Tomorrow is Flag Day, commemorating a Congressional resolution in 1777 that “The flag of the United States shall be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white.” Next Tuesday is the official publication date of Been There, Done That: How Our History Shows What We Can Overcome (Simon & Schuster). Maybe a coincidence, but Greg Jackson’s book is worth reading at a time when optimism is flagging and Americans are increasingly disunited.

Jackson with jocular writing takes us through many hard times: Mudslinging among Founding Fathers, the Baltimore Riots of 1812, and the electioneering ugliness in which partisans attacked either the “pimp” John Quincy Adams or the “common prostitute’s” son Andrew Jackson. He reviews dueling Louisiana governments, the “Fraud of the Century” 1876 election, and 1890s yellow journalism.

In between those debacles comes a bloody bludgeoning in the Capitol itself, South Carolina Rep. Preston Brooks’s almost-fatal caning of Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner in 1856. Jackson asks, “How many Prestons, regardless of party affiliation, walk the halls of Congress now? They may not carry canes, but they carry phones. If the pen truly is mightier than the sword… modern-day members of Congress are wielding weapons every bit as dangerous.”

Today, after each assault, some on social media say what some defenders of slavery said to Brooks: HIT HIM AGAIN. That attack foreshadowed civil war, but it’s helpful to know what Been There, Done That narrates regarding many other debates that could readily have moved from words into sticks and stones. They did not because some resolved to love our neighbors as ourselves, or at least listen to “the better angels of our nature,” as Lincoln optimistically put it.

I and probably many of you have read lots of books about the Civil War, so I want to praise one that opened for me an entirely new window. Robert Bonner’s The First Pariah State: How Proslavery Confederacy Menaced the World (Princeton, 2026) shows how the 1861 assertion by Alexander Stephens that slavery was “the cornerstone” of the Confederacy became a soundbite heard round much of the world.

Although Southern leaders including Stephens, Jefferson David’s VP, portrayed themselves as defenders against invasion, the South became known in much of Europe as a “slave republic” based on inhumanity and attempting to expand it by reopening the slave trade from Africa to America. England, after decades of striving by William Wilberforce and others, had abolished the evil, and also become the Atlantic’s policeman by stopping slavers from other nations.

Thomas Jefferson, who had written that “all men are created equal,” mused regarding slavery in 1820 that white southerners “have the wolf by the ear”—but by 1860 slavery was the foundation of wealth for the southern elite, with racist views accommodating. That’s why Abraham Lincoln could see that a country “formed on the basis of Human Slavery” should not be “recognized by, or admitted into, the family of Christian and civilized nations.”

Southern leaders hoped Europe would back them based on the need for cotton, but a theology of equality eventually overcame the argument by some of the Confederacy’s most distinguished clergymen that a “cruel and useless war” for emancipation would lead to racial strife in the “darkest chapter of human woe yet written.” One thousand ministers in Scotland attacked their counterparts across the ocean for using religion to defend a cause “founded on wrong and crime” that was earning God’s “righteous wrath.” Tens of thousands of ministers elsewhere agreed.

Briefly noted

Michael Clair’s We Sacrifice Everything to Baseball (U. of Nebraska, 2026) describes how Czechs who surprisingly fell in love with baseball dramatically exceeded World Baseball Classic expectations. Lorenza Antonucci’s Insecurity Politics (Princeton, 2026) is a scholarly linking of instability in personal lives with populist politics.

Princeton also publishes interesting books about Judaism. Never-Ending Tales, edited by Jack Zipes (2026) includes Jewish stories from the 1870s through the 1930s. Yair Mintzker’s I, Wandering Jew (Princeton, 2026) is a five-century history of the weird idea that a Jew purportedly cursed by Christ has strolled the world for two millennia and will supposedly do so until Jesus returns.

This is the 50th anniversary of publication of the best-selling autobiography, Joni: The unforgettable story of a young woman’s struggle against quadriplegia and depression. Joni Eareckson Tada, paralyzed from the neck down in 1967, wrote movingly of gaining new purpose during her next nine years: She is now 76 and still helping thousands of those with disabilities around the world. Her account is still in print as Joni: An Unforgettable Story (Zondervan). You can read my interviews of her at marvinolasky.substack.com.

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