Penguin Random House
Penguin Random House, 368 pages. Publication Date: June 2, 2026.
What is the history of resistance in the United States? What separates effective resistance from performative noise? Most importantly, why are most resistance efforts doomed to failure? These are the questions that Tad Stoermer addresses in his urgent new book, A Resistance History of the United States.
Stoermer begins by answering the thorniest one: Most domestic resistance movements fail because the Constitution, despite the lofty rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence (and the Constitution’s own preamble), did not aim to build an egalitarian utopia where “all men are created equal.” Indeed, the Constitution created an “enslavers’ republic” designed to anchor power in the hands of the elite. Venerated for its protections against the tyranny of the majority, the Constitution instead enshrined a tyranny of the minority.
And it’s done its job quite well. “[The Founders] feared that democratic majorities would threaten property,” Stoermer writes. “They said they needed to protect slavery to maintain the Union. They said they wanted checks on popular power. They built institutions reflecting these priorities. Those institutions functioned as designed.”
Stoermer presents nine vignettes, each of which teaches “diagnostic skills: how resistance emerged, what it challenged, what tactics it employed, how power responded, what happened afterward.” Many of these events are well known—the Salem witch trials, the Underground Railroad, John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry—while some, like Bacon’s Rebellion or Metacomet’s War, are not as familiar.
Stoermer brilliantly illuminates each example. For instance, we are told the story of Ona Judge, one of many enslaved by George and Martha Washington, and her successful escape in 1796. Judge’s escape, and Washington’s lifelong attempts to return her to slavery, illustrate what Stoermer calls “the twin pillars of resistance: persistence and resilience.” Judge lived a long life, dying penniless but free. When asked if she was sorry to have left the security of the Washingtons, Stoermer writes, “she responded, likely with ease and clarity, ‘No, I am free, and have, I trust, been made a child of God by the means.’ Her persistence was rewarded. Her resilience was redeemed.”
About the Underground Railroad, Stoermer writes, “Resistance isn’t about individual heroics or spontaneous uprising. It’s about the patient work of building infrastructure that can survive repression.” And on the Radical Republicans and Reconstruction: “[T]he clock starts ticking when you’re through the gates, and if you don’t use that brief window to rebuild the structure itself—changes that can’t be easily undone—then you’ve won nothing except the right to watch it all get taken back.”
A lecturer in public history at Johns Hopkins University, as well as a lecturer at the University of Southern Denmark specializing in American history, Stoermer keeps an active social media profile. His posts are often mini lectures, providing important context to contemporary events. As in his posts, Stoermer argues that while resistance’s obvious enemies are the state’s tools of oppression, they are aided by a surprising source: liberal nationalism. He saves some of his sharpest writing for those who “defend founding mythology . . . because to abandon that mythology is to abandon the institutional legitimacy they depend on.”
This veneration of the Founders, Stoermer writes, is a crucial reason why resistance movements face such uphill odds. It is nearly impossible, he says, to make structural change to the Constitution, partly because we believe it is a perfect document, beyond any ability to or need for change. Those who try usually end up paying a steep price. Stoermer presents compelling instances of ordinary people who achieved at least a measure of success, but who ultimately found out that “real resistance is rare, dangerous, and usually unpopular in its own time.”
Indeed, his outlook is not a rosy one. For instance, the Radical Republicans did abolish slavery and establish birthright citizenship, helping to fulfill some of the promises made by the Declaration of Independence. But even their work has been blunted and subsumed, and that attack continues to this day. As Stoermer reminds us, “Authority in a republic exists only on loan from the governed. When it is turned against them, resistance is not a departure from American ideas. It is their defense. And their duty.”