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What does real, REAL resistance look like?

Tad Stoermer is a public historian, teacher, and author of the forthcoming book A Resistance History of the United States releasing June of 2026.

His work dismantles the mythologies that pass for American history. He removes the curated nostalgia, moral evasions, and institutional silences that have long protected abusive power. That continue to protect that abusive power.

From his website:

"A Resistance History of the United States is a record of repeated fights against abusive authority, carried out by people who refused the lies used to justify it. Those battles have taken different forms: the women and men in Salem who would not confess to witchcraft, the Black Loyalists who seized their own freedom during the Revolution, and the Anti-Federalists who forced a Bill of Rights to limit nationalist power. It’s a tradition carried forward by people like Ona Judge and Henry David Thoreau, by the clandestine networks of the Underground Railroad, and by the violent resolve of John Brown and the Secret Six—resistance so disruptive it helped push the nation into civil war, and so ambitious it took the focus and will of the Radical Republicans to begin building a new republic from the ruins. A Resistance History of the United States uncovers these moments not as steps toward inevitable progress, but as a set of hard-earned lessons—a usable playbook for confronting the abuse of power in our own time.

ad is one of the most widely followed public historians in the world here today to help us face what is to come.

He is a currently a Visiting Scholar at the University of Southern Denmark’s Center for American Studies and a Lecturer in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He previously taught public history at Harvard, served as a public historian at Colonial Williamsburg, and was advisor for history content at C-SPAN.