A letter to the reader…
Dear reader,
Well… you.
Yes, you. The only living person in the entire series we’ve actually written to. Congratulations. You’re it.
It all started as a single thought on the 250th birthday of the United States.
We wondered what we might write on the Fourth of July – something small, thoughtful, maybe a single post about history, maybe a reflection, maybe a little curiosity.
And then we started thinking.
And thinking.
And before we knew it… one letter became two… became ten… and somehow, somewhere along the way, it became a series.
A hundred-plus letters,
hundreds of pages,
hundreds of hours of thinking,
reading,
writing,
imagining,
and laughing at ourselves.
Along the way, we learned more than we ever expected.
Some things surprised us.
Some things never change.
The threads of American life – woven from the colonial period to today – appear in the most unexpected places:
kitchens,
bedrooms,
bedrooms again,
streets,
farms,
schools,
laboratories,
toilets, and
dinner tables.
And it’s been a joy to watch those threads stretch, cross, twist, and sometimes snap before being repaired in another era.
We’re over fifty years old now – 63, to be exact.
Which means we’ve lived through more than a fifth of the United States’ existence since the Declaration of Independence.
And that perspective is humbling.
We see that 20% – our own lives – and realize how young the country still is.
We’re growing.
We’re learning.
We’re making mistakes and discovering truths.
And these letters are nothing if not an exploration of growing pains – of a nation and of ourselves.
This series touches on all aspects of American life – or at least the ones we could wrestle onto paper: labor, science, sanitation, dinnerware, politics, law, medicine, technology, agriculture, art, fashion… from abortion to women’s suffrage, from frontier towns to modern cities.
We wanted to make sense of the threads.
To see the shape of our history from one small detail to the larger arc.
Did we find the thread that binds all all…still?
We’ll see.
We’re still figuring it out…
…because framing history is never neat.
But what we do know: along this journey, the little discoveries – how people lived, ate, experimented, argued, invented, survived – became the connective tissue of this series.
Colonial kitchens and privies.
19th-century farms and water closets.
20th-century laboratories and bathrooms.
21st-century AI, gene editing, and smart toilets.
Each era speaks, and each letter has tried to translate that voice.
And dear reader, you are now part of this conversation.
You are the witness.
The friend.
The only one who gets to experience the entire chain of letters in real time (or at least in the order we wrote them).
So buckle up.
Some letters will amuse you.
Some will frustrate you.
Some might even surprise you.
And at the end, we hope you’ll see what we see: a country still young, still growing, still making sense of itself.
We’ve been lucky enough to watch a sliver of that 250-year US journey – one-fifth of it – and it has changed how we see history, humanity, and ourselves.
This series isn’t just a look back.
It’s a map of curiosity.
Of mistakes, discoveries, wonder, and the threads that tie us from 1776 to 2026.
So here’s to letters.
To curiosity.
To growing pains.
To all the ways the past keeps whispering into our present.
And here’s to you, dear reader – the only one who will ever get all of it.
Thank you for showing up.
Let’s begin.
With reverence, revelry, and a little of ourselves in the mix,
—The Radical Left