We’re in the home stretch with Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshippers, and this week’s chapter kept putting one question in front of us in different forms all night: when religious liberty gets claimed by an institution instead of a person, who actually pays for it?

Chapter 11 deals, in part, with healthcare, specifically what happens when religious doctrine governs the medical care available inside an institution. We spent a good deal of time discussing how religious beliefs determine what happens to our bodies.

That, I think, is the question underneath an awful lot of what we call “religious liberty” right now.

What Are We Actually Teaching People to Do?

Interestingly, even though healthcare was on the table, we didn’t begin with hospitals. We began with education. It started when we were discussing some Christian colleges and the difference between teaching students how to think and teaching students what to think.

That has been rattling around in my brain lately because I am back in an elementary classroom. At a recent professional development, we spent quite a bit of time talking about text complexity. One of the ideas behind our curriculum is that children need opportunities to grapple with difficult material. Teachers aren’t supposed to remove every obstacle for them. We help them develop the skills to encounter something complicated, wrestle with it, ask questions, reread it and ultimately understand it.

The goal isn’t merely decoding words; it’s thinking. And suddenly, sitting in our book study, I realized there was a connection.

I grew up learning apologetics. For anyone unfamiliar with the word, apologetics is essentially the practice of defending a religious belief. You begin with a conclusion — Christianity is true, the Bible is true, this doctrine is true — and then learn the arguments that defend it.

There is nothing inherently sinister about that. If you believe something deeply, of course you want to understand why you believe it. But apologetics is not the same thing as inquiry. It is different from the Socratic method.

One begins with the answer and asks, How do I defend this?

The other begins with the question and asks, What can I learn?

One member of our group remembered becoming a Christian in the 1970s and essentially being given a script: how to witness, how to answer objections, how to bring someone else around to your conclusion.

Another pointed out something that deepened our conversation. In many evangelical traditions, you aren’t merely responsible for believing the script yourself. You’re responsible for convincing other people. Sometimes you are taught that their salvation — and therefore your faithfulness — depends upon it. And that changes things. Because now my beliefs aren’t only governing me. They have something to say about you.

And when any person’s religion (and their personal beliefs within their religion) intersects with government, education and medicine, it can affect the lives of so many others, positively or negatively.

Then We Started Talking About Healthcare

One woman in our group couldn’t attend Sunday night, but she had messaged me after reading the chapter because she desperately wanted to discuss it. Her concern centered around the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, often referred to simply as the ERDs.

Another woman in our group lives in Oregon and said she had never realized how those directives could affect care provided inside Catholic healthcare systems. And I realized how little most of us actually know about the ideology of the hospital we’re walking into.

We know whether our doctors went to medical school, and their diplomas are the evidence on the wall. We know whether our insurance is accepted. We have to verify this before we are even seen or accepted as patients. We know how to find local emergency rooms - just follow the big white H on the blue sign.

But do we know whether the institution itself has religious beliefs?

That led straight into the Hobby Lobby question that anchors so much of this fight: can an institution have religious beliefs at all, or only the people who make it up? And if it can, whose beliefs win when the employee or the patient doesn’t share them?

The Problem Is, The Problem Isn’t

So, after reviewing my notes and reading through drafts of this substack several times, I cannot think of a better way to write what’s coming other than “the problem isn’t, the problem is.” It’s the simplest way to explain such a complex ideological issue.

I’ll begin by saying that I believe strongly in protecting the conscience of individuals. I don’t particularly want a doctor performing a procedure on me that he or she believes is morally abhorrent.

But that’s where someone in our group made an interesting point. The problem isn’t necessarily that an individual physician refuses to perform a particular procedure. The problem comes when the patient is not told that the procedure exists. Or isn’t told why it isn’t being offered. Or isn’t referred somewhere else.

Now we are no longer talking about protecting one person’s conscience. We are talking about controlling another person’s access to information. And those are not the same thing.

Protecting a Preventable Disease or Hoping Your Child Behaves Faithfully in the Future

This became intensely personal for me because I had just been confronted with this exact tension in a much smaller way.

My youngest son recently had his middle-school vaccinations. One of the vaccines we discussed was HPV. There is a lot of cultural noise around that vaccine because HPV is sexually transmitted. Some parents reason that their children will abstain from sex until marriage and therefore don’t need it.

I asked our doctor. He is Christian. I told him I was hearing a dozen different things and asked what I actually needed to know. His response was refreshingly simple. The vaccine is well researched. HPV can cause cancer. You don’t decline protection against a preventable disease because of the behavior you hope your child chooses someday.

At the exact same time, someone I love dearly has been dealing with cancer connected to HPV. The contrast has been impossible for me to ignore. Here I am making a decision for my son. Someone else I know made a different decision for their child. My friend is dealing with cancer. Three families. Three sets of choices. Three completely different frameworks for thinking about exactly the same virus.

And that is the thing about frameworks. They determine which questions we’re willing to ask.

If I begin with: Sex has a divinely ordained purpose and therefore my child will behave according to that purpose, I reach one set of conclusions.

If I begin with What does the medical evidence tell me about preventing cancer? I may reach another.

That doesn’t automatically mean faith and medicine must be enemies. My Christian doctor certainly didn’t think so. But it does demonstrate the enormous difference between starting with a conclusion that must be defended and starting with a question that needs to be investigated.

Religious Liberty for Whom?

Eventually our conversation moved from hospitals to pharmacists. Suppose a pharmacist believes contraception is sinful. Does religious liberty mean the pharmacist cannot be compelled to personally hand over a prescription they object to? Absolutely. Most states already let an individual pharmacist step aside as long as someone else fills it.

Does religious liberty mean the pharmacy itself can refuse to fill it, with no one else available and no referral? That question gets more complicated. Now two people’s liberty has collided. And we’ve gotten very comfortable talking about only one side of that collision.

The institution says: You cannot force us to violate our religious beliefs.

The employee says: You cannot force me to violate my religious beliefs.

Okay.

But the patient standing on the other side of the counter might reasonably respond: Why does your religious belief determine what happens to my body?

That is the question. Not whether Christians should be permitted to be Christian. Of course they should. Not whether Catholics should be permitted to follow Catholic teachings. Of course they should. Not whether Muslims, Jews, atheists, Hindus or anyone else should be permitted to live according to conscience. They should.

The question is what happens when your conscience requires something of me.

When religious liberty stops meaning: I cannot be forced to violate my faith.

And begins meaning: You must live according to my faith.

Those are very different definitions of freedom.

The Thing About Freedom

Maybe this is why I keep coming back to education. Democracy requires us to grapple with difficult ideas. It necessitates us interacting with people who reach different conclusions. It demands that we read something uncomfortable and resist the urge to ban it. It asks us to hear an argument we don’t like and answer it with a better argument instead of making the speaker disappear. It demands enough confidence in our own beliefs that another person’s freedom doesn’t feel threatening.

One of the most striking comments Sunday night came when someone in our group said:

“How sad it must be that, to preserve your beliefs, you have to remain ignorant — or force ignorance on other people.”

That has stuck with me this week, as I’m sure it did for others in our conversation. Faith that cannot stand another person’s questions is fragile faith. Political power that cannot survive another person’s vote is fragile power. And religious liberty that can only exist by limiting someone else’s liberty isn’t liberty at all. It is authority, and there is a difference.

And I think we would do well to read the fine print.

We close out the book with the final chapter, Global Holy War, tonight. Then we’re picking the next read. On the table: Fever in the Heartland, Why Fish Don’t Exist, and one group member floating a Small and Mighty detour for something with a little more triumph in it. If you have a vote, bring it! A link to the meeting is available to all paid subscribers below, along with questions.

If you’ve been curious about the paid Community but haven’t joined yet, tonight’s a clean entry point. We’re discussing a new chapter, and people are always enter at just the right time. We meet tonight, Sunday, at 7 p.m. EST, on Zoom. The link, passcode and discussion questions are below.

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Lake Ontario was renamed Lake America this week, at least as far as the United States federal government is concerned.

This made me wonder if I open a maps app and put the destination in for the Chicago Loop if it will come up empty, no destinations available. Suddenly, my news headlines would say digital GPS will now only recognize inputs of Trump Loop.

If I visit Appalachia, will I be in the Smoky Mountains or America’s Peaks? Will Death Valley be rebranded as Patriotic Paradise? Will Carnegie Hall receive a new name?

My bigger question is this: Can a President really just rename things?

The answer is sometimes.

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I spend a lot of time trying to put myself in the shoes of the women who came before me. And as a woman, I frequently find their shoes too small. I joke, of course. And also their shoes are too small for my size 9 feet.

But really, what were their lives like?

In college, I learned that historians have no proof that Betsy Ross sewed the first flag or that she suggested the five-pointed star to George Washington. As a 20-year-old, my thought was basically, “Well, there’s one lie. I’ll just add that to the so-called fact that Abraham Lincoln never told a lie and George Washington cut down a cherry tree.”

And then I moved on.

Years later, somewhere along the way, I had a framed piece of artwork that said, “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” Someone told me Hillary Clinton said it. Then someone else said someone else said it. So I decided to look for myself.

No one actually said it, as it turns out. A woman named Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote it in a 1976 scholarly article about Puritan funeral sermons. She wasn’t trying to be rebellious. She wasn’t brewing a feminist mantra. She was making a historical observation: ordinary women rarely made it into the historical record. Their lives disappeared because the things they did every day weren’t considered important enough to write down.

Years later, Ulrich would show just how much could be recovered when she took the diary of an eighteenth-century Maine midwife named Martha Ballard seriously. Ballard delivered babies, treated illnesses, traveled from household to household, raised a family, worked, negotiated, witnessed violence and death, and recorded the ordinary machinery of women’s lives that traditional histories had largely ignored.

And that was the thing that sent me back to Betsy Ross.

Not to ask whether she made the first flag.

To ask what her life was actually like.

Because when women make the history books, they are often reduced to one part of their lives that happened to intersect with history in a way someone had already decided mattered.

No one gives a shit about the points on the stars on the flag. That part isn’t even documented.

What is documented is far more interesting.

We know Betsy Ross was educated. She trained in a skilled trade as a teenager and became an upholsterer. She and her first husband opened a business together. She was widowed at 24 and kept working. She took government contracts. She married again, had children, lost a child, and kept supporting her family while her second husband was away at sea and eventually imprisoned by the British. He died in a prisoner-of-war camp in England. The man who came home and told Betsy her husband had died there had been imprisoned with him.

She eventually married that man.

She had seven daughters across her later marriages and continued working for decades. Hell, we even know where she rented a couple of rooms in Philadelphia. You can tour them today.

We have better evidence for where Betsy Ross rented rooms than we do for the story that made her famous.

And somehow, we took all of that — a working woman, a business owner, a mother, a widow, a woman trying to survive a revolution — and reduced her to a lady sitting in a chair sewing a flag.

Maybe the problem isn’t simply that women were left out of history.

Maybe the problem is that even when they made it in, we often told only the part of their story that connected them to the history we had already decided mattered.

You have one responsibility in life. Well, I’m sure you have bills like I do, so you probably have at least two.

That responsibility is to ask questions. You know, so your brain doesn’t stay in homeostasis and you don’t accidentally join a cult.

So, who was Betsy Ross?

Betsy Ross was born Elizabeth Griscom on New Year’s Day 1752, the eighth of seventeen children born to Samuel and Rebecca Griscom. She was born in New Jersey; the family moved to Philadelphia when she was a small child. Her father was a carpenter and builder, and the family was Quaker. Both of those things would shape Betsy’s life enormously.

Quakers had high expectations of their children and believed that both boys and girls should be educated. Betsy attended a Friends school until she was about 14. Her schooling would have emphasized literacy, arithmetic, practical skills, discipline, religion and the Quaker ideal of plainness.

Now, you may hear that the Puritans also believed in educating girls, and they did. The important question isn’t simply whether girls were educated.

The question is: educated for what?

Puritan New England placed enormous importance on literacy because both boys and girls were expected to be able to read Scripture. Girls learned to read, and some learned writing, arithmetic and other subjects as well. But education was gendered because the futures imagined for children were gendered.

A boy might be preparing to become a minister, merchant, lawyer, physician, magistrate, business owner or town leader. Some would continue into grammar schools, classical studies and college. Girls were much more likely to be educated for lives centered around marriage, motherhood, religion and managing a household.

By Betsy’s lifetime, those early Puritan congregations had evolved into the Congregationalist churches that dominated much of New England. The theology and culture had changed over generations, but many of the assumptions about what boys and girls needed to prepare for adulthood remained deeply gendered.

And I don’t want to take 21st-century ideas about gender equality and slap them onto the 18th century. That doesn’t work.

Quakers were also preparing their children for gendered roles. Betsy was not growing up in some proto-feminist utopia where boys and girls were expected to have identical lives.

But Quakerism did imagine a somewhat larger sphere of female competence.

Quaker women could speak publicly about religion. They could serve as ministers. They participated in women’s meetings that conducted church business, administered charity and exercised moral authority within their communities. A Quaker woman was still expected to marry, raise children and manage a household, but she was also treated as a spiritually accountable adult capable of judgment in her own right.

And then something happened in Betsy’s life that I find far more interesting than whether George Washington ever sat in her upholstery shop.

The Apprenticeship

Her family apprenticed her to an upholsterer.

That was not the typical path for a teenage girl of her social position in the 1760s.

An apprenticeship meant learning a marketable skilled trade. And eighteenth-century upholstery was a lot more than recovering somebody’s chair. Upholsterers made mattresses, bed hangings, curtains, cushions, blinds and other expensive household textiles. Betsy was learning to make things people would pay her to produce.

And I have no idea why her parents chose that path for her.

I can speculate. Her father was a successful carpenter, so Betsy grew up in the world of skilled artisans. Quakers valued practical usefulness and education. Maybe her parents saw something in her. Maybe there was an economic reason. Maybe an opportunity simply presented itself.

Other people can speculate, too. The records don’t tell us.

But they do tell us what happened next.

Meeting John Ross

Somewhere in that upholstery shop, Betsy met another young apprentice named John Ross, the son of an Anglican minister. Quakers did not allow people to marry outside the Society of Friends, so they did what any young couple in love would do — they eloped. Together, they crossed the Delaware River into New Jersey and married at Hugg’s Tavern on Nov. 4, 1773. That must have been a brisk river crossing. Setting that thought aside, the Quakers disowned her for it. That’s sad. But also freeing. It was her first act of agency, and this woman was going to need that agency for the rest of her life.

She and John ended up joining Christ Church in Philadelphia, and their upholstery business did well. Philadelphia’s colonial elite hired them for all sorts of projects. In fact, George and Martha Washington hired them to make bed hangings in 1774 — before the Revolution, before the Articles of Confederation, before the Constitution, before he was the first president.

Then, the next thing we know about Betsy’s life is that her husband John joined the Pennsylvania militia in 1775. He guarded military stores and munitions. He was badly injured while on duty and died in January 1776. The Revolution had not yet formally started. At 24, she was a childless widow.

Look at what we’ve already learned about religion, colonial life and the role of women from her life by the time she was 24.

She went back to work … and then married again

Fortunately, she did not have to wait for a man to provide for her. She could simply go to work.

A year and a half later, she married Joseph Ashburn, a merchant mariner, at Old Swedes Church. If you’re wondering how they met, I have no idea. We could speculate. Perhaps he bought a flag for a ship or drapery for his home. Maybe she was shopping in the market or attending church. There is zero historical evidence for how they met — only that they married.

