From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians, a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister and a history of history itself. Like her brother, Jane Franklin was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator. Unlike him, she was a mother of twelve. Benjamin Franklin, who wrote more letters to his sister than he wrote to anyone else, was the original American self-made man;...

"I pity Mr. Sam Adams," his cousin John Adams wrote to his wife, "for he was born a Rebel." At virtually every juncture of the American Revolution, from the Boston Massacre and Tea Party to Lexington and Concord and the ratification of the Constitution, Samuel Adams played a forceful role. With his fiery rhetoric and religious fervor, he was in many respects the moral conscience of the new nation. "The love of liberty," he thundered, "is interwoven...

"Thomas Jefferson asserted that if there was any leader of the Revolution, "Samuel Adams was the man." With high-minded ideals and bare-knuckle tactics, Adams led what could be called the greatest campaign of civil resistance in American history. Stacy Schiff returns Adams to his seat of glory, introducing us to the shrewd and eloquent man who supplied the moral backbone of the American Revolution. He employed every tool available to rally a town,...

This book is a behind-the-scenes portrait of the Irish power brokers who forged and fractured twentieth-century Boston. It tells the hidden story of Boston politics, the cold blooded ward bosses, the smoke-filled rooms, the larger-than-life pols who became national figures. It includes Honey Fitz, the crafty stage Irishman and grandfather to a president; the pugilistic Rascal King, Michael Curley; the hectored Kevin White who tried to hold the city...

"In War Fever, celebrated sports historians Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith explore the monumental changes taking place in Boston during the Great War through the stories of three men: Karl Muck, the German conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra;Charles Whittlesey, a Harvard Law Student who was called to service and became an unlikely leader; and perhaps the most famous baseball player of all time, the Red Sox's Babe Ruth. Each was cast into the...