Blog Posts

Episode 303 "The Founders, Part One" (coming June 24!): What were the personal religious beliefs of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, and John Adams, and what role did they see for religion in the United States? B…

Listeners interested in a visual representation of the progress of the fighting in the China-Burma-India Theater during World War II — the subject of much of our discussion in three episodes of the "Tea, Drugs, and Jesus" series, which conside…

This gallery of photos, maps, and other images add to our "A Christian Nation?" audio series about whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation. We expand the gallery as the series continues – and sometimes after it has conclude…

Marshall recommends an article produced by the Center for the Study of Intelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency about America's detection and analysis of the Sino-Soviet split, which we discuss in Episode 210. The article is "Calling the Sino…

The United States of Amnesia posts its long-format podcast episodes on all major platforms, including our YouTube channel. On YouTube, we also have begun to post YouTube shorts, each sharing a minute or two from one of our episodes, with suppor…

Many people may wonder about the location of various cities referred to in our series "Tea, Drugs, and Jesus" on the United Sates and China.  Where is Canton or Shanghai or Nanking?  Please check out the link to this map to get a better se…

Few families in the history of China have exercised such wide-ranging influence as the Soong dynasty in the 20th century. The three famous Soong sisters married well.  According to one saying, one loved money (Ai-Ling), one loved power (Mei-Lin…

There have been some questions involving the arrest of Fred Trump at the Klu Klux Klan rally in 1927 (see Episode 102). Could he have been there to protest the Klan?  Did his presence really imply an acceptance of the Klan's doctrine of white r…

Theodore R. Johnson's Washington Post column of January 14, 2026, discusses the "fragility" of U.S. citizenship in which he describes the injustice and danger of allowing the United States Government to decide capriciously who does and does not belo…

MARSHALL's SOURCES:Hyatt, Irwin. Our Ordered Lives Confess: Three Nineteenth-Century American Missionaries in East Shantung. 2014.A spirited case study of American missionaries operating in Northeast China and the challenges they faced. Ess…

In our Tea, Drugs, and Jesus series on the persistent American misunderstanding of China, we discuss the First Opium War of 1839–1842 and briefly mention the Second Opium War of 1856–1860 (Episode 202: Conflict Follows Trade). The H…

Washington Post columnist Ishaan Tharoor's December 30, 2025, column from the newspaper's Today's WorldView newsletter discusses how right-wing politicians in the United States and globally are embracing an ethos based on the militaristic myth …