November 25, 1758. A cold rain falls on the forks of the Ohio. Exhausted British and provincial soldiers, expecting a final desperate battle, instead find only smoking ruins where Fort Duquesne stood the day before. The French have blown up their own magazines and vanished up the Allegheny River in the night. No flags are struck. No volleys are fired. Yet in that quiet moment the strategic heart of North America changes hands forever.

This is the story of the Forbes Campaign, a six-month ordeal of axes, frostbite, and forced marches that finally broke French power in the Ohio Country. Led by a dying Scottish general and a Virginian colonel who had first tasted defeat on these same rivers four years earlier, a hybrid army cut a new road across the Alleghenies and forced the French to destroy the fort they could no longer hold. What followed was not just the birth of Fort Pitt and the city of Pittsburgh, but the opening of the American interior. This is how the continent’s future was decided, one muddy mile at a time.

On Thanksgiving Eve 1971, while millions of Americans prepared for turkey and football, a nondescript man in a business suit bought a one-way ticket from Portland to Seattle for twenty dollars cash. He gave his name as Dan Cooper, boarded Northwest Orient Flight 305, and settled into seat 18C with a bourbon and 7-Up.

Less than thirty minutes after takeoff, he handed flight attendant Florence Schaffner a note claiming he had a bomb. What followed was the most audacious crime in commercial aviation history. Cooper collected $200,000 in ransom, released the passengers in Seattle, and then ordered the crew to fly toward Mexico at low altitude. Somewhere over the dark, rain-soaked forests of southwest Washington, he opened the Boeing 727’s unique rear stairway and parachuted into the night with the money.

He vanished completely. No trace of the man, the parachute, or most of the cash has ever been found. The press soon misnamed him D.B. Cooper, and America gained its only unsolved skyjacking and one of its greatest folk legends.

Today we're talking about the single most important defense of free speech ever written in English: John Milton's Areopagitica, published illegally in November 1644 while England was busy tearing itself apart in civil war.

Parliament had just killed the king's censorship machine, watched ideas explode everywhere, panicked, and promptly rebuilt the exact same censorship machine under new management. Milton, already public enemy number one for arguing you should be allowed to divorce a bad spouse, responded by printing a blazing manifesto without a license and basically told the government: "Congratulations, you just became the tyrant you overthrew."

What he gave us wasn't just a complaint. It was the philosophical foundation for everything the First Amendment would later become: the conviction that real virtue has to be tested, that truth isn't fragile, and that the answer to bad ideas is never silence; it's a fair fight.

So buckle up. Four hundred years later, we're still living in the world Milton demanded. Let's go find out why.