Together, they had two daughters, Zillah and Eliza. Zillah died in infancy. Eliza was just a baby in 1781 when Betsy received news that her husband had been captured by the British and sent to Old Mill Prison in Plymouth, England. While there, he met another American prisoner, John Claypoole. In March 1782, Joseph fell ill and died within about a week.

Claypoole was eventually released, and by August 1782 he had made it back to Philadelphia, where he told Betsy her husband was dead. Whether he went to Philadelphia specifically to find her, again, we don’t know.

Outdoing the flag legend

We do know, though, that Betsy Ross’s actual life was determined to outdo the flag legend, because in May 1783 she married John Claypoole, the man who had been imprisoned alongside her second, late husband. Did I say that right? Late husband. Does he need a number assignment? Second husband once removed? Isn’t genealogy and history fun?

John and Betsy Claypoole were married for 34 years, until his death in 1817. They had five daughters together: Clarissa, Susanna, Rachel, Jane, and Harriet, who died in infancy.

Even after Betsy remarried, she continued to work. John eventually joined Betsy in the upholstery business, and they built a family life around that work, moving the business and their family to a home on Second Street in Philadelphia. John also later worked for the U.S. Customs House. Their daughters learned to upholster and sew.

Later in life, his health declined significantly, including after a stroke, and Betsy helped care for him. While she was tending to him, her family and some assistants continued to run the business. After his death in 1817, she stayed in the upholstery business until 1827, retiring around age 75.

Betsy died in 1836 at the age of 84. And the end of her story is so very Betsy.

Burials 1, 2 and 3 (maybe)

She was originally buried in the Free Quaker burial ground in Philadelphia. In 1856, her burial ground was closed to make way for the growing city, and her remains were moved to Mount Moriah Cemetery. Then, ahead of America’s Bicentennial celebration, officials moved what they believed were Betsy’s remains — again — to the courtyard of what is now the Betsy Ross House, where a grave marker sits today.

Here’s the part I can’t get over: when workers went to make that third move, they weren’t fully confident they’d selected the correct bones from the family plot. Accounts differ on exactly what was recovered — a collar bone and a boot sole, according to some; skull fragments and leg bones, according to the historic site itself. A funeral historian’s verdict on the whole business: “Earth burial is an inexact science.”

So she may be under that marker. Or she may still be at Mount Moriah. We can be sure someone is there.

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Thank you for being here. If you enjoy my free articles, consider pulling on even more threads with me in my Historian’s Notebook, which I publish weekly for paid subscribers or joining our weekly book study on Sunday evenings. Those are the place where I share the questions, wrong assumptions, more primary sources and very long rabbit holes behind the history I write about. This week, you’ll meet Gov. Lurleen Wallace of Alabama who wasn’t told about cancer growing inside her body. The doctor told her husband, not her. No such thing as informed consent in those days. You’ll also meet some other women who make me wonder more about our history. Your subscription supports the research that makes this work possible

Sources

Further reading

• Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (Knopf, 1990).

• Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History (Knopf, 2007).

• Marla R. Miller, Betsy Ross and the Making of America (Henry Holt, 2010).

• Betsy Ross House

• Museum of the American Revolution’s materials on the rediscovered John Claypoole diary, donated to the museum after being lost for generations.

• The flag story first appears in the historical record via her grandson William Canby, who presented it to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1870, nearly a century after the fact and with no earlier documentation. — A Brief Biography of Betsy Ross, ushistory.org

• Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668–1735,” American Quarterly 28, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 20–40. Full text via Harvard DASH repository. On the quote’s life and misreading, see AASLH, “Turns Out Well-Behaved Women Do Make History” and Museum of the American Revolution, AmRev360 with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.

• On the upholstery business and government/military contracts: National Women’s History Museum, “Betsy Ross”; ushistory.org.

• On Joseph Ashburn, Old Mill Prison, and John Claypoole: Historic Philadelphia, "Privateers and Prisoners: The Story of Joseph Ashburn and John Claypoole"; Museum of the American Revolution, on the rediscovered Claypoole diary.

• Birthplace and family: National Women's History Museum, "Betsy Ross" — born in New Jersey, family moved to Philadelphia when she was about 3; eighth of seventeen children, roughly nine survived to adulthood.

Last Sunday our book study wrapped the chapter “Theocracy from the Bench” in The Power Worshippers. Like every week, the conversation didn’t stay inside the book for long. It never does. We start with the text and end up somewhere in our own families, our own churches, our own ballots.

In this chapter, Stewart argues that a movement that couldn’t always win elections learned to win in courtrooms instead. She gives examples in which judges were recruited early, put in place, and waited for the right case to walk through the door. Stewart’s case study is a pastor in Winter Garden, Florida, whose wife climbed the Florida judiciary. She started in the Orange County Court, then the Fifth District Court of Appeal, eventually landing in the Florida Supreme Court, where she still sits today. It’s a similar playbook on a different scale, now running at the federal level too.

As we discussed this, nearly everyone on the call noted that Trump had the opportunity to reshape roughly 20 percent of the federal judiciary. After our call, I pulled on that thread. It’s a first-term number. By the actual end of his first term he’d appointed 234 federal judges, which is closer to a quarter to a third of the sitting bench. His second term has moved a lot slower with only 37 confirmations as of this spring, mostly because there just aren’t that many open seats right now. So, if you use that 20 percent stat anywhere, it needs to be pinned to “his first term,” not floated like it’s happening today.

Where legislation gave way to the courts

I asked the group where they had seen a court ruling do the work that legislation could have done, but never did. The first example that came up was Dobbs overturning Roe. Next we discussed the Supreme Court ending race-conscious admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard/UNC. Then, the 2024 presidential immunity ruling in Trump v. United States, which the Court had to build from constitutional interpretation because Congress had never passed a single word of law on the subject. I keep coming back to Roe specifically, because someone put it perfectly: it wasn’t a law passed by Congress, so it was easy to repeal. A court ruling can give you the outcome, but not the permanence. That gap has enormous consequences for individuals.

We talked about the documented cases of Texas women denied care during miscarriages and pregnancy complications, developing sepsis, some nearly dying, because of ambiguity written into the state’s abortion law. Someone on the call described it as “if you know and don’t report, you can go to jail.” When I checked that afterward, that’s not quite the mechanism. Texas’s criminal penalties fall on providers, not on bystanders who stay silent, and the civil lawsuit provision in SB8 (the “Heartbeat Act”) lets private citizens sue anyone who performs or knowingly helps someone get an abortion after roughly six weeks. It’s real exposure, just a different kind than what we described out loud. I just wanted to note that before we keep talking about it.

The shadow docket

I walked the group through what that phrase actually means when it shows up in headlines: cases skipping the normal rungs of the lower courts entirely, fast-tracked straight to the Supreme Court for an early ruling. That’s exploded under this administration, and it’s a big part of why so many rulings feel sudden even when the underlying strategy has been years in the making.

Loyalty over qualification

This is the thread that tied the whole night together for me. Someone pointed out that this administration isn’t hiring the most qualified people — it’s hiring loyalists — and drew the same parallel to school boards captured by people who wanted control, not competence. Someone else connected it to the administration’s letter to Harvard demanding “equal representation of political viewpoints” in hiring, which is, if you think about it for two seconds, its own version of the DEI framework it claims to be dismantling, just selecting for ideology instead of merit. And it’s not only federal. We talked about how invisible this is at the state and local level, where most voters have never heard of the judges on their ballot, and appointments run on political favor-trading nobody’s watching.

A personal thread I wasn’t expecting

One of our members grew up in the Christian Reformed Church, in the same Grand Rapids, Michigan, world where DeVos money runs deep — Calvin University, the whole ecosystem. She talked about watching her own family’s church move the opposite direction theologically over the decades, to the point where it now hands out know-your-rights cards for ICE encounters. Her read on the DeVos family specifically stuck with me: it went from exclusionary to this is the way, and we will fund the way into making it happen. That’s the whole chapter in one sentence, honestly.

Where we’re headed tonight

Tonight’s chapter is Religious Liberty, and we basically started it a week early. I’d been sitting with something from my own research: most school curricula never mention Jewish settlement in America, but nearly every district teaches a lesson built around George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Touro Synagogue in Newport. His actual words: the new government “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance” — not merely tolerating the congregation, but confirming they already belonged. We connected that standard directly to Kansas’s current law stripping transgender residents’ ID and birth certificate protections, which is being challenged in court right now. It’s the same test, 236 years apart: are you tolerated, or do you belong?

One more correction while I’m at it, since I said on the call I’d check it: the story about a formerly enslaved man who traveled to free territory with a doctor, whose wife pushed the case through the courts, commemorated with a statue outside a courthouse in St. Louis — that’s Dred and Harriet Scott, not Frederick Douglass. I had the two mixed up at the moment. Douglass’s escape from slavery in Baltimore in 1838 doesn’t match that story at all; Dred Scott traveling into free territory with the Army doctor who enslaved him, and Harriet Scott pushing the legal fight, does.

If you’ve been curious about the paid Community but haven’t joined yet, tonight’s a clean entry point. We’re discussing a new chapter, and people are always enter at just the right time. We meet tonight, Sunday, at 7 p.m. EST, on Zoom. The link, passcode and discussion questions are below.

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A Crayola Factory rabbit hole

A little over 10 years ago, I went with a friend to the Philadelphia area. During our trip, we took our kids to the Crayola Factory in Easton. I think we were the only non-Jewish people learning about the manufacture of crayons and the Erie Canal that day. At one point, I was seated at a table with a Jewish family and we started chatting. They explained that they were celebrating Chol HaMoed Sukkot, one of the intermediate days of Sukkot when observant Jewish families can travel and spend time together.

Living in Indiana my entire life, this was all completely new to me. At that point, nearly everything I knew about Jewish culture came from Tuesdays with Morrie, Shapiro’s deli in Indianapolis, and Sunday school class.

As we explored the area over the next few days, I noticed so many other Jewish families, some dressed very differently from the people I had met at Crayola. I learned about Hasidic Jews and other Orthodox communities in which men may wear black coats, white shirts and hats, and some grow payot – the curls at the sides of the hairline – in accordance with the biblical prohibition against cutting the corners of the head.

As the years went by, those experiences lived somewhere in the back of my mind, as things often do. Why did so many Jewish people live in that part of the country? Why was there not a larger Jewish population where I lived? When did Jewish people begin immigrating to the United States?

And here we are, reading about my 4 a.m. wonderings.

The door was already closing

At first, I assumed perhaps much of the Jewish population in the United States had come during or immediately after World War II. But as soon as I thought that, I remembered Anne Frank’s father, Otto, trying desperately to get his family out of Europe.

Beginning in 1938, Otto Frank pursued the possibility of immigrating to the United States. His application was never formally denied; it was never processed. The American consulate in Rotterdam was destroyed during the German bombing of the city, applications had to be reconstructed, American immigration requirements became increasingly difficult to navigate, and eventually the U.S. consulates in Nazi-occupied territory closed. He tried another route through Cuba, but that failed as well.

That didn’t fit comfortably with the version of America I had learned growing up, the country represented by Emma Lazarus’ words on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

And this is where it gets interesting and devastating.

During the Nazi era, the number of Jewish refugees admitted to the United States was much smaller than we might imagine when looking backward from the end of World War II. By then, the United States had already built an immigration system designed to sharply restrict immigration from parts of Europe where many Jewish people lived.

Between 1881 and 1924, more than 2.5 million Eastern European Jews left their homelands, driven in large part by persecution and a lack of economic opportunity, with huge numbers coming to the United States. Then Congress began closing the door. The Emergency Quota Act came in 1921. Three years later, the Immigration Act of 1924 created an even more restrictive national-origins quota system.

And Congress didn’t base those quotas on what America looked like in 1924.

It used the 1890 census.

That matters because the enormous wave of immigration from southern and eastern Europe, including millions of Jewish immigrants, had largely happened after 1890. The new law limited annual immigration from each nationality to two percent of the number of people of that nationality counted in the United States in 1890. The effect heavily favored immigration from northern and western Europe while sharply reducing it from southern and eastern Europe.

What is absolutely heartbreaking is that even the limited quotas available during the 1930s were not always filled. There was no special American refugee policy for people fleeing Nazi persecution. Refugees had to squeeze themselves through the existing immigration system while navigating bureaucracy, financial requirements, security restrictions, antisemitism and a country that was not particularly eager to admit them.

So, feeling equal parts angry and curious, I wondered what happened in 1924.

Or maybe the better question was: what had happened before 1924 that made Americans willing to support such restrictive legislation?

I expected to find fear of foreigners after World War I. I expected the First Red Scare, which is a story for another time. I expected nativism and antisemitism.

I did not expect to find eugenics.

This is where the free preview ends.

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Before I get to the recap of our book study (which, as always, was a delight) I want to thank all my readers and subscribers for being here, especially this month. Two weeks ago, I started work in a new school district and a new grade level, where I knew no one. This week, I began working with 24 amazing students. On top of that, my husband just started a new job (same vocation, different location), my older son went back to college, and my youngest started middle school. I had to give myself a little time to absorb the change and lighten my cognitive load a bit. It takes a lot of mental energy to think about states of matter, long division, and how to teach personification and dialogue.

Now that I have my feet under me, I’ll get back to my regular rhythm: a Sunday night book study recap, and a history piece each week digging into whatever thread from that reading deserves more room than a group chat allows. Paid subscribers get to join us live for the Sunday night book study itself, plus a Historian’s Notebook piece — a closer look at primary sources, the research trail, and the stuff that doesn’t fit into the regular posts. If you’re a paid subscriber already, thank you, from the bottom of my heart. This newsletter takes real research hours, and your support is what makes it possible for me to keep doing this well, especially in a season like this one. And if you’ve been getting value out of this and have been thinking about upgrading, there’s no better time than now. We’re nearing the end of The Power Worshippers, which you can still join. I’d also love to have you in the room live when we pick our next book.

The Book Study

Another Sunday, another book study session that started on the book and wandered gloriously off the rails before finding its way back. If you were with us live, thank you. If not, here’s the recap.

This week we dug into the “Proselytizers and Privateers” chapter of Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshippers, which is all about the alliance between religious nationalists and free-market fundamentalists in the fight over public education. One of the things I appreciated about this chapter is that Stewart doesn’t flatten these groups into one monolithic “anti-public-school” bloc, which is easy to do. Some people are motivated by faith, and others by money. This chapter is about where those two motivations tangle together, and sometimes it happens in the same family.

The DeVos of it all

We spent a good chunk of time on the Betsy DeVos material, which apparently hit different for one of our members, who worked in nonprofit education advocacy back when DeVos was first appointed Secretary of Education. She remembered colleagues half-joking about inviting DeVos to a fundraising luncheon because “she’s rich, it could mean money for us,” a reminder that even people who see through someone’s politics can still feel the pull of proximity to wealth. It’s a small, honest detail that says a lot about how influence actually spreads.

From my copy of the book (page 193, paperback), there’s a 2003 report from the Christian Reformed Church in North America that I read aloud, because I think it captures the why behind a lot of this better than any summary could:

“Government schools have become aggressively and increasingly secular in the last 40 years... [public schools] engage in a deliberate program of de-Christianization that is at odds with Christian morality. Not only does there exist a climate of hostility toward the Christian faith, but the legitimate and laudable educational goal of multiculturalism is often used as a cover to introduce pagan and New Age spiritualities, such as the deification of Mother Earth, and to promote social causes such as environmentalism.”

I’ll be honest; I went to public school for thirteen years and the closest I got to “New Age spiritualism” was planting a tree for Earth Day. I’ve always thought of public school as the one place that’s supposed to be open to everybody, regardless of religion. Reading that quote reframed the whole voucher and charter conversation for me: for a real segment of the people pushing school choice, “failing schools” isn’t really the complaint. Secularism is.

