Author: Scott M. Smith

After a thirty year career on Wall Street, Scott retired in 2014 to pursue a lifelong passion to write. His cybersecurity novel, Darkness is Coming, won Distinguished Favorite in the Thriller category in the NYC Big Book Award competition. In 2017, he began researching the life and times of Nathan Hale, the official hero of his adopted home state of Connecticut. The effort resulted in a biographical novel, entitled But One Life, as well as whetted Scott’s appetite to further explore this period in American history.

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Economics Posted on

Captain Luke Day: A Forgotten Leader of “Shays’s Rebellion”

While Daniel Shays (1747-1825) has basked posthumously in the glory of leading the 1786-87 populist rebellion that bears his name, Luke Day (1743-1801) was a co-commander of the forces on the ground that fateful winter. Both Shays and Day were battle-hardened Continental army captains who returned home to rural Massachusetts to find their fellow farmers […]

by Scott M. Smith
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Constitutional Debate Posted on

Insurrection and Speculation: A Farmer, Financier, and a Surprising “Sharper” Seeded the Constitution

The January 6, 2021 assault on the Capital rocked America, but it was by no means the largest, or even the most threatening, armed rebellion in the post-Revolutionary War era. In 1786 and 1787, Daniel Shays, a middle-class farmer and decorated Continental Army captain, was one of several leaders of as many as four thousand […]

by Scott M. Smith