Affecting microhistory reconstructing the life and actions of George Hewes, Boston shoemaker, who was radicalized and included in revolutionary action in the Boston Massacre and Tea Party, and whose life is a window into the middling folks' participation. Young takes this further by exploring the afterlife of his story, revived in the 1830s by Jacksonian egalitarians and preserved in carefully edited anecdotes, and then edited out again by respectable 19th century historians and Daughters of the American Revolution who didn't want shoemakers at Paul Revere's house.