Where the money goes

One of our book study members has watched this from the inside as a former Bible college student and church board member. He made the point that this isn’t really a single-issue fight; it’s a coordinated, multi-pronged one. State legislatures, federal policy, curriculum, courts. And because the same networks show up in all of those places, nobody’s incentivized to investigate anybody else. He brought up the Cornerstone Schools Association as an example: schools that started explicitly religious, converted to charter status, and kept doing more or less the same thing. And the people who’d be responsible for oversight are drawn from the same donors and political networks that fund the schools in the first place.

That tracks with something I’ve seen locally. Every dollar that goes to a public school here comes with real strings attached. Public schools in Indiana face state board of accounts audits, state testing requirements, obligations to serve certain student populations. Charter schools don’t answer to that same standard, and it shows: Indiana just had two men indicted for allegedly siphoning $68 million from a charter network around Indianapolis. Sixty-eight million dollars. It takes years for something like that to even surface, because the accountability infrastructure simply isn’t built the same way.

I also mentioned a private Christian school about two miles from my house. It’s not a charter school, but it receives voucher dollars, and over the last eight to ten years that money has visibly transformed the place. At least, that’s how it seems to me. The school boasts a new amphitheater, an early learning center, and now a full sports complex under construction. Meanwhile the local public schools are fundraising for classroom supplies. That’s not a metaphor. That’s the actual state of things.

We also discussed that vouchers didn’t start as a school-choice innovation. They started in the 1950s and ‘60s as a way to funnel public money to white families so schools could stay segregated after Brown v. Board. One woman from Texas believed it’s really the whole reason the private school wave exists in the first place. It’s not the only reason charter and voucher programs exist today, but it’s the root, and roots matter.

We did pause to acknowledge nuance here, because the group is good about that. Some people in our group attended or sent their kids to Catholic and Jesuit schools, and neither of them experienced those as religious indoctrination so much as genuinely strong academics. One member noted that money, not religion, is often the bigger predictor of educational outcomes. Well-funded schools, whether public, charter, or private, tend to produce better results, and the parents with the most money and time available tend to cluster wherever the resources are. The problem isn’t that some private and religious schools are good. It’s that public dollars are being redirected away from public accountability toward institutions that don’t have to answer to the public at all.

We also touched briefly on homeschooling, which came up as another branch of the same tree. One member made a good-faith case that homeschooling isn’t monolithic either; she homeschooled her own kids for a sabbatical year and called it one of the most positive experiences of her life. But there was real agreement in the group that homeschooling quality varies enormously, and that some families use it less as an educational philosophy and more as an exit from any form of accountability.

What does democratic erosion actually look like?

Where I wanted to push the conversation a little was here: it can feel dangerous to shorthand “Christian nationalism” as “just like 1930s Germany.” That comparison escalates fast and can shut a conversation down rather than open it up. So instead I asked the group: what does democratic erosion actually look like, in real time, in front of us?

I’d pulled up some numbers from V-Dem (the Varieties of Democracy research group) right before we talked. The U.S. dropped in their rankings this year — from roughly 20th most democratic out of 179 countries to 51st. That’s not abstract. And the strategies behind that kind of decline tend to rhyme across countries and eras: contesting election rules, working to install friendly judges, questioning election integrity, and, yes, going after school curriculum. None of these tactics are new. What’s new is watching them converge in real time, in your own county.

Tolerance vs. inclusion

One of the best moments of the night wasn’t really about the book at all. One member shared something that’s stuck with her since a conversation with her brother years ago: “We don’t need to be tolerant. We need to be inclusive.” Tolerance, she said, is I still don’t love what you do, but I’ll let you come to dinner. Inclusion is hey, want to come over for dinner? It’s a small distinction with a lot of weight behind it, and it gave us language for something we’d been circling around all night: the difference between grudging accommodation and actually building a shared table.

Another member connected that same thread to a story about a “God’s Not Dead”-style registry: a woman in Washington charged with child abuse after unknowingly ingesting THC, whose name stayed on a state abuse registry for ten years even after the charge was found to be a mistake, ending her plans to become a nurse. He tied it to a pattern he sees in a lot of unforgiving, purity-driven systems, religious and secular alike: once you’re marked, you stay marked. There’s no path back in.

Flags, patriotism, and who gets to claim it

We also talked about why people assume anyone flying an American flag is a Republican. My take, which I’ve made a video about before: patriotism doesn’t belong to one party, and the moment a party starts acting like it does, that’s nationalism, not patriotism. Our local Democratic party has actually leaned into this by handing out flags at events, encouraging people to fly them on Flag Day and Memorial Day, partly because ceding the symbol felt like ceding something bigger.

Up next

We’re moving into “Theocracy from the Bench,” followed by the chapter on religious liberty and bodily autonomy, and then “The Ongoing Holy War.” Each one probably deserves its own full session, because if this week proved anything, it’s that we’re incapable of staying on topic for more than 45 minutes at a time, and honestly, I think that’s part of what makes this group work. The tangents are where the trust shows up.

Join us next time! We’re meeting tonight at 7 p.m. Usually my recap comes sooner, but remember to give me grace. I just started back to school. Link to join and the questions are below.

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This past week, someone was attacked outside a Jewish synagogue in New York City. I had already been reading about Jewish settlement in the colonies this past month when another headline came across my newsfeed. Keep this in the back of your mind because we’ll circle back at the end of this piece.

You know how I have a lot to say about colonial America? I find it doubly ironic that two branches of Calvinism, an ocean apart, carried the same “New Israel” self-image and landed on the same intolerance. Dutch Calvinists, during their own revolt against Spain a century earlier, had already cast themselves as God’s chosen people, escaping Babylon for a promised deliverance.

That same Reformed tradition shaped Peter Stuyvesant, who brought it to New Amsterdam. Meanwhile, in Massachusetts Bay (not to be confused with the Pilgrims of Plymouth), the Puritans preached their own version even louder, building their entire colonial mission around the idea that they were a new Israel, a city upon a hill. Same theological root. Same “most least tolerant” fruit, even if I tripped over the phrase deliberately, on both sides of the Atlantic.

The 1654 Brazilian Departure

Historians consider 1654 the beginning of the first wave of Jewish immigration to America. This is a mere 34 years after the Pilgrims came to Plymouth/Patuxet and 24 years after the Puritans . colonized Massachusetts Bay and Salem.

The very first group of Jews immigrated to America from Brazil, which had been under the control of the Dutch since 1630.

A reasonable next question would be: why were there Jewish people in Brazil in the 1600s? If you graduated from a high school in the United States, unless you had a teacher that went way beyond the standards, you probably didn’t learn anything about this. So, you didn’t forget this. It simply wasn’t taught, and it’s something you don’t know. Had I not been spending long hours reading dusty books and wondering if I’m the only person googling colonial settlements, I wouldn’t know either.

So, here we are on my back porch on a Saturday evening after a glass of some pinot noir I picked up at Trader Joe’s.

The Dutch had two big business ventures: the East India Company and the West India Company. The East India Company did really well in the spice trade in Asia.

To help improve their profit margins, they looked to the west for new business opportunities. Brazil was known for its sugar. Like salt, sugar was something people really wanted once they had a taste of it. So, the Dutch went after the most profitable sugar-producing region that the Portuguese already controlled. It was a violent corporate takeover, and when they won in the 1630s, they established New Holland.

Well, Portuguese is the language of Brazil today. So, that’s a clue that the Dutch didn’t win the final battle. After guerilla-style fighting from the late 1640s to the mid-1650s, the Portuguese had won and gave Dutch subjects three months, until April 26, 1654 to leave. Among those Dutch subjects were 23 Sephardic Jews, who fled to New Amsterdam (what is now New York).

Captured by Pirates

It wasn’t like they boarded a cruise ship and opted for drink packages. After leaving Recife, Brazil, their ship was captured by Spanish pirates. What are the chances? I don’t know and math is not my strong suit. The pirates wanted to surrender the Jews, who, of course, were poor, to the Inquisition. That’s also happening at this time. This is definitely a period of history that I would not Outlander back to.

In a wonderful plot twist, wink from above, or however you choose to look at it, the Jews were rescued by a French privateer, the St. Catherine, which was captained by Jacques de La Motthe. The refugees asked him to take him to the nearest Dutch colony, which was New Amsterdam. They offered to pay him 2,500 guilders, which because they were poor, they didn’t actually have. Nonetheless, he accepted their offer.

When the Jews arrived in New Amsterdam, they hoped they would be warmly received; however, they were met with resistance, thanks to the leadership of one of the cringiest people in the New World, Peter Stuyvesant. He was the first governor of the colony, and he got really upset in 1657 when a Quaker minister wouldn’t take his hat off one day. He had him tied to a wheelbarrow and flogged. A bunch of people got mad and contacted the Dutch West India company, who told Stuyvesant to let him go. That was the Flushing Remonstrance.

Inhospitable Stuyvesant

Stuyvesant, and other colonial leaders, were lacking in hospitality. Specifically, Stuyvesant believed the Jewish refugees (comprised of men, women and children, mind you) to be a threat and an economic burden. He also called them “enemies of Christ.” He called for the Dutch West India company to deport them, but it was denied, in part, ironically, because some of the company’s Jewish investors used their influence to block it. We still have 1654 letters from colonial authorities to the company directors dated Sept. 22 and Sept. 25, which say “these new territories not be invaded” by people of the “Jewish race.”

While George Washington was accepting of the Jews in 1790, as recorded in his famous letter to the Touro congregation, Stuyvesant and others were antisemitic racist bigots in 1654. History is messy. And contradictory.

In the end, the Jewish community stayed and established Kahal Kadosh Shearith Israel, which means “The Holy Congregation the Remnant of Israel.” It was the first Jewish congregation in the colonies and the only permanent North American Jewish community of the entire 17th century. It took time, but they could eventually buy property, hold private religious services, and trade. Just before the Revolution 400 Jews lived in New York.

One caveat to consider. While this was the first group of Jewish people to settle in the colonies, two other Jewish men lived in New Amsterdam before their arrival, Jacob Barsimon and Solomon Pieterson had come from Holland just one month before them. There is also a record of Asser Levy as being there at the same time.

The Plot Twist

So, in 1654, 23 Jewish people arrived. Then, Peter Stuyvesant, the director general, a man with a background in the Dutch Reformed church who wanted to deport them, said these people were enemies of Christ who would be a burden. Today, approximately 960,000 Jews live in New York City’s five boroughs. That makes New York City home of the largest Jewish community in the world, surpassing both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Interestingly, if you include the wider metro area and Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester counties, nearly 1.23 million people live in Jewish households, with roughly 1.37 million identifying as Jewish.

They went from a barely tolerated remnant to the largest Jewish city in the world. This is exactly the community, rooted since 1654 and grown to the largest, that someone chose to target.

Antisemitism today

Antisemitism has measurably increased since the 2023 Hamas attacks and the war that followed. I am concerned as a historian, as a woman who heard Holocaust survivors speak as a child, and as a millennial. You see, organizations are noting that a reversal of historical patterns is here, especially among younger Americans, and millennials in particular are driving this.

I am a millennial, albeit on the elder side of the spectrum. My generation, of all generations, is showing the highest rate of endorsing antisemitic tropes, and it’s happening online, like oil diffusing through the house. It’s not rooted in an institutional ideology or organized, but it is cultivating an environment of antisemitic hate.

Since January 6, 2021, we’ve seen the biggest rise in political violence since the 1960s. Antisemitism is one strand of that. And, on top of all of this, Blue Square Alliance’s tracking has found that people who believe that Jews “have too much influence in the media” has grown 6 percentage points since 2023.

My question for you. If 23 Jewish refugees came to your town because they were fleeing war and persecution, would you help them? Would your church?

This is only the first thread. Newport, Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah. Nearly every port city has its own version of this story. The Puritans weren’t the only ones preaching “New Jerusalem” while shutting the door on actual Jews. I’m sharing what I’ve been digging up in my Historian’s Notebook on Tuesday - sermons, legal codes, and century-long wait for basic citizenship. Paid subscribers get the full piece. If you’re not one yet this is a good time.

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Sources & Further Reading

I used AI to help organize the sources and look for further reading recommendations. It was always my least favorite part of writing research papers. All research, analysis, writing, and editorial voice in this piece are my own.

• Court Minutes of New Amsterdam (1654), documenting Jacques de la Motthe’s suit against the Jewish refugees for unpaid passage

• The Massachusetts General Court’s 1649 expulsion decree against Solomon Franco — referenced in the Jewish Encyclopedia (1906), “Massachusetts”

• Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641), full original text — Online Library of Liberty

• George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport — recommend pulling the authenticated text directly from the National Archives’ Founders Online before quoting further

The 1654 arrival and New Amsterdam

• Hershkowitz, Leo. “By Chance or Choice: Jews in New Amsterdam, 1654” — American Jewish Archives Journal, 2005. Full PDF: sites.americanjewisharchives.org — this is the strongest scholarly source in the list; worth citing directly if you want an academic anchor.

• Singer, Saul Jay. “Jews In New Amsterdam In The 1600s And The Antisemitism Of Peter Stuyvesant,” The Jewish Press, July 2024.

• New York History Blog: “Return to the Jewish Arrival to New Amsterdam 1654”

• EBSCO Research Starters: “First Jewish Settlers in North America”

Dutch Brazil and the Sephardic diaspora

• Algemeiner: “The History of the Jews of Brazil — the Oldest Jewish Community in the Americas”

• Algarve History Association: “Portugal’s Fateful Mistake: The Sephardic Diaspora”

Newport, Rhode Island / Touro Synagogue

• National Park Service: “Discover Touro Synagogue” lesson plan

• Gilder Lehrman Institute: “Exiles by the Streams of Babylon: Newport Jews in the Colonial Era” — strong on the Aaron Lopez citizenship story specifically

• Gilder Lehrman Institute: “American Jewish Origins, 1654–1820”

Flushing Remonstrance and Stuyvesant’s record on religious dissent

• Historical Society of the New York Courts: “The Flushing Remonstrance, 1657”

• Americans United for Separation of Church and State: “Powerful Proclamation: The Flushing Remonstrance”

Solomon Franco and colonial Massachusetts

• Wikipedia: “Solomon Franco” — note: cross-reference carefully, as some secondary aggregator sites conflate details

• Wikipedia: “Massachusetts Bay Colony”

Puritan New Jerusalem theology

• Winthrop, John. “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630 sermon, aboard the Arbella)

• Danforth, Samuel. “A Brief Recognition of New-England’s Errand into the Wilderness” (1670 election sermon)

• On Dutch Calvinist “New Israel” self-conception: Calvinism and National Consciousness: The Dutch Republic as the New Israel, Springer — link.springer.com

Jewish immigration waves overview

• My Jewish Learning: “Jewish Immigration to America: Three Waves”

• Institute for Curriculum Services: “American Jewry – The Jewish Journey To America”

Modern antisemitism data

• American Jewish Committee, State of Antisemitism in America 2025 Report — ajc.org

• Blue Square Alliance Against Hate, U.S. Antisemitism Landscape Survey, March 2026 — bluesquarealliance.org

• Anti-Defamation League, annual antisemitic incident tracking

New York City Jewish population today

• UJA-Federation of New York, Jewish Community Study of New York (2023) — communitystudy.ujafedny.org

• New York Jewish Week / Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “Nearly 1 million Jews live in NYC, new study finds”

A lot of people are interested in the political makeup of congregations in this country. The chart above is from the 2014 Religious Landscape study, which was conducted by the Pew Research Center. I’m sharing it here as a broad example.

