What do you remember from middle and high school American History? George Washington? Thomas Jefferson? Franklin? Revere and several others? I certainly do.Samuel Adams is also a name I remember. Barely. ‘Wasn’t he kin to John Adams?’, I thought."The Revolutionary Samuel Adams", by Stacy Schiff, 2022, answered that question for me and so much more.George Washington is the father of our country. Sam Adams should be known as the father of the revolution. His pen defined, coalesced, and spread the initial concepts of American interests and patriotism which defeated the British Empire before they knew there was a battle, much less a war. Adams’ lack of personal ambition assured his place in history would not be built upon his self-promotion; there was none. He even encouraged his contemporaries—whom you do remember from school—to minimize his role in the revolution and founding.Schiff will immerse you in the events and daily lives of Adams and many others, including leading British figures, as the former begins to think about a separate identity from Great Britain and the latter pursues the business of Empire, too busy and unconcerned about a far away place to pay much attention to the rapidly building dissatisfaction and discord of that land.Schiff presents Adams, far more famous then than his much younger cousin, our second president, as a chaos agent capitalizing on every opportunity and slight provided by British agents and administrators in order to sow increased division between an American populace drifting along under the protection of the Crown and the Empire. Many of those opportunities were manufactured by Adams to further his (initial) dream of Americans being afforded their rights as British citizens.The chaos he created with his hundreds (thousands?) of published articles and letters under a host of pseudonyms roused citizens to begin questioning British rule which disregarded American rights.Schiff puts you there and then; I found myself eagerly awaiting to see what Samuel Adams and his colleagues—names you will recognize—would do the next day or week. (I used this book as a bedside reader thinking it would help this insomniac drift off . . . no such luck!)I almost did not buy "The Revolutionary Samuel Adams" due to the comments I had read concerning Schiff’s use of archaic and awkward sentence structure in many instances. It is true, many of her sentences require thought to unpack and mentally rearrange or to simply sit and allow the true meaning to ‘come, as if in a dream.’She is often like listening to a foreigner speak your language; the words are there and you understand them individually, but what do they mean when strung together? Over time, you become used to the foreigner’s speech pattern and the issue either disappears or is diminished.The same is true of Schiff’s writing. The complaints about some of her sentences are accurate but overblown.I do have one huge complaint: Schiff has copious endnotes, however, they do not reference the actual text, but the page number on which it is found. This made the endnotes practically useless for me.I learned a tremendous amount of Revolutionary and Founding history from "The Revolutionary Samuel Adams" . . . history that I thought I already knew.I highly recommend this book.