Tad Stoermer: A Resistance History of the United States
Historian Tad Stoermer traces America's long tradition of dissent from the Salem witch trials through the Underground Railroad to contemporary activism.
Why we picked this
The book's argument — that dissent has always been central to American life, not exceptional to it — lands differently when read against the current moment, which is precisely why the timing matters.
Tad Stoermer’s “A Resistance History of the United States” works from a specific historical proposition: that the narrative of American progress has consistently been shaped not by institutions acting on their own but by organized dissent pushing institutions further than they intended to go. The book traces that pattern from the Salem witch trials through the Underground Railroad, the labor movement, the suffrage campaigns, and the civil rights movement, into the contemporary period.
The argument is not that America is uniquely resistant to injustice, but that it has always contained within it a counter-tradition that refuses to accept official accounts of what is possible or permitted. That tradition has its own tactics, its own leaders, its own internal debates about strategy and principle — and Stoermer is interested in those specifics, not just the broad arc.
A Wharf location event in late June, free and open to the public. The material is historically grounded but the implications for the present are not hard to see, which is presumably part of why the book was written and why Washington is an appropriate place to discuss it.