Some churches and political organizers are interested in individual church data. Like, who votes. Who votes after a sermon on the importance of voting? Who sits in a particular pew and votes for a particular candidate or party? That’s what we talked about this week in our book study of Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshippers.

Some pastors don’t think about their congregation as a flock, rather but data points. What effect does that have on the relationship between a person and their spiritual leader? That’s what we spent last Sunday evening discussing … a conversion from being shepherded to being mined. Katherin Stewart presented this idea in chapter 9 of her book The Power Worshippers, although it wasn’t the first time I’d considered it.

Several years ago, I read about Paul Weyrich, the architect of the Moral Majority and a co-founder of the Heritage Foundation. His goal – from the books, articles, podcasts and documentaries I’ve consumed – was to turn congregations into voters, beginning in the 1970s. In order to do that, he needed access, data, and messaging.

The flock, converted into data

We started with a question: When a pastor’s flock gets converted into data, what does that do to the relationship between the person in the pulpit and the person in the pew? One member said, without hesitation, that it turns a shepherd into a manipulator. Another person shared that, in the Episcopal Church, she’s been told there’s only one shepherd, and everybody else is a sheepdog. That’s why they wear a collar. They keep the herd moving, but they aren’t the shepherd. It made me think about who actually tends to the herd and why.

A few weeks ago, my family watched The Great Sheep Detective with Hugh Jackman. His character reads detective novels to his sheep every night. Then, he gets murdered, and his flock helps a rookie detective solve the case. It is delightful in the most British of ways. What stood out to me was the importance of the shepherd. Do they care for their flock? Do they know their names, their temperaments, and their likes? Or are they in it for the money?

I shared a story about my friend. After she went through a divorce with her husband, who was a pastor, it was a little difficult for her to go to church, again. She finally found a place where she felt like she belonged. She joined a small group. One week, the small group leader shared he had been given a directive to report any concerns about the group member to the pastor. Was he a spy? Is this space safe? Was she being judged? What was framed as a warm, welcoming small group turned out to function more like an intelligence operation than a Bible study.

One member nearly interrupted by their realization that it was dominion theology at work. Another noted that a small group is supposed to be said in confidence, among people you trust as friends. That’s clearly not what was happening. While this wasn’t about directing votes in this case, it seems to be about knowing the behavior of the congregation, which leads to the question … why?

Ananias, Sapphira, and the tithe pledge

We talked about a new-member class that opens not with welcome, but with a pledge card saying how much will you tithe. And people are asked to sign this before you have even committed to membership, youth group, nursery help. One member connected it to the story of Ananias and Sapphira, struck dead for lying about how much they’d given. It’s one of those stories that’s always bothered me, honestly, and his read helped. He felt that story was less about lying in general and more about the legalism of the tithe itself. It seems like generosity becomes more like an amount that’s audited.

Another member made the point that pledging itself is common practice for budgeting purposes, but doing it in a newcomer’s class is a different animal entirely. As she put it, “it almost sounds more Mormon” than anything she’s used to.

The voter file and the church roster

This was the part of the chapter that actually unsettled one of our members. Stewart writes about the practice of taking a church’s membership roster and matching it against the public voter file. Then, they would measure how many members voted before the pastor’s “encourage everyone to vote” push, and how many after. Not who they voted for — that’s not public — just whether they showed up. One member was surprised this happens at all. Another wasn’t surprised in the slightest.

I found myself thinking about how this is public information in Indiana. Here, it’s public information to see which ticket someone pulled in a primary, but I had never considered the likelihood of someone pulling a church directory and cross-referencing it against that file until this chapter put the idea in my head. A member also pointed out that it doesn’t have to be the pastor doing this. It could be anyone in the congregation with access to the roster and a political itch to scratch.

Isegesis dressed up as exegesis

One member brought up Scott Spages misreading Proverbs, “when the righteous rule, the people rejoice; when the wicked rule, the people groan,” and turning a statement of fact into a call to action … therefore, Christians are called to install Christian leaders. His line for this was perfect and I’m stealing it: exegesis is pulling meaning out of the text; isegesis is putting your own meaning into it. Spages is isegeting.

I made the point that Proverbs is wisdom literature, not a governing manual, and that Jesus himself never aspired to be a Sadducee, a Pharisee, or a king. His ministry was one-on-one. The only time he got visibly angry was the money changers in the temple, a detail I keep on my dining room wall, actually, in a David Hayward cartoon. Another member added that he also cursed a fig tree, but that’s the whole list. Two incidents. Everything else we know about him is relational, not institutional. We don’t even have that secondhand account for 30 years after his death, from a set of followers with, at best, a first- or second-grade level of education. Matthew, the tax collector, probably had a bit more. Paul was the outlier. He was the one person in the movement with the schooling to write his own material from the start.

We also got into Bill Dallas’s line about not letting the culture take over so it “doesn’t smell like us,” biblical values, unnamed and undefined. One member called it a rhetorical sidestep, a way to gesture at Christian nationalism without committing to the specifics, so you keep deniability. Another member responded that the biblical values she holds and the ones her conservative brother holds are “vastly different,” so whose values are we smelling, exactly?

Voter guides and the discomfort of correcting people

I asked whether a “rank candidates by biblical values” voter guide, without a named political party, is technically not an endorsement of a candidate. Is that a meaningful legal distinction or just a workaround for what tax law won’t let a pastor do directly.

One member said she wouldn’t call it out to her neighbor directly, because doing so assumes she knows better and that’s its own kind of disrespect. Another member’s approach was different. For them it was not about attacking the conclusion someone lands on, but asking about the presuppositions that got them there. Asking someone why they believe something, rather than just exchanging ideas or positions, doesn’t always work, but it’s more honest than silence or a lecture.

Your data, showing back up

Toward the end of our meeting, I asked if anyone has noticed their own data resurface later as messaging aimed at them? One member shared that after her husband broke his neck, a hospital care coordinator referred her to a couple of meal delivery services, and within days the ads were all over her Facebook feed. It went quiet for months and then came roaring back this week.

It’s the same mechanism as the Target pregnancy-prediction mailers, or the hospital system I used to work for sending mammogram reminders to women who’d simply mentioned their age at a checkup. None of us could point to a church doing this directly to us … small parishes, mostly, no directory apps, no check-in software, but one member’s sister-in-law’s Methodist parish in Albuquerque did require sign-ins long before anyone was thinking about where that data would land.

Always read the fine print. If you enjoy my writing and thinking, consider becoming a paid subscriber. That gives you access to our Sunday night book club on Zoom, my complete Historians Notebook and access to history classes on Tuesday evening Zoom meetings and early access to the curriculum I’m creating. The link to this Sunday’s Zoom meeting is below the paywall. We’ll be continuing this study for a few more weeks before we move on to our next book, either Fever in the Heartland or Why Fish Don’t Exist. Racial issues come up pretty often in our discussions about the evangelical movement in America. Let’s dig into why.

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It’s interesting to me how something that once served one purpose, or meant something to one group of people, can later come to mean something else for others, especially symbols. Take the swastika. It shows up among unrelated cultures going back thousands of years to Neolithic times. Its name comes from Sanskrit and means good fortune. It’s been used in Buddhism and Hinduism for at least 3,000 years to represent the cycle of creation. Today, though, we recognize it as a symbol of hate.

How did that happen? The Nazis viewed the swastika as a symbol of the Aryan race. They did not borrow it. They hijacked it and claimed it as ancestral property. While the symbol had drifted over the millennia, having various meanings in different cultures, when it came to the Nazis, it was like cultural misappropriation.

Once you recognize that symbols, language, and music can be destroyed, appropriated, and misappropriated over time, you’ll begin to notice some interesting patterns.

And that’s just what happened in our book study this week when we discussed Chapter 6 of Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshippers.

A children’s marching song became a battle hymn

Our discussion started with a conversation about a former Michigan state representative saying one of his favorite songs is “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Earlier this year, while writing some social media content, I dug into the history of the song. It was written one night by Sabine Baring-Gould, an Anglican priest in Yorkshire, England, in 1865. Originally called “Hymn for Procession with Cross and Banners,” the idea was that children could sing during a processional as a cross was being moved between churches during Pentecost.

The song, based on a verse in 2 Timothy, was never meant to be used beyond the festival; however, history shows it was printed in a publication and later found its way into hymnals. It wasn’t until 1871 that it was set to music by Arthur Sullivan of the famous Gilbert and Sullivan. Some have speculated that it became popular in the United States because it appeared shortly after the Civil War and the words resonated with them.

“Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus, going on before.”

One of our study members has led historical tours at a lighthouse for years. He made the point that a chant like is genuinely useful for keeping children moving, but this song, as he put it, “turned into something completely else.”

It was never meant to be a song to comfort American Civil War soldiers, nor was it meant to be a rallying cry for Christian nationalists, like we read about in this chapter. One member of the book study shared that she’s spent months now unable to sing hymns she loves without hearing the theology underneath them differently. “That’s bad theology,” she kept catching herself thinking, mid-song.

‘Laboratories of democracy,’ repurposed

Stewart used the phrase “laboratories of democracy” in this chapter. The phrase was coined in 1932 by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in his dissenting opinion on New Ice State Co. vs. Liebmann. He wrote, “a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”

Brandeis meant that a state may test a policy, perhaps in agriculture or education. Other states or the federal government may watch to see how it works or doesn’t work. If it works well, other states, or even if the federal government may copy it. If it fails, only that state has to deal with it.

Stewart pointed out that states are now using “laboratories of democracy” to test theocratic policy at the state level, where there is less scrutiny and far less media coverage than in Washington.

I invited the group to share examples of something built for one purpose getting quietly redirected to another. One member told us about Texas’s Bluebonnet curriculum. State education officials made this Bible-infused reading curriculum inexpensive enough that most Texas school districts felt pressured to adopt it. Rather than make laws requiring that the Bible is taught in schools, biblical stories were simply woven into reading books.

A member from Maryland talked about volunteering at food banks and watching well-meaning people slip religious tracts into the bags. The food is free, but some people take the opportunity to evangelize. She called it mission creep, one kind act at a time.

I noted that during a recent legislative session in Indiana, the state’s school voucher program was expanded to every family, marketed as “school choice.” That clever phrase hides the fact that $500 million in taxpayer money was moved from public to private schools last year. Only 10 percent of Indiana’s K-12 students benefited from that money. And private schools that accept voucher money don’t have to complete state testing, and they can decline students with special needs or discipline issues.

Model legislation & the mile-from-my-house problem

The book describes how model legislation lets the same bill appear in a dozen statehouses with different local sponsors’ names attached. A policy that looks homegrown is actually coming out of a small number of conservative think tanks, who find “stable” legislators in each state and hand them a bill to introduce.

I told the group that the man credited as the author of Indiana’s redistricting bill lives less than a mile from my house. I ran into him at the grocery store the week the story broke. He said hello. I said hello back and kept walking, because I had nothing else to say. My son noticed that I’m not usually like that with people. But as another group member pointed out, being a vehicle for someone else’s agenda doesn’t make you innocent, it makes you culpable.

Another member connected this to the first days of the second Trump administration. The president had a stack of executive orders ready to sign before he’d finished the inauguration lunch. Another member named the strategy directly: flood the field with so many changes at once that people can’t choose their battles, and things slip through the cracks while everyone’s attention is scattered. Whack-a-mole, as the book calls it. I vote to give Steve Bannon the credit.

The religious rights question nobody fully answered

One member raised a question: how do you draw the line between religious freedom and using religious freedom as cover for discrimination? He was honest that he was “that guy” 30 years ago … the one who used belief as a reason to withhold basic decency from people he’d decided were sinners. His read now: evangelicalism, structurally, carries the idea that believers have a God-given responsibility to tell other people what to do, and that stopping them from doing so is itself framed as an infringement on their rights.

Another member talked about the distinction between religious rights vs. religious civility. You don’t have to agree with someone to owe them basic decency, and those two things get conflated on purpose. She brought up John Fugelsang’s approach of meeting cherry-picked scripture with more scripture. For example, Matthew 25’s instructions on how nations are judged by how they treat the stranger and the vulnerable, aimed squarely at the people using the Bible to justify cruelty.

How do you actually talk to people who disagree with you?

A member from California asked, “How do you have a conversation with someone whose belief system denies your humanity … Someone who thinks you, or someone you love, is going to hell?” She doesn’t always trust her own family to hold her spiritual life with respect.

One member said that she doesn’t go deep with people she knows disagree with her, but she’s made sure both sides know the relationship holds anyway. She believes that respect and disagreement can coexist even when policy views don’t overlap.

I told the group about my neighbor, who brings us banana bread, volunteers at the food pantry, is extremely evangelical, and told me flatly she doesn’t believe homosexuality is real after she saw a pride flag in my yard. In the same breath, she told me she’d never treat anyone differently for it. I don’t know that “never” survives every test. But it gave us a place to keep talking instead of a door slammed shut. Another member said that having these conversations takes bravery. The willingness to go one step past the conversation-stopper and say, I disagree, and I’d like to hear more.

Next week: Chapter 8, “Converting the Flock to Data” — and where we go after this book

By September, we’ll be finished with The Power Worshippers, and I asked the group where they want to go next. I’ve noticed, going all the way back to some eugenics research I did this spring, that the racist infrastructure underneath Christian nationalism keeps surfacing, not as the whole story, but as a load-bearing wall inside it. One member said it better than I could, “if you’re a white supremacist looking for a political home, conservative politics, which right now means Christian nationalism, is the only house with the lights on.”

That’s likely pointing us toward Fever in the Heartland, about the KKK’s resurgence in the 1920s, which, it turns out, had one of its biggest strongholds right here in Indiana. More on that when we pick it up. For now: D.C. Stephenson built the Klan here into a quarter-million members, one in three white Hoosier men. An Indianapolis Times reporter won a Pulitzer for exposing it in 1925. Stephenson brought down his own empire, and half the Indiana Republican Party with it, after a murder conviction and a very ill-advised assumption that the governor he’d helped elect would let him walk. There’s a lot more to that story, and we’ll get to it.

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Over the past year, so many of you have asked questions that go far beyond the finished videos. You want to know how I decide what to trust, what I leave out, and how my thinking changes as I research. So as I celebrate one year of Rising from the Red, I welcome you to The Historian’s Notebook. This is the place where I show paid subscribers how I figured out what happened, where I’m still uncertain and all the thoughts in between.

Today’s thoughts are mostly in-between.

I don’t hear a lot about the Klan or white supremacy groups. At least I didn’t for several years.

When I first moved to northern Indiana in 2006 for a newspaper reporter position, a klan leader was shot and killed by his son. It was the headline on the paper that day.

And then I’ve heard little bits in the last few years, but most notably this year.

There was a white supremacy group that marched in Indianapolis.

There was a white supremacy group that marched in Washington, D.C. They still masked up, but donned khakis and polos instead of bed sheets. These are the same people who probably didn’t wear masks during COVID.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, there was a Pride celebration not far from where I live. A woman arrived to set up and noticed papers scattered everywhere. It looked like someone had dumped a large plastic trash can full of flyers and shaken them across the grounds. They were advertising some sort of “Straight Pride” event, hosted by the Klan. That revelation, from that woman, alone early in the morning, was rattled. And she’s also tough as nails. She chose to simply pick up every flyer and throw them away, refusing to give them any more power.

That’s been living in my head for a while. Someone went to a lot of effort to print all those papers, load them in a trashcan, put it in a truck, drive it to the location of the festival and dump them all over the ground, either very late at night or in the wee hours of the morning.

