We Stopped Teaching History. We Started Teaching Opinions About It.

I've spent the last two years writing about people who stood for something when standing cost them everything. Fourteen figures across two thousand years for Courage to Stand: Across the Ages. Now a deeper dive into the American founding for Planting Courage. Hundreds of primary sources. Thousands of pages of letters, court records, sermons, legislative debates, and personal diaries.

And the thing I can't shake isn't what these people did. It's how little we know about them, and how much they accomplished.

Not the names. We know the names. Well mostly. Ask any eighth grader about John Adams and you'll get "second president." Ask about William Penn and you might get "Pennsylvania." Ask about Anne Hutchinson and you'll get silence. Ask about Eliza Lucas Pinckney — the woman who built South Carolina's indigo industry at seventeen — and you'll get a blank stare. The names survive, barely. The stories don't.

We have a history problem in this country, and it goes deeper than curriculum battles or textbook debates. We have stopped treating history as a discipline that requires patience, context, and humility. We have replaced it with something faster, easier, and far less useful — moral scorecarding from the comfort of the present tense.

Here's what I mean.

When I was researching John and Abigail Adams for Planting Courage, I spent countless hours inside their correspondence. Hundreds of letters spanning fifty-four years. What emerges from those letters is not a pair of marble statues. It's a married couple — brilliant, stubborn, sometimes wrong — trying to build something that had never existed while raising children, managing a farm, and arguing about everything from theology to whether John was spending too much time away from home.

Abigail told John to "remember the ladies" in 1776. He laughed it off. That's a failure in our eyes. A real one. And, yes, it matters.

But here's what also matters: John Adams defended British soldiers in a Boston courtroom when the entire city wanted them hanged. He did it because he believed the law applied to everyone or it applied to no one — including the instruments of the empire his cousin Samuel was trying to dismantle. That act of legal courage established a principle that still protects every one of us. And he paid for it. Lost clients. Lost friends. Received death threats at his home where his pregnant wife was managing the household.

Both of these things are true. The failure and the courage. You don't have to choose one and discard the other. In fact, if you do, you've stopped studying history and started doing something else entirely.

That "something else" is what I see happening everywhere now. We approach historical figures with a checklist of modern values and score them pass or fail. Did they hold views on race that meet our current standard? Did they treat women the way we believe women should be treated? Did they own slaves, tolerate slavery, fail to condemn slavery loudly enough? If the answer to any of these is no — and for almost every figure before 1900, the answer to at least one of them will be no — we dismiss them. Cancel the name. Remove the statue. Close the book.

And then we wonder why nobody knows who Anne Hutchinson was.

The problem with this approach isn't that it asks hard questions. Hard questions are the point. The problem is that it refuses to do the actual work of history — which is to understand people within the norms, the constraints, the moral frameworks, and the material realities of their own time before we judge them by ours.

William Penn founded a colony on religious liberty in 1682. Not unlimited liberty — Penn's Frame of Government and later his 1701 Charter of Privileges required belief in "one Almighty and eternal God," and only Christians could hold office. But within that covenantal framework, the tolerance was extraordinary. Catholics, Jews, Quakers, Baptists, Lutherans — anyone who professed faith in the one true God could live and worship freely in Pennsylvania. That was radical. Dangerously, expulsion-from-England radical. Penn went to prison for it. Twice. Lost his fortune. Spent his final years in debtor's prison while the colony he built became the most prosperous and tolerant society in the Western Hemisphere.

And here's where the modern lens distorts even when we're not trying. I've seen Penn's religious liberty described — in textbooks, in online summaries, even in AI-generated research — as extending to "all faiths" or to Muslims alongside Christians and Jews. It didn't. Penn's framework was monotheistic and Judeo-Christian. Any Muslims in colonial Pennsylvania would almost certainly have been enslaved West Africans, not free citizens benefiting from Penn's charter. But the reflexive instinct to retrofit modern inclusivity onto a 1682 document is so deeply embedded in how we produce and consume information now — including through the AI tools millions of students use for research — that the distortion happens automatically, without anyone noticing or questioning it. That's not education. That's cultural filtering dressed up as knowledge.

He also owned slaves. At least twelve. He freed them in his will, which puts him ahead of many founders, but the fact remains. A man who built his life on the conviction that conscience was sacred held human beings as property.

If your only response to that is to condemn Penn, you've saved yourself the trouble of understanding him. And understanding him is the whole point. How does a man who genuinely believes in liberty of conscience fail to extend that belief to the people working his fields? What does that tell us about the power of cultural norms to override personal conviction? What does that tell us about ourselves and the moral blind spots we certainly have but cannot yet see?

Those are historical questions. They require sitting in discomfort, holding contradictions, and resisting the urge to render a verdict before the evidence is in. They require exactly the kind of thinking we've stopped asking students to do.

I wrote Courage to Stand: Across the Ages to remember the heroes. Fourteen men and women across two thousand years who demonstrated that courage and virtue are not abstractions — they are decisions, made by specific people, in specific circumstances, at specific cost. The book tells their stories and lets the stories speak.

Planting Courage goes deeper. It doesn't just remember the people. It remembers the world they lived in. The architecture of their houses. The theology of their churches. The economics of their trades. The laws they lived under and the ones they broke. You cannot understand what John Peter Zenger risked in that New York courtroom in 1735 unless you understand what seditious libel meant under English common law. You cannot understand what Eliza Pinckney accomplished unless you understand the Colonial plantation economy she was operating within — and the enslaved labor that made it possible. The history isn't background. It's the ground itself.

And running through all of it is a thread I keep finding no matter where I look — in the Mayflower Compact, in Penn's Frame of Government, in Adams's courtroom argument, in Abigail's letters: the covenant. A binding agreement — to our Creator, to our country, to our fellow citizens — that says we will hold to these principles not because they are convenient but because they are true. The founders understood their project in covenantal terms. They believed they were entering into an agreement that carried obligations — to each other, to their descendants, and to the God who granted the rights they were claiming.

We've largely forgotten that framing. We talk about rights without obligations. Freedom without covenant. Liberty without the moral architecture that makes liberty possible.

That's what I'm trying to recover. Not nostalgia. Not a sanitized past where everyone was noble and no one owned slaves. The actual past — complicated, uncomfortable, full of people who got some things profoundly right and other things profoundly wrong, often at the same time. People who are worth studying not because they were perfect but because they stood. And standing, in any century, costs something.

History studied honestly — through the lens of its own time, with the patience to understand before we judge — doesn't make us less critical. It makes us more serious. It gives us the context to ask better questions, to recognize that moral progress is real but uneven, and to understand that the people who moved it forward were not saints. They were men and women who made a covenant and kept it, imperfectly, at personal cost.

That's worth remembering. That's worth teaching. And that's what I'm writing.