Gate in the Fence of Time

After a near miss on a rainy highway on the way to Williamsburg, Virginia, the Sinclair family finds themselves in 1775 as witnesses to history. As they get to know the slaves, indentured servants, gentry, and other people of that time, they are surprised to learn that the reasons for the American Revolution were not what they learned in school.

John, Susan, Megan and Peter meet challenges that put them in touch with their own pasts and lead them to reach deeper into their spirituality to engage with what they find. Before the adventures end, they find they are not only observing history but playing a part in how it unfolds.

Imagine you slid back in time after a near crash on a rainy Interstate going to Colonial Williamsburg. Walking around in 1775, meeting gentry and slaves, indentured servants and Native Americans you might be surprised to learn that:• "No taxation without representation" did not trigger war. The Stamp Tax & Townsend Duties were repealed years before the Revolution.• Tea thrown into Boston Harbor in December 1773 was the first direct shipment from India, due to be sold the next day at half the price received by tea smugglers. Who threw tea into the harbor?• For over 50 years prior to the Revolution, it was illegal to hold a Catholic mass in Maryland or Virginia. Catholics could not vote nor hold office. There was great religious prejudice.• The survey of the Proclamation Line in Appalachia and the Quebec Act of 1774 giving jurisdiction over land west of that line, to Catholic Quebec, was a major provocation.• Large debts of plantation owners and illegal loans to principal Virginia families of currency due to be burned, put pressure on leaders to throw off the existing authority that could ruin them.• The British freed as many slaves during the Revolution as many years of the Underground Railroad, but few stayed free.• A young ambitious Virginian worked for a distant cousin who was heir and namesake of the Earl who overthrew the King a century before. Did that have an influence on our history?