You see, the Klan doesn’t just hate Black people. They hate Catholics. Jews. Immigrants. And the entirety of the LGBTQIA+ community.

Then, I did a couple of videos and wrote a Substack about D.C. Stephenson and some of the Klan’s history in Indiana. People messaged and commented with their stories and memories. And many of these people lived (or at some point lived) in Indiana, Ohio, Michigan and Kentucky. These weren’t Klan stories from the South. These were in the North, well into the 20th century.

People also sent me messages about the Klan being active in their area, and more than one person sent me this flyer. Celebrate America’s 250th birthday with the Klan. There will be fellowship and food. It looks like any other normal picnic flyer. Except it’s not.

And then my algorithm changed on social media. I started getting invited to join white supremacy groups.

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We need to dispel a myth.

The Ku Klux Klan was not only a Southern thing, and it did not only target Black Americans.

That first Klan is real, and what it did is abhorrent. It was founded in December 1865, in a judge’s law office in Pulaski, Tenn., by six former Confederate officers who were Democrats. Historians consider that the first wave, when those people aimed Reconstruction-era terror at Black people across the south. That history stands on its own and doesn’t get erased by anything that comes later.

But that’s not today’s story. This is about the second wave, when the Klan built its single largest chapter in Indiana, a northern state in the 1920s, just after World War I.

In Indiana, the Klan wasn’t selling hate. It was selling a story about “Americanism” and “reform.” They told people their protestant identity was under attack. That “real Americans” were losing their country. They said Catholics, Jews and Black Americans were taking over, and that only the Klan could save the nation. And all of this was sold wrapped in an American flag and Bible verses.

But how did they say these things? They planted stories wrapped in fear. Stories are much easier to tell than statistics are to repeat.

They didn’t say “look at those Catholics getting into politics.” They convinced people the Pope was secretly running America.

They didn’t say there were too many immigrants. They convinced their neighbors that their children wouldn’t grow up in the same America they did.

All along, the Klan was convincing people it was protecting people, protecting society.

But the ideology — the story they were carrying — was lost when its beloved leader kidnapped and raped a woman. She died from her injuries, and he was sentenced to life in prison.

And then he took everybody down with him — from prison.

Then, people believed a different story. The Klan corrupts our society.

Let’s go back in time

Indiana already had a history of hate. Sure, it was in the North. People didn’t believe in slavery. But just because they didn’t believe in slavery didn’t mean they wanted Black people for neighbors. In 1851, when Hoosiers voted on a new state constitution, they didn’t just ratify the document. They voted separately on a measure barring Black people from settling in Indiana at all. It passed, 113,828 to 21,873. Here’s the kicker: Black Hoosiers were already living in the state when that vote happened. They had thriving settlements, schools, churches, scholarship programs and organizations all over Indiana … until 1851. Then the population plummeted. It didn’t start to rise until after the Civil War and Indiana updated its constitution.

When D.C. Stephenson arrived in the 1920s, he wasn’t importing hatred to innocent ground. He came to Indiana from Texas, in the name of good, honest work. He was born in Houston in 1891 to a sharecropping family, but he was raised in Oklahoma. He was a printer’s apprentice who’d brushed up against the Socialist Party and served briefly in the Army during World War I.

In 1920, at 29, he moved to Evansville, Ind., for a job with a retail coal company, and got involved in local Democratic Party politics. The Klan, and the empire he built inside it, came after. He wasn’t a Klansman who came to Indiana. He became one once he was already here, on ground that had voted for exclusion 70 years before he arrived.

How big ‘biggest’ actually was

Historian Leonard Moore spent years going through actual Klan membership rosters — not Klan self-promotion, not press estimates, the internal documents — for his book Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928. He found that more than 25 percent of native-born white men in the state were dues-paying members. Other estimates from the period put it closer to a third. Either way, the round number is the point: this wasn’t a fringe. From 1922 to 1925, Indiana was the acknowledged center of the national Klan movement, with membership estimates for the state running from roughly 250,000 to over 300,000.

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And it wasn’t hidden. Cross burnings were reported in Fort Wayne as early as Christmas season 1922. There’s a 1926 photograph of Klan members at the Main Street Interurban Terminal in Fort Wayne, a public gathering, not a secret one. This is the part worth sitting with if you grew up here: this didn’t happen somewhere else. It happened in the same towns, on the same streets, within living memory of people’s great-grandparents.

There were parades and picnics all across the state — from Evansville to Muncie and beyond.

The pitch

Stephenson was explicit about how he built that membership, and this is worth reading in his own words, because it’s the whole mechanism in one sentence, “I did not sell the Klan in Indiana on hatreds. That is not my way. I sold the Klan on Americanism, on reform.”

“Reform” meant temperance and clean government, in a state frustrated with Prohibition-era lawlessness and machine politics. “Americanism” meant a fraternal, civic, respectable-looking organization — parades, picnics, church socials — that also organized around hatred of Black Americans, Catholics, Jewish Americans, and immigrants. The wanting of political order, the racism, and hatred against religious groups were all part of the Klan’s ideological package. It is not a contradiction in the historical record. The Klan of the 1920s recruited through belonging, not through announcing itself as extremist. Nobody had to believe they’d joined a hate group, even if it was the product.

What happened to Madge Oberholtzer

Stephenson and his associate Earl Gentry forced Madge Oberholtzer onto a train to Hammond, where Stephenson raped and assaulted her so violently she was left covered in bite marks. At a stop, she bought bichloride of mercury and took it rather than continue to endure what was happening to her. Another Stephenson associate, Earl Klenck, carried her into her home and lied about a car accident. Her landlady didn’t believe him and called a doctor. Before Madge Oberholtzer died — over two weeks later, from the complications of what she’d ingested and untreated injuries — she gave a formal dying declaration to attorney Asa J. Smith, made “being in full possession of my mental faculties and conscious that I am about to die.” That declaration was admitted at trial and was central to Stephenson’s conviction.

The legal outcome is its own piece of the story. Stephenson didn’t kill Madge Oberholtzer directly. She died from the poison and/or the infection from the bitemarks. His conviction for second-degree murder rested on the argument, upheld on appeal by the Indiana Supreme Court in 1932, that his unlawful acts had rendered her incapable of exercising informed judgment, making her act a direct and foreseeable consequence of his own crimes. That’s a significant point in Indiana criminal law, separate from everything else this case is remembered for.

The list from the prison cell

Stephenson expected a pardon from Ed Jackson, the governor he’d helped elect, but it never came. So, Stephenson decided to get even. Starting in 1927, from his cell, he started planning. He got the paperwork from his lawyers, spoke to reporters and released the names of officials who’d been on the Klan’s payroll.

But it’s not one Stephenson saying he wanted to get even. Reporters took him seriously. As a former journalist, I cannot help but note the importance of the work of the reporters who followed the money, verified the documents and published evidence connecting the KKK to Indiana’s political establishment. Reporters Boyd Gurley and Edwin V. O’Neal had to follow old checks and documents linking the Klan to politicians. O’Neal went so far as to find one crucial letter that helped authorities find “Black Boxes” containing Klan records that helped expose the entire political network. The editor of the paper publicly said he would expose the corruption. The Indianapolis Times won a Pulitzer Prize in 1928 for exposing the connection between the political corruption in the statehouse to D.C. Stephenson and the Klan.

The Indiana Indictments

Governor Jackson was indicted in September 1927 for conspiracy and attempted bribery. The charges dated back to 1923, when Jackson was serving as secretary of state, to bribe outgoing Governor Warren McCray with cash and a promise of protection, in exchange for appointing a Klan-aligned prosecutor in Marion County.

Stephenson even testified for the prosecution. Jackson was not convicted because the statute of limitations had run out. During the course of the investigation they learned Stephenson gave Jackson $2,500 for his gubernatorial campaign. Jackson said it was for his horse, whom he named Senator. That was a lie. It turned out the horse cost $300 and had recently died after choking to death on a corn cob.

Indianapolis Mayor John Duvall, a Klansman elected in 1925, was convicted of violating the state’s Corrupt Practices Act and forced to resign. Six city councilmen were indicted for taking bribes and pleaded guilty.

None of this happened because the Klan was driven underground by public outrage. It happened because one man’s expectation of a pardon didn’t pan out, and he decided to burn down everyone who’d used him. The collapse was a falling-out among people already inside the machine, not a reckoning imposed from outside it.

Read the fine print

The scariest thing about hate isn’t when it hides. It’s when it doesn’t have to. The dangerous version of this isn’t the one hiding in the woods at night. It’s the one with a parade permit, a seat at the inaugural ball, and a membership roll that includes a quarter to a third of the neighborhood. The Klan of the 1920s didn’t have to conceal what it was doing, because what it was doing. It was recruiting through respectability, trading favors through elected office and looked, from the inside, like normal civic life.

That’s the fine print. The mechanism doesn’t need to be secret to work. It just needs to be familiar enough that nobody questions it.

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Sources & further reading

Primary sources

• Madge Oberholtzer’s dying declaration and trial testimony excerpts — The D.C. Stephenson Trial: An Account, Famous Trials (UMKC School of Law), famous-trials.com

• Stephenson v. State, 205 Ind. 141, 179 N.E. 633 (Ind. 1932) — Indiana Supreme Court opinion, via Justia and CourtListener

• Indiana Constitution of 1851, Article 13 (”Negroes and Mulattoes”), and the governor’s proclamation on the vote — Indiana Historical Bureau, in.gov

• Indianapolis Times “Black Box” investigative series (1927–28), referenced via Hoosier State Chronicles, Indiana’s Digital Newspaper Program (in.gov)

• D.C. Stephenson and Ku Klux Klan Collection — Indiana State Archives finding aid, in.gov/iara

Books

• Leonard J. Moore, Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928 (University of North Carolina Press, 1991)

• M. William Lutholtz, Grand Dragon: D.C. Stephenson and the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana (Purdue University Press, 1991)

• Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them (Viking, 2023)

Archives & institutions

• Indiana Historical Bureau (in.gov/history)

• Indiana Historical Society — D.C. Stephenson and Ku Klux Klan records

• Encyclopedia of Indianapolis (Indianapolis Public Library)

• Indiana Memory digital archive — Allen County Public Library and Ball State University collections (Fort Wayne and Muncie Klan photographs)

• Tennessee Encyclopedia — Ku Klux Klan founding, Pulaski, Tenn.

Chapter 6 asks how Christian nationalists use the past to justify the present. Ask a room full of people that question and you don't get a tidy answer … you get everyone's family. That's how Sunday nights tend to go, and this one was no exception: we moved from theology into food scarcity, into a mother's memory of picking cotton, into fairy tales, into how modern debate works, and back out again. It felt scattered while we were in it. In hindsight, every thread was answering the same question from a different angle: how does personal experience harden into a story people will defend past the point of evidence?

Scarcity as inheritance

We opened with food, almost by accident. Several members grew up in households shaped by the Depression or by rural poverty — gardens the length of a field, a rented locker at the local dairy for frozen meat, a bakery you paid to use rather than owned an oven yourself. One member described her mother going without dinner so her children could eat, then being caught later eating crackers alone in the kitchen. Another remembered her brothers eating cornflakes before bed because there wasn't enough.

What struck the group wasn't the hardship itself but how long it outlives the hardship. Decades later, some of these same families still can't throw away a paper plate. One member's brother refused to buy his daughters a dollhouse because he'd grown up sharing everything and didn't want his own kids to have that luxury — even though not sharing was, by then, entirely affordable. Scarcity becomes a worldview long after scarcity stops being a fact. That turned out to be the hinge the whole night swung on: memory doesn't just record what happened. It builds a lens, and the lens outlasts the event.

Whose cotton field is this, exactly

That lens is exactly what the chapter is describing. One member told a story about her mother, who often says: *I picked cotton too. My fingers bled on that cotton. Don't tell me only Black workers built the South.* And she did pick cotton — that part is true. What she leaves out, her daughter said, is that she was gleaning leftover cotton after the main harvest, for money, on land her own father owned. She wasn't picking to survive. She was picking for pocket money, and she got to choose whether to do it at all.

The group sat with this for a while. It's not that her memory is false. It's that one true, painful, personal detail — bleeding fingers — is being asked to stand in for the entire history of forced labor in the South, and to cancel out any account that doesn't match it. When someone else's history is offered as a fuller picture, it doesn't just feel like new information. It feels like an attack on something that actually happened to her. That's a hard thing to argue someone out of, because you're not really arguing about history at that point. You're arguing about whether her pain counts.

Reification and idea laundering

Two vocabulary words did a lot of work this session, and both describe how a personal or invented story gets upgraded to fact.

Reification: treating a belief or an invented narrative as though it were established fact. The example on the table: a fabricated anecdote circulating about a public figure's supposed work ethic. When challenged that it wasn't a true story, the response was that it didn't need to be true, because it reflected who he "really is." That's reification in miniature — the story stops needing to be factual once it's doing the job you want it to do.

Idea laundering: a term one member had researched after a conversation about how repackaging works. A controversial claim gets dressed in gentler language while keeping its original shape intact. Segregation reframed as "cultural differences" was the example that came up, pulled from one of my own past newsletters.

Tracing ‘settled fact’ back to its source

From there we turned to the chapter's discussion question directly: name a historical claim you once accepted as settled and later had to unlearn. A few examples are worth sitting with — and worth verifying properly before any of us repeats them as fact (see the note below):

- The Columbus narrative most of us were taught in school versus the account left by Bartolomé de las Casas — worth a correction here: Las Casas didn't sail with Columbus himself. His father and uncles did, on the second voyage, and Las Casas grew up hearing the stories before arriving in Hispaniola himself around 1502. What he left behind is still an eyewitness account of the Spanish colonial system in its first decades, just not of Columbus's own initial voyage.

- A widely circulated story about George Washington praying alone at Valley Forge, witnessed by a Quaker miller named Isaac Potts. This one is worth retelling accurately: it traces to Parson Weems, the same biographer who invented the cherry-tree myth, published in the 1804–1816 editions of his Washington biography — five to seventeen years after Washington's death. The story wasn't disputed by Washington's own daughters (he had none biologically); it was Potts's daughter, Ruth-Anna, whose handwritten account is the closest thing to corroboration, and even that differs in details from Weems's version. Historians also note Potts likely wasn't married yet at the time the story claims he told his wife about it. It's a legend with a documented paper trail, not a fabrication out of nowhere — but it's legend, not eyewitness history.

- The original Grimm fairy tales featured biological mothers as the villains in stories like Snow White and Hansel and Gretel. Folklorist Jack Zipes and others have traced the change through the editions: the first 1812 collection was criticized as unsuitable for children, and the Grimms, led primarily by Wilhelm, revised later editions to swap in stepmothers, reportedly out of a wish to preserve motherhood as sacred.

- The 325 AD Council of Nicaea was a gathering of Christian bishops with no Jewish participants, and Constantine's own follow-up letter announcing the Easter-dating decision explicitly frames it as separating the church from Jewish practice. The Trinity as formalized doctrine was very much argued into existence there, not inherited whole from the earliest church.

That last thread turned personal fast. One of our members, a stepmother of over forty years who legally adopted her husband's children within months of marrying him, talked about never fully shedding the "wicked stepmother" framing in her own family, regardless of what she actually did or didn't do. It landed as a small, uncomfortable proof of the chapter's larger point: the stories we inherit shape how we're allowed to be seen, whether or not they're accurate.

