John Milton was born in London in 1608, which makes him a contemporary of Charles II, Samuel Rutherford, John Owen, Oliver Cromwell, and the men of the Westminster Assembly that produced the famous Confession of Faith. His father had abandoned the Roman Catholic religion of the Milton family and had prospered greatly as a scrivener in London. Young John’s education came from a Scottish private tutor who proved his worth and John’s native genius by qualifying him to enter Christ’s College, Cambridge in 1625, to prepare for ministry in the Church of England. He befriended Roger Williams, later of Rhode Island fame, who taught him Dutch in exchange for lessons in Hebrew.

Milton’s first publications date from this period, mostly poetry. Of serious demeanor, he also was unafraid of criticizing the curriculum of the college and would later serve as an educational reformer. From 1635-41 Milton’s autodidactic nature enabled him to conduct intensive study on his own at his father’s home, mastering at least six languages as well as history and philosophy, making him, perhaps, the most knowledgeable poet in history. He spent more than a year travelling across Europe, conversing with and learning from intellectuals, linguists, poets, and artists. He met Galileo, at the time under house arrest in Italy. He studied Roman Catholicism in practice, toured the Vatican library, and spent time in Geneva, Switzerland. The peripatetic genius was now providentially ready for his life’s work and literary immortality during the upheavals of the English Civil Wars, Interregnum and Restoration of the Stuart monarchy.

Milton’s Puritan convictions took immediate wings with written tracts against prelacy and Erastianism, and he taught in a school. The thirty-five-year-old poet and pamphleteer married a sixteen-year-old bride, who deserted him within thirty days. They reconciled and had four children together, although Milton published several controversial pamphlets arguing that divorce was biblical, a position for which he was roundly condemned. Among his most admired works was Areopagitica, a treatise on liberty which identified him with the views of Parliament in the ongoing controversy with King Charles I. Milton supported the Commonwealth and republican ideals regarding the King’s accountability to the people. Milton also agreed with and justified the regicide of Charles, in disagreement with his Scottish brethren. Parliament hired him in 1649 as a propagandist and correspondence secretary to foreign powers.

As a supporter of the regicide, Milton would become a target of the new king, whose refusal to pardon anyone who had played any role in the execution of his father placed the blind poet in mortal jeopardy. His friends forced him into hiding when Charles arrived in England. They held a mock funeral for Milton on August 27, 1660. Charles II commented that he “applauded his [Milton’s] policy in escaping the punishment of death by a reasonable show of dying,” but insisted on a public spectacle nonetheless by having Milton’s writings burned by the public hangman.

The Puritan poet reemerged after a general pardon, was imprisoned, and released, likely due to political friends in high places. He died, aged sixty-four in 1674. His theological views were sometimes considered heterodox by the best Puritans and his political views came close to getting him executed. His poetry, however, has endured as some of the greatest works in the English language, especially Paradise Lost; much of his greatest work was written during his twenty-two years of blindness.

Born Lev Devidovich Bronstein in 1879, on a remote farm of a well-to-do Jewish family in the Ukraine, Trotsky attended school in the port city of Odessa, where he excelled in his pursuit of a mathematics degree. He got involved in political opposition to the Russian monarchy, and dropped his studies to support agrarian socialist populism. He converted to Marxism through the influence of the woman who become his first wife. His writing and agitation to organize radical students and industrial workers landed him in prison in 1898. He and his wife were exiled together to Siberia, and there had two children.

They all escaped from their Siberian captivity and Lev immigrated to London, changed his name to Leon Trotsky and joined with Lenin as a writer and theoretician of Russian Marxism. He also remarried. Eventually the Russian cell in London divided into two major factions, the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. The latter group believed in violent revolution and close-knit, revolutionary cells. The Mensheviks tended to be more moderate and many of them thought revolution could be brought about by peaceful means. Trotsky supported the huge labor strikes in St. Petersburg and joined the local Soviet under an assumed name. Before long, he became the director. Arrested again and exiled to Siberia, Trotsky again escaped and made his way to London to continue support of revolution. He wrote for and supported Socialist parties in Switzerland and Germany while agitating for radical change in Russia.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, best known by his alias Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) in 1897

Although living in New York City when the Czar was overthrown in 1917, Trotsky returned to Russia (after arrest by the British in Canada). Joining the Bolsheviks, Trotsky became the “People’s Commissar” and took a strong hand in the new Communist state’s foreign policy. There was great opposition to the Bolshevik takeover by Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, Czarists, and Western countries. Trotsky built up the “Red Army,” from 800,000 to 3,000,000, turning them into a well-disciplined and efficient fighting force, which fought and won a protracted civil war against the more numerous, but totally non-unified, sixteen factions and foreign troops of the “White Army,” including the United States.

The Communists “translated their revolutionary faith into practical instruments of power.” They nationalized banks and industry, requisitioned the food sources from the peasants, and used terror to annihilate resistance and consolidate centralized government. The Central Committee of the “Soviet Union” fought among themselves over strategies of control and expansion.

