One of the major factors that led to the War of 1812 was the practice of impressment.  Under English law, a ship of the British navy could board any vessel and force just about any able-bodied British subjects on that vessel into naval service.  This practice often led to the impressment of American citizens into the British navy if Americans traveling abroad could not prove their citizenship. 
 
Because of this, America passed the 1796 Act for the Relief and Protection of American Seamen, which was designed to protect American sailors from being impressed into the navies of foreign nations.  Part of that protection consisted of giving American sailors certificates of citizenship to show foreign governments that they were in fact citizens of the United States.  Here is the text of the 1796 act requiring these certificates to be made available:

Mark Ward’s handling of the word let is a deliberate attempt to manipulate his audience into accepting a falsehood. This is a textbook case of deceptive framing—where key details are selectively presented, linguistic meaning is distorted, and critical context is omitted to shape a misleading narrative. Ward doesn’t address this supposed “false friend” very often. Apart from a passing reference in an article, I’ve only been able to find a single thirty-second segment devoted to this word in one of Ward’s videos, but the amount of deception that Ward managed to cram into that tiny segment of video is literally mind-blowing.

One of the joys of writing is seeing your work have an influence on others.  I published my first piece of online content twenty years ago on the first rendition of this website, and I've been blessed to experience a lot of that joy over the years.  When I started this blog, my goal was simply to catalogue a few of my studies in a format that I could access easily for my own reference.  That quickly morphed into sharing my work with others, and now, my articles are read by thousands of people all across the globe.  Writing has become a great responsibility but also one of my greatest joys.

Over the past twenty years, I've had the opportunity to make small but significant contributions in four fields of study, theology, history, law, and medicine.  To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of my website, I've put together a collection of my most memorable and, hopefully, my most impactful articles.