Reading the document itself

Naming a claim is one thing. Knowing how to check it is another, and that's really where the night's threads converge. When you sit down with a primary source, three questions do most of the work:

1. Who wrote it, and why? A land charter written by a king claiming authority he didn't actually hold (several English monarchs styled themselves "King of France" long after that stopped being true) is not a neutral record — it's a claim to power, dressed as description.

2. Who was it written for? A private diary meant for no other eyes — like William Bradford's journal — tends to be more trustworthy than something written for an audience. Edward Winslow's writings, by contrast, were meant to recruit more colonists, so they read differently.

3. What's the author's bias, and can you find it?Everyone has one. The job isn't to find a bias-free source — there isn't one — it's to know what you're correcting for.

Debate is not the same as truth

The last thread of the night was rhetoric itself — specifically Schopenhauer's The Art of Being Right, which one member is currently reading. His point, badly needed in 2026: in a debate, people aren't trying to reach truth. They're trying to win. One member described a Tibetan Buddhist debate tradition where the person defending an idea sits in the center of a circle while others fire questions at them — not to find truth, but to practice staying calm under pressure. That distinction — performance versus inquiry — came up again around the modern tactic of overwhelming an opponent with more claims than they can address in real time. Nobody in the room thought this was a new trick. Several of us just hadn't had a name for it before.

It's the same move as reification and idea laundering, really, just live instead of written down: make the story feel true faster than anyone can check it.

Where curiosity fits into all of this

We ended, as we often do, somewhere quieter. A few members talked about growing up in households or school systems where curiosity itself wasn't encouraged — where questions were treated as a kind of insubordination. One member, a longtime educator, talked about deliberately filling her classroom with hornets' nests, fossils, and "weird rocks" specifically to invite the kind of open-ended wondering nobody modeled for her growing up. It felt like the right closing note for a chapter about how easily belief calcifies into fact: the antidote isn't more information. It's staying curious enough to keep checking your own.

How the book study works

We meet on Zoom TONIGHT at 7 p.m. EST to talk through the Chapter 7. Come as you are — you don’t need to have every line annotated, just read the introduction and bring one thing that struck you.

To get the Zoom link: comment below or send me a message, and I’ll make sure it gets to you before Sunday. The link goes out to every paid subscriber who wants in. If you have been attending, continue using the same link and passcode.

Questions to consider for Chapter 7

1. Stewart borrows the “laboratories of democracy” framing (originally about states testing policy for the public good) and shows it repurposed to test theocratic policy instead. Where else have you seen a phrase or institution built for one purpose get quietly redirected toward another?

2. The chapter argues that state legislatures are an easier target than Congress — less scrutiny, less media coverage, faster turnover. Has anyone in the group followed state-level politics more closely than national, and what did that teach you that national coverage doesn’t?

3. Model legislation lets the same bill appear in a dozen statehouses with local sponsors’ names on it. Have you ever discovered that something you thought was a local, homegrown decision was actually part of a much bigger coordinated push?

4. This is a strategy chapter, not a theology chapter — it’s about mechanics, not belief. Does understanding the “how” change how you feel about the “why,” or are those two separate problems for you?

5. Bring it back to the personal, like we did with Chapter 6: has your own state or town ever felt the effects of one of these coordinated pushes, even if nobody around you named it that way at the time?

I’m planning to see Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey this summer, because I love all things ancient Greece, a love that started in an art history classroom, where I learned the phrase “Roman marble copy of a Greek bronze original.” (The Romans, it turns out, could never quite get their marble to balance the way the Greeks got their bronze to move.)

I read The Odyssey in high school. My husband recently brought home Emily Wilson’s translation, and it became our bedtime reading, riveting, I know. Two years ago, David and I went to Greece: the Acropolis, the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Delos, Mykonos. We wandered as far as the Strait of Messina and Ephesus, both technically outside Greece but worth the trip.

Troy, if it existed at all, would have stood in northwestern Turkey, near the Dardanelles, a three hour drive from Ephesus, not next door to it. Even Ephesus moved over the centuries, as its harbor silted in. Someday we’ll try to trace Odysseus’s mythical route home the way we once followed Lewis and Clark’s trail out west. Hopefully it won’t take us ten years.

But let’s be clear about what we’d be tracing: a myth, not a map. Odysseus, cunning, endlessly resourceful, king of a small island, left no more evidence of his existence than the Egyptian chariots that were never recovered from the Red Sea, or the pillar of salt that was once a woman named Lot’s wife. These are stories that explain something. They were never meant to be depositions.

And yet so many people insist The Odyssey owes them historical accuracy. Elon Musk went furthest, announcing that his AI platform would produce a “historically accurate” full length Odyssey: “Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.” A three minute AI generated clip served as proof of concept.

Historically accurate. Say it slowly. This is a poem with a cyclops in it. A witch who turns sailors into pigs. A six headed monster that snatches men off ships. Sirens whose songs kill. Gods who disguise themselves as beggars and tip the scales of battle. None of it happened, because myth was never in the business of happening. Mythos means story. Historia means inquiry. Leonidas and William Wallace belong to the second category; Paul Bunyan and the Oompa Loompas belong to the first. Nobody is confused about which one The Odyssey is, except, apparently, when the casting doesn’t match what they’d already pictured.

That’s what Musk was really asking for: not accuracy, but familiarity. A cast that looked the way he’d already imagined it. Months before the film released, when casting rumors first surfaced, he wrote that Nolan was “an anti-White racist” for casting Lupita Nyong’o, an Oscar winner, as Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra. Not “historically inaccurate.” Not “a departure from Homer.” Racist. That word choice tells you what the accuracy argument was covering for all along.

I want to name two patterns I keep seeing, because The Odyssey backlash isn’t happening in isolation.

The first is selective history, not revisionist history, which is what happens when a diary surfaces, or a survivor is interviewed, or a shipwreck full of preserved peaches rewrites what we thought we knew. I mean history with the uncomfortable parts removed on purpose. Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492; he also slaughtered people and seized their land. We don’t need to tell a six year old that part. But we also shouldn’t teach slavery as though it were simply the unremarkable custom of its age. It wasn’t unremarkable, and it wasn’t unopposed. Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania were formally protesting the enslavement of Africans as early as 1688, a full century before abolition became a movement with a name.

The second pattern is racism, plain and covert both. After I posted about sundown towns and the state constitutions that barred Black residency in the North, even in towns where Black families were already living, I heard from people who wanted me to know that those towns “probably don’t have the crime rates,” that I should “try walking through one of them at night.” I’ve watched a politician in my own state post, publicly, that he doesn’t want Muslims living here. I’ve heard about a store manager who instructs employees to shadow Black customers or face discipline. My ten year old came home this year having heard more racist language from classmates than in his entire life before it, everything from “monkey” to the word itself.

Everyone loves a Black man when he scores the touchdown. Fewer want him in their neighborhood, their kids’ classroom, or the pew beside them on Sunday. Dr. King called eleven o’clock on Sunday morning the most segregated hour in America. Six decades later, that’s still mostly true.

And here’s what I can’t get past: we don’t apply any of this scrutiny to the stories we already treat as settled fact.

Disney’s Pocahontas turned a real girl, roughly ten to twelve years old when she knew John Smith, into a grown woman in a doomed romance that never happened. The actual Pocahontas was captured by the English, converted, married off to John Rolfe, and died in England around age twenty, thousands of miles from home. Disney gave her a waterfall solo instead. Nobody organized around historical accuracy for that one.

Braveheart gave William Wallace, a real man, a love affair with Isabella of France, who was a child living in France during the actual events of Wallace’s life. They never met. It isn’t embellishment; it’s chronologically impossible. The film won Best Picture anyway.

300 took Leonidas, a real Spartan king, and built a fantasy around him complete with a nine foot, gold draped Xerxes and monsters that never existed even in myth. Nobody demanded realism, because everyone understood it was spectacle, not documentary.

A real man gets an invented romance, and it’s beloved. A real king gets turned into a demigod fighting monsters, and it wins Oscars. But cast a Black woman as Helen of Troy, a woman who, according to her own myth, was hatched from a swan’s egg, and it becomes a referendum on civilization itself.

That tells you the objection was never about the historical record. If it were, Pocahontas would have drawn ten times the fury The Odyssey has.

Paid subscribers get the rest: the actual mythological genealogy behind the “controversial” casting, the true story of the Agamemnon mask sitting in an Athens museum, and the school board moment that convinced me most of this outrage isn’t about the source material at all.

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Here’s what I remember learning about the Pilgrims growing up.

They came to Plymouth Rock on the Mayflower in 1620 because they wanted religious freedom. They didn’t know how to grow food in the new land, so Squanto helped them plant corn. They wore shoes with buckles and black hats. They were so thankful for the help that they had Thanksgiving with the Indians. I think some of them died that first winter. Roanoke and Jamestown might have been in the same unit. It’s all a little blurred together now.

We made pilgrim hats in first grade. There was probably a coloring sheet. That same year, we made colonial style hats for President’s Day too, a different holiday, the same craft table.

After that, I think we talked about Salem.

In music class, we sang “Fifty Nifty United States,” with its “thirteen original colonies” line.

In fifth grade, the local newspaper came to take pictures while we all made “Indian clothing” out of grocery bags.

And that’s it. That’s the whole unit. I don’t think I learned anything else about the Pilgrims for the rest of my time in school.

Sixth grade was world history. I genuinely don’t remember seventh grade at all. Eighth grade picked back up with American history, starting with the Revolutionary War. Whatever happened between 1620 and 1776 just wasn’t covered.

It was in eighth grade, doing a genealogy project, that I found out I was a Mayflower descendant on both sides of my family.

On my mom’s side, a direct line to William Brewster. On my dad’s side, Sarah Chilton, by way of the Winslows. That line is murkier, though, and I’ve never fully nailed it down.

At the time, I just thought it was cool. Related to the Pilgrims. Neat family trivia.

My family thought it was cool too, but for a different reason. It fit the rhetoric I’d grown up with: that America was founded as a Christian nation, and here was proof, right in our own bloodline.

And the more questions I asked about that, the more trouble I seemed to get into.

But we shouldn’t shy away from asking questions. History makes a lot more sense if you start from a place of curiosity instead of a place of certainty.

“The Pilgrims coming here means we were founded as a Christian nation” is a claim. And underneath it is a completely natural question that deserves an honest answer: how, exactly, does that follow?

Ask it, and you’ll usually get some version of the same response: well, the Pilgrims came here for religious freedom.

That answer should send you in one of two directions.

As a kid, my question was the obvious one: what about the Catholics? What about the Quakers? If this was a country built on religious freedom, why did it take centuries, and a lot of suffering, before that freedom applied to much of anyone outside one narrow version of Protestant Christianity?

Later, once I’d actually learned more about who the Pilgrims were, a second question replaced the first one: if they already had religious freedom in the Dutch Republic, which they did, for over a decade, then why did they leave?

That second question is where this series lives. Not “did the Pilgrims want religious freedom,” they did. But whose religious freedom, freedom from what exactly, and what actually pushed them onto a ship in 1620 after already finding safety somewhere else.

Here’s what stood out to me most, working through this material: for the people demanding a “Christian nation,” the actual content of someone’s faith seemed to matter less than whether that person would let them in. Access to power was the currency. Piety was negotiable, as long as the door stayed open.

That’s the same logic that ran through Tudor and Stuart England. Henry needed an annulment. Edward needed a Protestant England. Mary needed a Catholic one. Elizabeth needed the fighting to stop. Four monarchs, four official versions of Christianity, enforced by the same law each time. The faith didn’t change because the truth changed. It changed because whoever held power decided it should.

People need to understand: the Pilgrims left a Christian country.

Not a Muslim country. Not a Jewish country. Not a Buddhist country. Not an agnostic one. A Christian country, whose leaders had decided their own beliefs should determine the entirety of belief for every person in the land.

One of the oldest political instincts in the history of the world is letting the people in charge decide everyone else’s conscience is theirs to define.

The people are more interesting than the caricature. The reasons they left are more complicated than a single word on a coloring sheet. And what came after, how their story got used two hundred years later to build a national myth, is its own story entirely.

That’s what this series is. Just what’s actually in the record, read carefully.

Read the fine print.

This is the introduction to Pilgrims Before the Mayflower, a series running alongside my short form video work on Facebook and Instagram. New installments, on William Brewster, Richard Clyfton, the departure from Leiden, the fear of war with Spain, and the question of which Christianity the Pilgrims were actually practicing, post as they’re finished.

Paid subscribers get the deeper source material in my history notebook posts, the discrepancies I’m still chasing down, and access to the Sunday night book study and course work this series feeds into. Sneak peak into my notebook for paid subscribers below.

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Sunday night’s Community Zoom took on chapter 5 of Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshippers, “Up from Slavery: The Ideological Origins of Christian Nationalism.” As usual, the conversation didn’t stay inside the book’s margins — it never does with this group — but everywhere it wandered, it kept circling back to the same question the chapter itself is asking: when an idea is discredited, does it disappear, or does it just change clothes?

Who was Rushdoony? A bit more background

A lot of our conversation centered on Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001), and it’s worth taking a few minutes to talk about him because more than one person in the group made the same observation: they’d absorbed pieces of his framework secondhand, through churches or schools that never once said his name.

Rushdoony coined the term “Christian Reconstruction” and is widely credited as the movement’s founding intellectual. His central argument, laid out at length in The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973), is theonomy — the position that Mosaic case law, not just the Ten Commandments in the abstract but the specific Old Testament civil penalties attached to them, should govern modern society. He founded the Chalcedon Foundation in Los Angeles in 1965 and edited its Chalcedon Report, which reached a mailing list of 25,000 to 40,000 by the 1980s. His son-in-law, Gary North, was an early collaborator and one of the movement’s other major voices, though the two had a public falling-out in 1981.

What matters for the “we absorbed this without knowing his name” observation is reach, not just doctrine. Rushdoony had a hand in launching the modern Christian homeschooling movement, and his ideas circulated through evangelical networks with connections to figures like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell — meaning his framework could shape a school’s curriculum or a congregation’s assumptions about law and authority long after it had been separated from his name and from the explicit Reconstructionist label. That’s the mechanism Stewart is pointing at in this chapter, and it’s the same mechanism the group flagged with “idea laundering”: the doctrine travels further than the citation does.

Critics have accused Rushdoony of racist writing and Holocaust minimization in some of his texts, but his defenders and Chalcedon itself dispute those characterizations. I haven’t verified either side of that claim against primary text, so I’m not stating it as settled here. You might want to read Michael J. McVicar’s Christian Reconstruction (2015), an academic history of the movement, for a more measured view. I have not read this, but my understanding is that should give anyone interested a good overview.

Where we started: the person behind the theology

One member of the group had looked into him and brought us something the chapter doesn’t dwell on: Rushdoony was born to Armenian immigrant parents who had fled the Ottoman Empire’s collapse and the violence against Armenian Christians. That detail opened up a real conversation in the group — not to excuse what he built, but to ask an honest question about how inherited trauma shapes the belief systems people construct afterward, and how differently we’d frame that today if we were looking at it through a mental-health lens instead of a purely theological or political one.

Our group was clear-eyed that a difficult origin story explains a worldview, but that it doesn’t redeem what gets built with it. Several people were quick to draw the parallel to arguments made about state violence elsewhere, and agreed the logic doesn’t hold up any better there either.

