Learning history is relearning history.

I didn’t know…

1. storytelling could be so captivating. (“Captivating” here means four college guys inundated with work up to their eyeballs chose to stay up until 3AM watching the show.)
2. Sam Adams, John’s firebrand cousin, is such a wanker in the beginning.
3. Abigail Adams deserves a lot more credit than history’s giving her. Compared to his wife in the miniseries, the second president of the US sometimes sounds whiny and vain.
4. the miniseries portrayed the founding fathers as flawed individuals and not as glorious demigods. Hancock is a smuggler who supports the revolution partly out of self-interest, Franklin goes hos-over-bros on his friend Adams when they visit France, and Hamilton is a conniving politician whose loyalty to Adams is is questionable even as his Treasury Secretary.
5. the Boston Massacre wasn’t really a massacre, that John Adams defended the British soldiers, and that he got the captain acquitted.