With the deteriorating health of Lenin, he and Trotsky sought to devise a strategy that would make Trotsky the General Secretary of the Party. Stalin formed a “troika” to insure his own control of the Party when Lenin died. After the death of Lenin, Trotsky remained the most popular and powerful leader of the Communist party, though Stalin’s factions never stopped plotting his downfall. A veneer of solidarity kept the peace until 1927 when Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union, first into exile in Kazakhstan, then to Turkey. His followers all publicly admitted their mistaken allegiance to Trotsky, and most of them were murdered during the purges of 1936-38.

Trotsky lived in a number of different countries who offered him asylum, finally settling in Mexico, where he met with American and Chinese Communists to carry the Revolution to their respective nations. After several failed attempts, Stalin’s assassins finally caught up to Trotsky. The NKVD hitman Ramon Mercader mortally wounded him with an ice axe at his Mexico City home.

David held jobs that forced him to travel extensively, primarily in Virginia and Tennessee. He helped his father pay off debts and, on the day before his birthday in 1806, he married Polly Finley, with whom he sired two boys and a girl. After the death of his wife, he married a widow with two children, and had three more of his own, thus eventually becoming the father of eight, a typical frontier family.

Crockett had moved so often and lived in so many different counties, he was known throughout his region. Never particularly successful in business or farming, he had well-honed skills at hunting, telling stories, and effective frontier oratory, the latter which he employed in his legislative positions in Tennessee and in the United States House of Representatives. He was elected to serve in Washington, D.C. for two terms, 1827-1831. Crockett was the only Tennessee delegate to vote against Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, which cost him his seat in the U.S. House but earned a letter of thanks from Cherokee Chief John Ross. He was returned to the House for one more term in 1833. He published an autobiography in 1834.

The Texas Revolution inspired men young and old across the South, especially in Tennessee. Hundreds of families headed west, leaving the letters GTT scrawled on the walls of their cabins—Gone To Texas. Ex-Congressman David Crockett, fed up with politics and attracted to the cause of Texas Independence, and eager for a fresh start for his family in the seemingly limitless vista west of the Mississippi, left his family to await his call, and travelled to the scene of the action, with thirty fellow Tennesseans, “armed to the teeth.”

On January 14, 1836, David Crockett signed an oath in Nachedoches, Texas, swearing allegiance to the Provisional Government of the Republic of Texas, and with five other men, made his way to San Antonio de Bexar, where a handful of Texians had seized an old Spanish mission called the Alamo, to await reinforcements or a Mexican army of retaliation. Crockett arrived on February 8, and the army of General Antonio de Santa Ana on the 23rd, sealing the doomed garrison inside their adobe walls. A siege ensued which lasted until March 6, when the Mexican General decided to force the issue and attacked with overwhelming force. There are many books and speculative accounts concerning the fall of the Alamo and the role played by David Crockett. Popular movies and songs have dramatized the ninety-minute fight, creating in the mind of the American public an image of what might have occurred. David Crockett’s role in the battle and last moments in combat are the subject of much speculation and disagreement. What is certain is the willingness of the defenders, or most of them, to die for Texas independence, a goal achieved in the months ahead by the efforts of General Samuel Houston.

Small congregations of Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists were scattered throughout the region. Some of the Scots-Irish and Scottish immigrants from Virginia and North Carolina had been able to retain some of their religious tradition, but vital “heart-religion” was not as apparent as in generations past. One of the practices that came from Scotland was known as “Holy Fairs,” more usually called “camp meetings” in America, in which multiple congregations would gather for a week or so to celebrate the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. One such occasion called by frontier pastor James McGready, attracted eighteen Presbyterian and an unknown number of Baptist and Methodist preachers to Cane Ridge in Bourbon County Kentucky, in August of 1801. While there had been revivals of vital spiritual awakening in the late 1790s, no one had ever witnessed the scale and impact of what occurred on that occasion.

The spiritual impact of Cane Ridge extended to other states, both west and east. Revivals in New York, including New York City, Pennsylvania, Ohio and across the South, occurred in following years. While the Presbyterians were initially the most active and successful church planters with men trained at Princeton and Hamden-Sydney, by 1820 the Methodists and Baptists had streaked past the “confessional” churches in adherents on the frontier, since their ministers, initially, needed only “feel the call” and not be formally educated in the original biblical languages, hermeneutics, or systematic theology. Their hardiness and appeal to the individual attracted many who lived with uncertainty and death daily. With the revivals came new denominations, founded by former Presbyterians and Baptists, as in the “Christian Church” of Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone, or the Cumberland Presbyterians. Cults, such as Mormons, Spiritualists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses evangelized alongside the traditional groups. A radical change from the historic Calvinism of the Scots and Scots-Irish produced a “revivalism” by rejecting the doctrines of Grace and replacing them with a more man-centered gospel, manifested in innovations in evangelistic meetings. The “Second Great Awakening” is a subject broad and deep with many historic convolutions, some of which survive to this day. Historians trace many of the “reform movements” of the 19th Century to the religious ferment set loose.