Notes from my Knapsack 7-2-2026

Notes from my Knapsack 7-2-2026
Jeff Gill

From Bicentennial to Semiquincentennial
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When in the course of human events a nation advances from a bicentennial celebration in 1976 to a semiquincentennial in 2026, it becomes necessary for some columnists to admit fifty years have gone by, a period of time I recall quite distinctly.

Seriously, it’s been the bulk of my adult existence, and as I look back to what I thought about the United States of America as a junior in high school, and compare it to what I think now in this America 250 year, it feels worth asking: what has changed?

There are some historical passages which look very different to me now. One is early in our Midwestern history, as the end of the Revolution turns into the era of European settlement in the old Northwest Territory. Over the last three decades, my awareness of the displacement of indigenous people has gotten sharper and clearer, where before it was a misty presence of scattered “Indians” in the forest, brushed aside as the pioneers came to bring agriculture and civilization where it never had been.

Today, I’m much more conscious of how “Indian Removal” was an act of violence, and almost always a betrayal of previously negotiated treaties, right down to the Wyandot forced departure of 1843. And along with that acknowledgement, there’s some insight that’s come as I look at a landscape once dominated by the figure of Tecumseh. That Shawnee leader was and is a giant in the history of this area, but his younger brother Tenskwatawa, known as “The Prophet” is someone I’ve come to know a bit better. His teachings, his understandings of what was happening to his people, and to Native Americans more generally in the Ohio and Wabash River valleys, have something to say to us today, and are worth recovering.

In 1976, I knew Thomas Jefferson was the primary author of the Declaration we celebrate each Fourth of July, and I honored him as a “Founding Father.” His relationship with Sally Hemings was something I had not heard of, and I will admit many years later when I did it was something I was initially skeptical about. That is no longer the case; in fact, I think our understanding of Jefferson is all the more complete and constructive for the fact that there is at Monticello an interpretive exhibit that presents the story of Sally Hemings in some detail, bringing forward the reality of slavery on that Virginia plantation, and forcing visitors to confront the inconsistencies of what Jefferson wrote, and what he did.

In many aspects of U.S. history, I am better informed than I was in the 1970s, and not just because I have more information stuffed into my brain. There are perspectives I now have that make the achievement of national independence more precious to me, for the fragility that I know surrounds it. Liberty is made possible by people, doing the right thing, sometimes after they’ve first done the wrong thing.

And “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that” we engage in such reflection and consideration of our past, so we can continue to expand the scope of liberty into the future. Rights and responsibilities in “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” still call on each of us to choose the good, and to do it.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s taught early American history in many settings, academic and otherwise. Tell him how your understanding of our history has changed at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.

Faith Works 6-12-2026

Faith Works 6-12-2026
Jeff Gill

Our relationships with our new machine overlords
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My beard-trimmer is some twenty years old, and while I’ve cared for it well, I think, it’s starting to show its age.

Let’s just say I went to a big box store to check out my options (it doesn’t matter which one). I found where such items are stocked, and ran into one of the less cheery signs of our modern era, a large case with locked clear fronts across it.

Inside were more options than I had anticipated, at least forty or more. They were cheap and costly, colorful and monochrome, some multi-purpose and others very precisely meant for specific functions. And the boxes were, as I mentioned, behind some kind of plexiglass and not all square with the front, so I crouched and peered and squinted, my eyes being twenty years older than when I first bought one of these, too.

Finally, a crew member came over to unlock the case… and stood next to me. Right next to me. Thisclose. I reached out, picked up a box, and the staffer got closer. I set it down, they backed away. A little.

You know how this ends. I stopped looking, thanked the crew member, and left, thinking “I’m going to look online.” Maybe that’s what they want. It’s less ideal, to me, than holding the box and looking directly at the item, but in context, I’d rather go home and open the laptop.

What does this have to do with artificial intelligence, which is where I left you all last week? Pope Leo XIV has some concerns about how AI influences how we relate not to machines, but to people. I think he has some good points in “Magnifica Humanitas.” Our relationships with devices can slop over into how we deal with actual human beings in front of us, and I was thinking about that as I felt uneasy about the person wedged up next to me as I bought, or didn’t buy, an item in a brick-and-mortar store. People make demands on us and have expectations which bots and droids do not. It is easier to review our consumer choices in a human-free zone, but what does that say about the human connections we defer or decline by retreating into them?

My equally uneasy response to these thoughts is as a historian. Reading about Newark, Ohio between about 1904 and 1914 is fascinating, among other reasons, for how the downtown area went in one decade from all horses to no horses. The shift was dramatic, decisive, and absolute. Once World War I is the dominant story, interurban electric streetcars and horseless carriages control transportation. Livery stables and old-fashioned teamsters, which is to say those men who knew how to control teams of horses to pull heavy loads, had to adjust and adapt; private barns behind family homes quickly became garages. In 1922, the use of teams of draft horses to pull loads up the hill to where Swasey Chapel was being constructed was already a bit of an anachronism, never to be seen again on a commercial scale.

And I can imagine people saying in 1911 or 1912: these “auto-mobiles” are a bad idea. People, especially the young, benefit from the relationship with horses they have, the responsibility they bear for caring and combing and feeding these living creatures each night and every morning. A motor vehicle is not the same at all! You can defer care and put off “feeding” it, and you lose the habits and patterns of a living engine for transportation.

They’d be right, wouldn’t they? Something is lost in that transition. Yet looking back, what could have stopped it? We left horses and buggies behind, and moved into the automotive age.

Does that mean we simply welcome our new AI overlords? There are important differences in the two case studies, but some similarities, ones that make me, well, uneasy.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s going to stay on this topic for one more week, as you can tell. Tell him what the answer is at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.