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.

It started with St. George.

Not the legend — not the dragon or the princess or the white horse. The real George. A Roman tribune in the third century who stood before Emperor Diocletian and refused to sacrifice to gods he didn’t believe in. He had everything a man could want — rank, reputation, a career most soldiers would kill for. And he threw it all away for nine words he wouldn’t unsay.

I couldn’t stop thinking about that.

I wasn’t trying to write a book. I was sitting in my favorite chair late one night, long after the kids were in bed — and while three of my ten kids are still at home, “long after the kids are in bed” is practically tomorrow — scrolling through the noise that passes for public conversation these days. And a question surfaced that I couldn’t shake:

Where are heroes like George today?