In the summer of 1765, secret committees of merchants, lawyers, and tradesmen in Boston, New York, and other port cities began coordinating anti-Stamp Act action, took the name "Sons of Liberty" from a speech by an Anglo-Irish member of Parliament, and built the first extra-legal political organization in British North America — using boycotts, mobs, and a colonial press network to bring an empire to heel.

August 1765. A Boston shoemaker leads a mob of thousands in the most thoroughgoing destruction in colonial American history. The targets: a stamp office, three mansions, and a government. The result: the first act of the American Revolution — and a warning to everyone about who would actually fight the war.