ABSTRACT
Professor Alfred Young did something that many historians dream of doing but rarely actually do: he reshaped a historical debate by recovering the all but lost, thereby making the obscure prominent. It began with a serendipitous encounter when he was engaged in research at the Bostonian Society library. It ended with a highly regarded essay, then a book, on George Robert Twelves Hewes, Boston shoemaker, an observer of and participant in the American Revolution. 118
