Samuel Adams & American Independence

This week on The Learning Curve, for our special July Fourth edition, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Stacy Schiff explores the American revolutionary Samuel Adams. She discusses Adams’ background, religion, and formative intellectual development, including the influences that Greco-Roman history, the Bible, and Enlightenment thinkers had upon his life and political thought. Schiff discusses Adams' rise to prominence in the 1760s and ‘70s, how he and fellow American revolutionaries viewed the British Crown’s policies, and how they transformed their conception of themselves and their country from subjects of Great Britain to independent citizens of an American republic. Schiff touches on Adams’ ideas about American independence, republicanism, and slavery, and what K-12 schoolchildren today should remember about a man who was a paragon of austere republican self-government based on principled civic virtue. Ms. Schiff closes the interview with a reading from her book, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams.