Samuel Adams was the most radical of the Founding Fathers — a professional agitator who organized the Sons of Liberty, orchestrated the Boston Tea Party, and spent two decades pushing Massachusetts toward a revolution most colonists did not initially want. He was also a terrible businessman who nearly bankrupted his family and whose post-revolutionary career was largely undistinguished. History reduced him to a beer label; the real man was far more dangerous.

This episode traces Adams from his Harvard education through his years as Boston's chief agitator, the Tea Party, the Continental Congress, and the paradox of a revolutionary who had no idea what to do once the revolution succeeded.

• Adams's failed business career and his discovery that political agitation was his true calling
• The Sons of Liberty, the propaganda campa ...