A&E Biography, John and Abigail Adams, Love and Liberty Best
Rate This Product :
Customer Reviews
*** Product Information and Prices Stored: Jan 19, 2012 20:52:07
Adams, Samuel It is sure that no one did more to make the United States a free and independent nation than did Samuel Adams of Boston, one of the great founding fathers. It may be that no one else did so much. Samuel Adams wanted the revolution more than anyone else. He stirred up the spirits and tempers of Americans when otherwise they might have been content to make a bad peace with the English king. He started some of the dramatic events, like the Boston Tea Party, that "stirred men's souls."
He faced danger and dared the fates time after time. From the success of the revolution he gained far less in fame and fortune than any of the others who approached him in stature. Yet he did not seem to care. A cousin of John Adams, the second president, but a few years older, Samuel Adams was born in Boston in 1722. Like his cousin John, he went to Harvard. Also like his cousin John, he had independent ideas when he was quite young; at the age of 21, he proposed the question, "Is it not valid to resist the king if you cannot otherwise keep your country?" Samuel Adams was in business, but he did not make money; in fact, he lost what small money he had. He was more interested in opposing the harsh acts of the English king and Parliament, which were then trying to accumulate unfair taxes from the American colonies, not yet a separate nation.
When in 1765 the Stamp Act was passed by Parliament, forcing Americans to buy a tax stamp and put it on every piece of paper used in legal transactions, Samuel Adams opposed it vigorously. The British did not like that, but they were trying to keep the Americans peaceful, and general Thomas Gage, who commanded all the British soldiers in this country, called Samuel Adams to him and said, "You should make your peace with the king." Adams, who was a Puritan and very correct in his religion and behavior, answered, "I have made my peace with the King of kings. I will not abandon the cause of my country." In 1774 a Continental Congress was called in Philadelphia, with representatives of eleven of the American colonies present.
Based on David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, the miniseries is produced for HBO Films by Playtone.
John Quincy Adams was raised, educated, and groomed to be President, following in the footsteps of his father, John. At fourteen he was secretary to the Minister to Russia and, later, was himself Minister to the Netherlands and Prussia. He was U.S. Senator, Secretary of State, and then President for one ill-fated term. His private life showed a parallel descent. He was a poet, writer, critic, and Professor of Oratory at Harvard. He married a talented and engaging Southerner, but two of his three sons were disappointments. This polymath and troubled man, caught up in both a democratic age not to his understanding and the furies of passion, was an American lion in winter.