The deeper history: how slavery became racial

Because the chapter roots Christian nationalism’s ideology in slavery’s theological defense, we spent real time on the actual mechanics of how slavery — which is ancient and was never race-specific — became racialized. The short version, as the group worked through it: slavery existed across the ancient world along lines of war captivity, debt, and birth status, not skin color. That changed when Spain and Portugal’s sugar plantation economy needed labor their own colonizing had already killed off. Indigenous populations in the Americas were devastated by disease and couldn’t be forced to sustain the labor system the way plantation economies demanded. West Africa was close, and an existing slave-trading structure was already there to be exploited. The racial justification — the idea that Black people were inherently suited for or deserving of enslavement — came later, philosophically laundered through Enlightenment-era writers before it hardened into law.

This is the through-line the group kept landing on. The economic decision came first. The ideology defending it came after, to make the economics feel moral.

Omar ibn Said and the record that survives

One member specifically wanted to build on the Omar ibn Said video I put up on socials last week — an enslaved scholar from the Fouta Toro region who wrote what’s considered the only known autobiography by an enslaved person in North America composed in Arabic. He’d spent 25 years as an Islamic scholar before capture. His writing complicates the flattened story a lot of us were taught, and the group’s instinct was right: his life is a direct, human counterweight to the “civilizing” narrative that Christian nationalist historiography has leaned on for two centuries.

“Idea laundering” — a concept worth sitting with, carefully

The most useful phrase to come out of the night was idea laundering: the process by which a discredited idea gets repackaged in more palatable language while the underlying structure survives intact. The group applied it well — to the reframing of “states’ rights” standing in for the right to enslave, and to modern language about “cultural preference” standing in for segregation. It’s a sharp lens, and it’s exactly the kind of pattern-recognition this whole project is built on.

The 19th-century backlash, and a longer cycle than we thought

We also talked about Horace Mann’s 1840s push to frame public education as a civic duty rather than a religious one — and the backlash that followed after the Civil War from thinkers like Dabney, who saw an educated formerly-enslaved population as a direct threat. More than one person in the group said this reframed how they understood the “Christian nation” argument generally: it’s not new, and it’s not hiding. It’s a 170-year-old argument that periodically gets a new coat of paint. Several people connected this directly to the shift in evangelical political identity between the Carter and Reagan years — worth revisiting when we get further into the book.

Where the conversation goes next

We didn’t resolve the hardest question of the night, and I don’t think we’re supposed to: how much of this is persuadable, and how much is identity that’s fused too tightly to belief to be reasoned with from the outside. The group’s best answer was structural, not rhetorical — you don’t get anywhere arguing about outcomes. You get somewhere asking people where the belief actually originates.

How the book study works

We meet on Zoom this Sunday at 7 p.m. EST to talk through the introduction. Come as you are — you don’t need to have every line annotated, just read the introduction and bring one thing that struck you.

To get the Zoom link: comment below or send me a message, and I’ll make sure it gets to you before Sunday. The link goes out to every paid subscriber who wants in. If you have been attending, continue using the same link and passcode.

Questions for Chapter 6: “The Uses and Abuses of History”

1. Chapter 6 turns from theology to historiography. So think about what Christian nationalists believe and how they use the past to justify it. Where did you see that same move happening in chapter 5, before Stewart named it directly?
   
   

2. We talked about “idea laundering” as a pattern. Chapter 6 is largely about how history itself gets laundered. Whose version becomes “the record.” What’s one historical claim you’ve heard treated as settled fact that you now want to trace back to its source?
   
   

3. Stewart is a journalist, not a historian by training. Does that change how you weigh her use of historical material in this chapter, and if so, how?

4. If the founders’ actual religious diversity and disagreements are as well-documented as this chapter suggests, why do you think the “Christian nation” narrative has had such staying power anyway?
   
   

5. Bring one example (from news, from your own family, anywhere) of history being used as ammunition rather than evidence. What was being laundered, and into what?

Yesterday morning, I was out walking my dogs through the neighborhood, as I often do. A friend of mine’s parents live just a street over, and I’d promised to drop off a bag of the hot pepper birdseed I use. Birds can’t taste capsaicin, but squirrels certainly can, so it keeps them out of the feeders without bothering the birds.

They have one of those bird feeders with a camera attached, so you can watch every little visitor that stops by — Lieutenant Warbler, Madam Cardinal, and the occasional indignant squirrel. I don’t know if they name their birds. I do. Also - as an aside - get Merlin Bird ID, it’s a free app developed by Cornell University that helps you identify birds.

I digress. As often happens, I intended to stay for a minute. Instead, we pulled up folding chairs in the driveway, drank cold water, and started talking.

She’s a master gardener, and somehow the conversation drifted to the old flower club she used to belong to. The club no longer exists, which made me a little sad. I hate watching traditions quietly disappear from one generation to the next.

Then she casually mentioned that several of the plants growing in her yard had originally come from Gene Stratton-Porter’s historic home.

I’d never been there.

She looked genuinely surprised.

“As much as you love history and gardening,” she said, “I can’t believe you’ve never visited.”

Neither could I.

So this morning, after watering my flowers and finishing my coffee, I decided there was no reason to keep putting it off.

Before we left, I texted my friend.

“Yesterday your mom was talking bout Gene Stratton-Porter and her hosts. I mentioned I hadn’t been there. She found that unbelievable. So I perusing the website last night. Anyway - I’m thinking of going today. Any interest in coming along?”

She had to work, but her response made me laugh.

“That is the most Lindsay invite ever.”

I suppose it is.

Some people text, “Want to grab lunch?”

I text, “Want to spend the afternoon touring the home of an early twentieth-century Indiana author?”

One more thing about me. I like to be cost-effective. Before we left, I stopped by our local library and checked out a museum pass. If your library has a Library of Things, see if yours offers museum passes. Ours lets you borrow them just like books.

And I packed lunch. It was a great day for a picnic, in the shade as long as there was a breeze. We had leftover chicken, everyone in my house loves naan bread, so I made sandwiches, threw in apples, cheese sticks, Capri Suns, bottled water, and called it a win.

History doesn’t have to be expensive. Sometimes it’s just a library pass, a packed lunch, and enough curiosity to drive an hour down the road.

So Atticus, one of his friends, and I headed to Rome City.

I thought we’d tour a historic home. Instead, I left with pages of questions.

If you’re a paid subscriber ... this is where I invite you into my research process.

The docent gave an excellent tour, but the drive home was when the real work began. I’ll walk you through what surprised me, what I wanted to verify, and the questions that sent me down entirely new historical rabbit holes.

The first surprise came before I had even stepped fully inside.

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Nearly a year ago, I hit “publish” on my first Substack post.

I thought I was starting a newsletter. Looking back, I think I was really starting a conversation.

Over the past year, so many of you have asked questions that go far beyond the finished videos. You want to know how I decide what to trust, what I leave out, and how my thinking changes as I research.

Yesterday I shared a one-minute video about Omar ibn Said. The video took about a minute to watch. The research behind it took about five hours.

Lately I’ve noticed something interesting. Many of your questions aren’t actually about the finished video anymore. They’re about the process.

How do I decide which sources to trust? What happens when historians disagree? Do I actually read everything? What claims don’t make it into the final script? What questions am I still trying to answer?

I love those questions because, honestly, they’re the best part of history.

A couple of weeks ago I checked out Good Things by Samin Nosrat from the library. (Yes... I’m the kind of person who reads the introduction to cookbooks.) She writes that she has always struggled with recipes because they attempt to “capture, quantify, and define the ineffable.”

That sentence stayed with me. Because I feel almost the same way about history videos.

A recipe tells you what came out of the kitchen. It doesn’t tell you what almost happened. It doesn’t tell you about the ingredients that didn’t work, the ideas the chef abandoned halfway through, or the tiny adjustments that made all the difference.

A one-minute history video is like that. You see the finished dish. You don’t see the five hours of reading. Or the questions.

So I thought I’d start sharing those.

Welcome to The Historian’s Notebook.

The question that started everything

When I first read that Omar ibn Said had studied for 25 years, I couldn’t get past it.

Twenty-five years.

That immediately made me ask another question. Where?

If someone spends twenty-five years studying theology, law, and Arabic, they probably aren’t living in an isolated village. Schools exist where scholars gather. Where teachers live. Where ideas circulate. Where books are copied.

When I picture people being captured into slavery, I don’t instinctively picture centers of learning. That assumption turned out to be mine, not history’s.

The more I read, the more I realized I had imagined Omar’s world incorrectly. Futa Toro, in what is now northern Senegal along the border with Mauritania, wasn’t some forgotten corner of the world. It was a center of Islamic scholarship.

Suddenly Omar’s education wasn’t the surprising part. The surprising part became something else: how does someone from a place like this end up on a slave ship?

That question consumed the next several hours.

Who captured Omar?

I assumed historians would have a simple answer. They don’t.

Omar writes:

“There came a great army to our country. They killed many men. They took me...”

That’s all he says. No names. No kingdom. No explanation.

At first I assumed historians had solved the mystery.

They haven’t. And that’s where the real investigation began.

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A Map Drawn for a King

In 1375, a mapmaker in Majorca — likely a Jewish cartographer named Abraham Cresques — finished an illuminated atlas commissioned for the French crown. On its second panel sits a man on a throne, holding a golden orb. The caption identifies him as Mansa Musa, ruler of Mali, described as the richest and most distinguished king in the entire region because of the gold found in his lands.

This wasn’t a fantasy. It was Europe’s best available intelligence about West Africa, made for a king, more than a century before Columbus.

Europeans of that era didn’t just know Mali was wealthy. They knew Timbuktu was a center of Islamic scholarship, home to a university with some 25,000 students, madrasahs, and several hundred thousand manuscripts covering astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and law. Word of the city’s libraries and mosques reached European shores well before any slave ship did.

Hold that image. We’re coming back to it.

The Ideology That Came Later

By the 18th century, a different story about Africa had taken hold among European thinkers. The Scottish philosopher David Hume argued that Africans were naturally inferior to white people, that no Black nation had ever produced anything of note. No art, no science, no institutions worth mentioning.

This wasn’t a correction to earlier ignorance. It was a replacement of earlier knowledge. The same continent Europeans had mapped as home to fabulous wealth and scholarship was, within a few centuries, being redescribed by European intellectuals as having produced nothing at all.

That’s not an accident of history. It’s a business decision that needed a justification.

How Slavery Actually Worked, Everywhere, For Thousands of Years

The institution of slavery is ancient. It shows up in the Code of Hammurabi, in the Hebrew Bible, in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, and in African societies themselves long before Europeans arrived on the continent. Almost every civilization we have records for practiced some form of it.

But look at how people ended up enslaved, across every one of these societies:

• War captivity. The single largest source almost everywhere, from Rome’s conquests to the internal wars of West African kingdoms.

• Debt. Ancient Greece and Rome both eventually restricted debt slavery for their own citizens, but it persisted informally for centuries.

• Birth. A child born to an enslaved mother inherited her status. This was true in Rome, China and across much of Africa.

• Crime and punishment. Judicial penalty for an offense.

• Piracy. A massive, if less remembered, source of captives across the Mediterranean world.

• Religious difference. In the medieval Mediterranean, Christians enslaved Muslims and Muslims enslaved Christians. The line was faith, not skin color. This is also where our word “slave” comes from: the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe were captured and sold in such enormous numbers by Byzantine, Arab, and Germanic traders that their own ethnic name — Slověninŭ, “people of the word” became the generic term for a person in bondage.

What’s missing from every single one of these systems, in every one of these civilizations, is ancestry as the sole and permanent basis for who could be enslaved. Whether you ended up enslaved depended on what happened to you, which war you lost, what you owed, what you’d done, what god you prayed to. It did not depend on what you were born as, applied forever, to your children, and their children.

That changes with the system that begins in Portugal.

When It Became a Business

Between 1441 and 1444, Portuguese sailors under Prince Henry the Navigator captured the first Africans on the Mauritanian coast and sold them at auction in Lagos, Portugal. Within decades, Portugal had built a fortified trading post on the Gold Coast and discovered that African labor could sustain a wildly profitable new crop on their Atlantic island colonies: sugar. That combination — sugar plus a permanent, coerced labor force — became the template exported to Brazil, and eventually to the entire Atlantic world.

For over a century, Portugal and Spain ran this system almost alone, especially after their crowns merged in 1580. The Dutch broke in next — not by inventing anything new, but by seizing a piece of Portuguese Brazil outright and running its sugar plantations directly from 1630 to 1654. When Portugal pushed them out, the Dutch took their capital and expertise into the Caribbean, right as England was colonizing there, too.

England’s version of the business arrived in 1660, with the Royal African Company, a joint-stock company chartered by the crown. Investors bought shares and collected dividends, the same way you’d invest in a company today. The list of investors included King Charles II himself, along with respected public figures like the diarist Samuel Pepys and the philosopher John Locke. Between 1672 and 1731, this one company transported nearly 187,000 human beings across the Atlantic.

In 1698, Parliament opened the trade to any British subject. Private investment exploded, and by 1708, independent traders were shipping four times what the original company managed. And in 1720, Parliament authorized dedicated insurance companies to underwrite the risk of these voyages, including the human beings aboard, priced as insurable cargo. By 1790, the slave trade accounted for at least a third of the premiums collected by one major London insurer. Lloyd’s of London — still a major name in insurance today — built early business on exactly this.

This is what “the ideology followed the money” actually means, in specific, dated, sourced steps:

• Portugal found a profitable practice.

• Spain and Portugal scaled it under one crown.

• The Dutch proved a corporate version worked.

• England copied it, then turned it into a stock market. And only once the system was fully running — profitable, insured, invested in by kings and philosophers alike — did a permanent, hereditary justification arrive to explain why the children of the enslaved should stay enslaved forever. That justification was race.

The Muslims America Forgot It Started With

Historians estimate that somewhere between 10 and 50 percent of the roughly 10 million Africans brought to the Americas in bondage were Muslim, from West African regions with centuries of Islamic scholarly tradition behind them.

Some of them are individually documented:

Omar ibn Said, enslaved in North Carolina, wrote the only known surviving autobiography by an enslaved person written in Arabic in America — a document the Library of Congress itself describes as attesting to “the high level of education, and the long tradition of a written culture that existed in Africa at the time.” He had studied Islamic scholarship for twenty-five years before he was captured.

Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, a Senegambian trader and Quran memorizer enslaved in Maryland, so impressed his enslaver with his learning that he was eventually freed and given passage back to Africa.

Estevanico, sold into slavery by the Portuguese in 1522, became one of the first Africans to set foot on the North American continent as an explorer, 85 years before Jamestown and nearly a century before the Mayflower.

Muslim names appear on Revolutionary War muster rolls. And the Founders themselves engaged with Islam directly and on the record. Thomas Jefferson owned a Quran and later said his Virginia religious freedom law was written to protect “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan” alike.

The Treaty of Tripoli, which was ratified unanimously by the Senate in 1797, states that the United States government is “not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

Muslims were not late arrivals to America. They were here before the country was.

How Muslims Actually Came to Indiana

None of this is ancient history removed from where you and I live, whether that’s Indiana, Colorado, New York, Maryland, etc. Muslim migration has a specific, boring, well-documented Indiana chapter, and it has nothing to do with conquest or an organized religious agenda.

Muslim immigrants in Indiana came from the declining Ottoman Empire, mostly from what’s now Syria and Lebanon. They began arriving in northern Indiana in the 1890s for jobs. Industrialist John H. Barker actively recruited Syrian-Lebanese workers to staff his railroad car foundries in Michigan City, which became the site of Indiana’s first mosque, which was incorporated in 1914. To be clear, these people weren’t fleeing religious persecution. The historical record shows they were fleeing an economic collapse. You see, Mount Lebanon’s silk industry was experiencing crushing new taxes, and, thanks to medical advancements and vaccines, a doubling population that had outpaced the local economy.

