A massive elm planted around 1646 near Boston Common became the headquarters of colonial defiance. On August 14, 1765, a secretive group called the Loyal Nine hung an effigy of stamp distributor Andrew Oliver and a green-soled boot from its branches, a visual pun on the Earl of Bute and George Grenville. Oliver resigned, and the tree became a permanent rallying point for the Sons of Liberty.

This episode traces the Liberty Tree from celebration to terror, as the ground beneath it served as a site of mock trials and tarring and feathering, until Loyalists chopped it into firewood in 1775. It then follows the strange story of how the site was forgotten, rediscovered by a Boston Herald reporter in 1966, and finally memorialized, while the idea of the Liberty Tree spread across the colonies and to revolutionary France and beyond.

• How the Stamp Act united merchants, lawyers and tradesmen against British authority
• Shoemaker Ebenezer McIntosh, the Captain General of the Liberty Tree, and the working-class muscle of the protests
• The dark side of Liberty Hall, including the tarring and feathering of John Malcolm and Thomas Ditson
• The 1966 discovery that a local waitress knew the Liberty Tree only as a roast beef sandwich
• How Liberty Trees spread to France, Brussels, Amsterdam and Rome, and the 2018 Liberty Tree Plaza dedication