History isn’t neutral. It never has been. And in this moment, telling the truth is an act of resistance.
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Tad Stoermer is a public historian, teacher, and author of A Resistance History of the United States (Steerforth Press / Penguin Random House, 2026).
With more than 600,000 followers across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, and a major presence on Substack, he is one of the most widely followed public historians in the world, reaching millions of people each month. Now a bestselling author, Stoermer has become a trusted voice for audiences trying to cut through misinformation, inherited mythology, and the distorted versions of the past that still shape American power.
His work begins with the problem that much of what Americans learn as history is not really history at all. It is a set of stories built to explain power, soften violence, excuse institutions, and make inequality appear natural or inevitable. Stoermer’s work asks what those stories leave out, whom they protect, and what becomes visible when the past is examined without the usual patriotic insulation.
In A Resistance History of the United States, Stoermer follows people and movements who refused the terms set for them by authority. The book moves from Salem to the American Revolution, from Black Loyalists and Anti-Federalists to Ona Judge, Henry David Thoreau, the Underground Railroad, John Brown and the Six, and the Radical Republicans.
These episodes are not treated as a clean march of progress. They are more difficult than that. They show people making choices under pressure, often with limited options and no guarantee that resistance would succeed. Some acted from principle. Some acted from necessity. Some saw the violence of American power more clearly than the institutions that claimed to represent law, order, or liberty.
A Resistance History of the United States is about what resistance looked like before it was safe to admire. It examines how people confronted abusive power when law, custom, public memory, and national mythology worked to defend it.
Stoermer’s larger project is to make American history harder to misuse: not by replacing one mythology with another, but by paying closer attention to what people actually did, what they risked, what they misunderstood, and what their choices still reveal about power in the United States.
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