Cromwell at Dunbar 1886 Andrew Carrick Gow 1848-1920 Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1886 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N01588 (c/o Wikimedia Commons)
Most students of American history are familiar with the standard narrative of New England’s early settlers: the Mayflower, the Puritans, and the quest for religious freedom. But there is a darker, hidden foundation stone buried beneath the soil of early Massachusetts. It is a story born of cold rain, political betrayal, and a brutal military disaster that history has largely allowed to slip through its cracks.
It began on the stormy morning of September 3, 1650, in a muddy marshland just outside the Scottish town of Dunbar…
If you open an early American historical ledger, you will witness a quiet, bureaucratic violence.
On the yellowed pages of parish registers, military rolls, and census tracts, the names of ordinary people undergo a strange, unsettling metamorphosis. A proud Scottish surname is flattened by an English soldier’s hurried quill. A French-Canadian patronym is chopped and mangled to fit the tongue of an Anglo-American land agent. A German-Dutch identity is phoneticized into oblivion by colonial tax collectors.
If you look into your own family history and encounter a sudden, bizarre shift in the spelling of an ancestor’s name, you aren’t looking at a simple clerical mistake.
Spanning nearly three centuries of displacement, warfare, and resilience, Unbowed tracks a grand historical mosaic across five distinct cultural lines. It features ordinary people caught in the violent machinery of changing empires:
Part I: A captive Scottish soldier from the English Civil War surviving a harrowing winter crossing as an indentured asset to a rigid Puritan iron works, his family is later tested by the paranoia of the Salem Witch Trials.
Part II: A family fractured by a sudden, brutal wilderness raid in Saratoga, navigating French captivity and cultural adoption inside Mohawk longhouses.
Part III: A Palatine German community torn right down the middle by the fierce, neighbor-versus-neighbor civil conflicts of the Revolutionary War.
Part IV: A bilingual French-Canadian veteran fights for his place on a shifting border, navigating the psychological scars of Civil War combat in la survivance of Cohoes and Troy.
Part V: An immigrant Irish drayman and his literate son fighting to protect their family from a deadly, volatile ballot-box riot in a gritty, industrializing America.
At its core, this volume is about the universal war over identity. In an expanding nation, institutional erasure didn’t always arrive with a bayonet—often, it arrived with an inkwell.
Consider the real historical journey of the German name Bohnenstiehl, filtered through a Dutch-speaking Albany minister before being reformed by English officials into Bonesteel. Or an Anglo-Irish Bushell, phoneticized into Barsell or Bouschel simply because local clerks had never heard it before.
Our ancestors did not survive by remaining rigid. They allowed their names to be rewritten so that their bloodlines could continue to write themselves. They traded the spelling of their past to purchase their future.
Whether your own roots trace back to the colonial frontier or you simply love a sweeping, high-stakes historical epic, Unbowed is a tribute to the unbroken chain of ordinary people who refused to bend.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing exclusive behind-the-scenes glimpses into the real archival discoveries that inspired these stories right here on the blog.
Thank you for reading, exploring, and reclaiming these voices with me.
What is one question you hate to be asked? Explain.
“Where are you from?”
I never understood why this question might rankle some people…until I moved to Japan.
I’ve been in Japan since 1999. “Where are you from?” was one of the first questions people asked me at the time, when I was teaching in junior and senior high schools.
In short, the algae will use sunlight to transform CO2 into sugars that are then enhanced by bio-engineered E.coli into 2,3-butanediol. Interestingly, 2,3-BDO is not entirely conceptual as it currently exists and is mainly used to produce rubber components. It has just never been thought of as fuel before.
Ya know, I’m pretty sure we need to figure out “this whole food-air deal” first (to quote comedian Bill Hicks).
“The US space agency confirmed that there were currently no plans for a field or project office to explore the topic in any detail but that could change as we get closer to putting humans on Mars.“
China’s plan calls for setting up a permanently occupied base and a fleet of interplanetary craft. Probably it’s a good idea to first see whether it can meet its goal of landing people on Mars in 2033.
Of course, China is “willing to join hands with our counterparts and partners all over the world,” but it’s unlikely NASA, JAXA, ESA, and the UAE and other countries not named Russia will “cooperate.”
The next space race is here. Just wait until multinats actually decide asteroid mining is worth the risk and expense.
“Over sixteen million Americans served during World War II and this story offers in rich detail the story of two men in uniform and a woman they both cared about. A story of love and tragedy that is more representative of the experiences of many that served than the ones often told of generals and politicians. A story that needs to be told and remembered.”
— Dr. Rick Derrah, Professor of Social Studies, Kindai University, Osaka; former US Army E-4 Specialist
“Not only is this a touching and interesting family story, it is a great snap shot of the war and its effects, as well as Trojans and Troy history connection.”
— Don Rittner, historian, former Albany City Archaeologist and founder of the Pine Bush Historic Preservation Project
Although the book Er Ist Weider Da (Translated into English as “Look Who’s Back,” although literally it should be “He’s here again”) was published in 2012, the German language movie released in 2015, Netflix picked it up in early 2016, I just now stumbled across this movie over the weekend. Probably an algorithmic thing (don’t ask).
Normally, I blog about either family history or science/science fiction. But in this case, let’s just call it science fictiony-historical satire with a dark edge.
It’s good. Scarily good. Hysterically funny in parts. Deeply, darkly disturbing in many others.
And completely misunderstood by most reviewers. Especially the ones writing only in English. Continue Reading
One thing I have struggled with while uncovering my family’s complicated past is the lack of consistency in naming conventions before the digital age.
In the Information Age, if you type in your name or ID with a single letter missing or out of place, your application gets rejected by whatever online program it is you’re trying to get access to. We all have numbers assigned to us—social security numbers, student numbers, worker numbers, case numbers, credit card numbers, you name it.
The past?
Thhppt. What’s a number? What’s a name? That which we would call a rose… Continue Reading
Although the book Er Ist Weider Da (Translated into English as “Look Who’s Back,” although literally it should be “He’s here again”) was published in 2012, the German language movie released in 2015, Netflix picked it up in early 2016, I just now stumbled across this movie over the weekend. Probably an algorithmic thing (don’t ask).
Since coming to Montreal last September, I have been asked by several people what my connection to Canada is.
One thing I have struggled with while uncovering my family’s complicated past is the lack of consistency in naming conventions before the digital age.
M Thomas Apple Author Page 