Migration patterns don’t always follow work, sometimes it’s displacement after a crisis. For example, in Indianapolis, a small homegrown African-American Muslim community formed there in the 1920s. These people had likely been living in Indianapolis since the Great Migration after the Civil War. Over time they became involved in new religious movements like the Ahmadi Mission and the Moorish Science Temple.

The real Muslim growth came after 1965, when a new immigration law opened the door to skilled professionals from majority-Muslim countries. Doctors, engineers, and scientists who came for jobs at places like Eli Lilly and Indiana University. Indianapolis then became the national organizational headquarters for American Muslim life when the Islamic Society of North America was founded there in 1982. Later waves came as refugees, fleeing wars in Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

Henry Ford’s five-dollar workday in 1914 pulled Arab immigrants — Muslim and Christian alike — into Highland Park, Michigan. When Ford built the massive River Rouge complex, the community moved to Dearborn with him, settling in row houses Ford built for workers.

American industry recruited immigrant labor, and refugee crises later added to it. That’s the entire mechanism. No infiltration, no plan, no agenda, just factory jobs and displaced people, the same way nearly every immigrant community in this country got here.

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Chapter 4 of The Power Worshippers by Katherine Stewart sent us straight into the question we keep circling back to on these Sunday nights: what does separation of church and state actually mean in practice, when real people are trying to live their faith and vote their conscience at the same time?

We didn’t land on a clean answer. I don’t think there is one. But here’s where the conversation went.

The Constitution says less than people think … and more than people think

We started by getting the plain facts on the table. The words “separation of church and state” aren’t in the Constitution. What is there: no religious test for holding office, and no established national religion. That’s it. Everything else — how much faith should shape a lawmaker’s vote, whether a legislature can put the Bible in a classroom, whether a judge is required to marry a couple who hasn’t already been through a courthouse — is downstream interpretation, not settled text.

One member pushed on this directly: if you’re voting your values, and your values come from your faith, how is that meaningfully different from writing your faith into law? Another member drew the line differently — a belief shaping how you vote is not the same as that belief becoming what everyone is required to do. The group sat with that distinction for a while without fully resolving it, which felt honest.

A useful test: who benefits, who’s harmed

The best practical tool to come out of the night was simple. Before deciding whether a law reflects reasonable values or theocratic overreach, ask two questions: who does this benefit, and who does this harm? Seatbelt laws came up as an easy case — resisted at the time as government overreach, understood in hindsight as basic harm reduction. Prostitution and Sunday alcohol laws came up as harder cases, where “harm” is contested rather than obvious. Indiana’s own blue laws got some airtime here too — no Sunday alcohol sales until relatively recently, and to this day, no alcohol sales on Election Day, a rule explicitly about influence.

The founders’ religious identity, revised

We talked about how many of the founders were deists — believing in a creator but not in a revealed, divinely inspired text — and how that gets flattened in the modern retelling. The Christian nationalist narrative doesn’t just claim the founders were religious; it claims they intended a specifically Christian nation, not a religiously neutral one. That’s a rewrite, not an interpretation. One member, raised Pentecostal, talked about how her own seminary training taught her the opposite of what she’d absorbed growing up — that scripture was written and revised by fallible people across centuries, not delivered intact.

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Pluralism as a target

Someone shared a clip of a pastor arguing that religious pluralism — the idea that the state stays neutral and lets different worldviews coexist — is itself a kind of competing religion, and therefore not actually neutral at all. That reframing does a lot of work for Christian nationalist arguments: if pluralism is just another belief system, then privileging Christianity in law isn’t an establishment problem, it’s just picking a side in a contest that was never neutral to begin with. Worth sitting with, because it’s a more sophisticated move than “they’re persecuting us.”

Where the Christian left fits

A good chunk of the night went to the rise of a more visible Christian left — political figures speaking from faith toward inclusion rather than exclusion. The group was sympathetic but clear-eyed: is this a genuine, slow-building movement forty years in the making, born out of people quietly deciding to “do right” in their own schools and churches and towns? Or is it mostly a reaction to Christian nationalism’s visibility — Newton’s third law applied to religion and politics? Probably both. One member raised a real tension: when a Christian-left figure fights fire with fire — matching an opponent’s tactics rather than staying above them — does that undercut the moral distinction the movement is trying to draw? No consensus, but a good, honest question.

The generational and regional piece

Several members traced their own path — private Christian schooling built around resisting integration, without that ever being named as the reason at the time; blue laws that varied wildly by state and even by county; a slow, individual “waking up” that took decades, not a single moment. There was real tenderness in how people talked about parents and communities who weren’t cruel, just unexamined — and how much it costs, personally, to look back and see what you didn’t see then.

Where we left it

Closing thoughts ran toward complexity rather than resolution — a shared sense that the “wall” of separation is not, and maybe never was, hard and fast. Several people named a loss of civility and basic decency as the deeper story underneath the legal question. And more than one person landed on the same instinct: rather than fighting Christian nationalist arguments on their own terms, ask the people making them to sit with the actual teachings — humility, care for the poor and the stranger — that the loudest version of the movement tends to skip past.

We pick up Chapter 5 next Sunday, 7 p.m. EST. Zoom link, password and questions are below for paid subscribers.

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When people picture the Revolutionary War, they sometimes think of a fairly narrow map. Lexington and Concord. Bunker Hill. Valley Forge. Yorktown. A war fought in a corridor running roughly from Massachusetts to Virginia, by armies in formation, ending with a surrender at a ceremonial table on a specific day.

Two women I’ve been researching lately didn’t live anywhere near that map.

Nanyehi — settlers called her Nancy Ward — was a Cherokee Ghigau, or “Beloved Woman,” on the Tennessee frontier: a title that came with a seat in the Cherokee General Council and authority over the fate of prisoners of war. She lived hundreds of miles from the nearest Continental Army regiment, in a conflict that had almost nothing to do with red coats and blue.

Dicey Langston was a teenage girl in the South Carolina backcountry, in a district where the war wasn’t armies facing off across a field; it was neighbors against neighbors, Patriots against Loyalists, families who’d known each other for years now burning each other’s houses down.

Neither of their wars had a front line. Neither had a uniform. Both of them still had to survive it.

That’s the corner of the Revolution I want to spend more time in.

Why anyone was even in Tennessee yet

Here’s a detail that gets skipped: in 1776, Tennessee wasn’t a state yet. It was Cherokee land, and the settlers living along the Watauga River were there without any government’s permission. Not the Crown’s. Not North Carolina’s. Not, initially, even the Cherokee’s.

The 1763 Royal Proclamation had drawn a line down the Appalachians and told colonists not to cross it. People crossed it anyway. By 1772, enough of them had built cabins along the Watauga that they formed their own government to keep order. They called it the Watauga Association, and it had no legal standing whatsoever. A few years later, a land speculator named Richard Henderson sat down with Cherokee leaders at Sycamore Shoals and bought an enormous tract of land outright, a deal neither the Crown nor, later, the state of North Carolina ever fully recognized as valid.

So, how was anyone there? Honestly, the settlers went first, and the paperwork tried to catch up later … or didn’t. It’s the same question I keep circling back to with the Declaration itself. Who actually has the authority to do something, and who decides that after the fact? The resource changes. The framework doesn’t.

But why they went is its own story, and it’s better than “cheap land.” A real number of the earliest Watauga settlers were political refugees, literally. Five years before the Revolution, small farmers in North Carolina calling themselves Regulators had taken up arms against their own colonial government over corrupt officials, punishing land costs, and abusive tax collection. The royal governor’s militia crushed them at the Battle of Alamance on May 16, 1771. Six Regulators were later hanged for treason.

James Robertson, one of the actual founding figures of the Watauga settlement, was a defeated Regulator. In the direct aftermath of Alamance, he led a group of (what one historian calls) “disenfranchised settlers” over the mountains into the Watauga Valley. People who had just lost an armed fight against a government they considered illegitimate turned around and built a government with no legitimacy at all, and it held together better than the fight did.

Not everyone went to Watauga for the same reason, though. Some were debtors who wanted out from under colonial courts entirely. The Watauga Association’s own 1776 petition for annexation admits the settlement’s government was formed partly to keep the region from becoming, in their words, “a haven for debtors and felons.” Enough people had already moved there specifically because no court could touch them that the more law-minded settlers had to invent one. And Richard Henderson, who engineered the 1775 purchase at Sycamore Shoals, wasn’t a farmer looking for a home, he was a speculator who saw a fortune in land nobody had legally claimed yet.

The summer Nanyehi became a legend, and why it’s more complicated than that

Nanyehi’s cousin was Dragging Canoe, a Cherokee war chief who believed the encroaching settlements had to be met with force before they swallowed everything. In July 1776, as Dragging Canoe and other war chiefs prepared to raid the Overmountain settlements, Nanyehi went the other direction and secretly warned the settlers an attack was coming.

That same summer, a settler named Lydia Bean, wife of William Bean, one of the very first Anglo-American settlers in the region, was captured. Some accounts describe her tied to a stake, kindling stacked around her, after having watched another captive burned. Nanyehi intervened, and the men holding Bean let her go.

For that, Nanyehi has been listed as a Daughters of the American Revolution patriot ancestor. Within the Cherokee Nation, she’s also been criticized (then and now) for undermining her own people’s resistance at the exact moment it might have worked, against settlers who were already breaking treaties and burning Cherokee towns. Two verdicts, same act, and historians still don’t agree on which one is right, if either is.

Nanyehi’s story didn’t end in 1776

Nanyehi’s story didn’t end in 1776. For the next 40-some years of her life she was vocal, which complicates the “hero or traitor” question even further.

In 1781, Nanyehi addressed American treaty commissioners directly, startling them, since they weren’t used to negotiating with a woman at all. She told them: let your women’s sons be ours, our sons be yours. In 1785 she helped negotiate the Treaty of Hopewell, the first treaty between the Cherokee and the brand-new United States. American commissioners promised, in writing, that settlers would leave Cherokee land.

They didn’t.

A note on what’s next. History is always free here — that’s the whole idea. But all month long I’m working through this same question: what the founding actually said about church and state, read from the documents themselves. If you want to do that with me — reading the primary sources together, Roger Williams and Madison and the rest, in real time — that’s what The Community is for. It’s our Tuesday-night course, Not a Christian Nation, included with a paid subscription. Come read the fine print with us. Or you can join our book study on Sunday evenings. We’re reading “The Power Worshippers” by Katherine Stewart.

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As she watched treaty after treaty get broken and cession after cession get forced through, Nanyehi’s own position changed. In 1817, nearly 80 years old and too sick to travel, she sent her walking stick and a written plea to the Cherokee council, co-signed with her daughter and granddaughter, begging the council not to sell any more land. Two years later, the land around her home was sold anyway. She spent her last years running an inn on land that wasn’t the land she’d been born on.

So the real version of Nanyehi is more complicated. She was a peacemaker who saved settlers in 1776 and the elderly woman fighting to keep her own people’s land in 1817. She was the same person responding honestly to what was actually happening around her, which is a more interesting and more human answer than “hero” or “traitor.”

The Bean connection

I’ve had some comments in my social media videos, mentioning Scottish ancestors who settled in that same stretch of East Tennessee, and asked if there’s a connection to Lydia Bean, the woman from the story above. There very likely is, at least regionally.

Her husband, William Bean, is the man generally credited by historians as the first permanent Anglo-American settler in what became Tennessee. He built his cabin on Boone’s Creek in 1769, and he was of Scottish descent. That whole Watauga settlement corridor filled in fast with Scottish and Scots-Irish families over the following decades, many of them intermarrying across just a handful of founding households. If your family has deep roots in that specific part of East Tennessee, a connection to the Bean family — by blood or by marriage, a few generations down — is genuinely plausible. I can’t verify anyone’s specific line without more to go on, but it’s not a far-fetched guess. That’s frontier genealogy in a nutshell: everyone was everyone’s neighbor because there weren’t very many everyones yet.

Dicey Langston, and what happened to her children

Dicey Langston grew up in a Loyalist-heavy stretch of the South Carolina backcountry, where her father and brothers were open Patriots. As a teenager, she started overhearing Loyalist plans and passing warnings along. The most famous story: at fifteen, she heard that a Loyalist militia called the “Bloody Scouts” planned to attack the settlement where her brother was camped. She crossed a flooded river on foot, at night, alone, to warn him in time. On another occasion, when Loyalists held a gun on her disabled father, Dicey stepped directly between them.

What happened to her after the war is unusually well documented. She married Thomas Springfield — the same militia leader who, family stories say, she’d first met when he came to collect a musket from her family’s home. They settled eventually in what’s now Travelers Rest, South Carolina, and had twenty-two children together. Seventeen survived to adulthood. By the time Dicey died in 1837, her obituary reported she’d left behind roughly 140 grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

The teenager who swam a flooded river at night to warn her brother, who stood between a Loyalist’s gun and her father — that same woman spent the second half of her life building one of the largest families in Revolutionary-era South Carolina. It’s not a dramatic ending. It’s just a long one. And there’s something worth sitting with in that: the Revolution didn’t end for these women when the shooting stopped. They kept living in the country they’d fought for, for decades, raising children who’d carry their stories forward without any of them knowing whether the stories would survive.

Mine did. I’ll leave that thread there for now.

Read the fine print.

Sources & Further Reading

On the Watauga settlement, the Regulators, and land authority

Tennessee Encyclopedia — “Watauga Association” tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/watauga-association/

National Park Service — Colonials and Patriots (Tennessee sites) nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/colonials-patriots/sitee17.htm

American Battlefield Trust — “The Regulator War” battlefields.org/learn/articles/regulator-war

North Carolina Historic Sites — Alamance Battleground historicsites.nc.gov/all-sites/alamance-battleground

Watauga County Heritage Museum — “Brief History of Watauga County” wataugacountyheritagemuseum.org/brief-history-of-watauga-county/

On Nanyehi (Nancy Ward)

Colonial Williamsburg — “Nanyehi (Nancy Ward): A Beloved Woman of Chota” colonialwilliamsburg.org/discover/18th-century-people/stories-of-american-indian-life/nanyehi-nancy-ward-a-beloved-woman-of-chota/

New-York Historical Society — “Nanyehi (Nancy Ward),” Women & the American Story wams.nyhistory.org/life-story/nanyehi-nancy-ward/

Britannica Kids — “Nanye’hi” kids.britannica.com/students/article/Nanyehi/314073

Primary source: Nancy Ward’s 1817 petition to the Cherokee National Council, co-signed with her daughter Ka-ti and granddaughter Jennie McIntosh, reprinted in Norma Tucker, “Nancy Ward, Ghighau of the Cherokees,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly, June 1969, pp. 192–200.

Further reading: Theda Perdue, “Nancy Ward,” in Portraits of American Women (Oxford University Press, 1998); M. Thomas Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1993)

On William and Lydia Bean

Tennessee Historical Sign / NPS site record, via nps.gov (Colonials and Patriots, cited above)

Grainger County Historic Society — “The First Family of Tennessee” graingertnhistory.com/first-family-of-tn/

On Dicey Langston

South Carolina’s 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution — “Dicey Langston: A Revolutionary Story Still Inspiring New Generations” southcarolina250.com/dicey-langston-a-revolutionary-story-still-inspiring-new-generations/

Daughters of the American Revolution — “Laodicea Dicey Langston Springfield” honoringourpatriots.dar.org/patriots/laodicea-dicey-langston-springfield/

Primary source: Dicey Langston Springfield’s obituary, The Greenville Mountaineer, 1837

diceylangston.com