Revisit the Salem Witch Trials, the Underground Railroad, and other resistance movements of American history to get a bold new understanding of how resistance shaped our past—and how its principles can change our future. The United States was shaped by resistance—but not in the way we’ve been taught. The Revolution did not secure liberty; it opened the door to either liberty or oppression, where only white men enjoyed all of the benefits and protections of citizenship. In A Resistance History of the United States , public historian Tad Stoermer shows how from the very beginning, that tension—between the ideals of resistance and the realities of power—has defined America more than the Enlightenment ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Utililizing powerful storytelling to focus on key—and often lesser-known—moments in American history, this book reveals the truth of how resistance movements from Colonial times have opposed the powers that be. Stoermer covers an impressive roster of pivotal movements, with each chapter identifying a key resistance movement and principle meant to inspire contemporary readers, including: Bacon’s Rebellion/Metacomet’s War (1676) - Salem Witch Trials (1692) - The Black Loyalists (1783) - The Underground Railroad (1850) Through these and many more examples, Stoermer dismantles the mythologies that pass for American history—exposing the curated nostalgia, moral evasions, and institutional silences that have long protected abusive power. What emerges is an essential look at how we can take lessons from the past to understand, and effectively respond to, the injustices we face today. Tad Stoermer is a public historian who trained at the University of Virginia, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard, with a particular focus Colonial and Revolutionary America. He is also a former Congressional staffer and speechwriter, and he served in the US Army and Reserves as a reconnaisance scout. He lives in Denmark. Chapter 1 Beware False Prophets — Bacon’s Rebellion That Wasn’t Resistance Principle #1: The banners of resistance and even rebellion are often stolen by those with no aim other than their own share of power. Two Fires Jamestown, September 1676 Imagine the humid Chesapeake air descending like a thick cloak, filled with the acrid bite of burning timber. And the sky, once dark and clear with pinpoints of faraway stars, is now orange, punctuated by sparks. Now add the roar of flames, the crackle of collapsing houses, the shouts of men high on rum and grievance. Nathaniel Bacon — thirty-something, Cambridge-educated, a privileged but dangerously disaffected planter — grimly watches it all, surveying his handiwork, as the capital of the first English representative government in North America caves in on itself. Just a week earlier, he had chased the royal governor, the aging Sir William Berkeley, a man drunk on his own claims to power, across the bay. Now Bacon was making sure that Berkeley could never return to what he once ruled — because it would no longer be there. Nine months earlier, the Great Swamp, December 1675 More flames. More screams. More destruction. A much different kind of smell. More than homes were burning — so were children. And their mothers. And their fathers. Old and young. The Puritan “gospel of terror” in full, bloody swing, the instruments of God, the king, and the authority of the New England colonies. And what was the crime that had yielded such a horrible sentence? Resistance. The Narragansett, caught up in Metacomet’s Wampanoag rebellion against the English, chose sides. They were harboring resistance fighters in their winter stronghold in Rhode Island. As far as the English were concerned, that made the Narragansett — every last one of them — as evil as the warriors they were trying to shield, turning toddlers into legitimate targets. So the English set the palisades ablaze and cut down everyone trying to escape. This was not some disaffected, privileged planter torching the symbols of his own government in a battle over his share of it. It was the brutal weight of abusive colonial authority, bent on exterminating a people who had become a threat when they fought to exist and, therefore, to resist. Two fires. Nine months and more than five hundred miles apart. But also not even in the same universe. Historians have turned Bacon’s Rebellion into a principled uprising of freedom-seeking settlers while erasing the effort by Indigenous people to defend themselves and their way of life as just another episode in a long train of conflict that threatened the progress of civilization and betterment in the New World. Nathaniel Bacon, though, was a false prophet, employing the trappings of resistance to further his own claims to authority. His legacy has been aided and abetted by generations of storytellers. Metacomet, however, was the real thing, leading his people in a last attempt to push back power when there was noth