Guillermo C Reyes

The anti-Masonic movement during the 1820s and 1830s is sometimes related by scholars to the development of the American party system. Certainly individuals migrated to the Know Nothing and Whig movements and eventually to the incipient Republican party, but more research is needed. No state was mor...

Contrary to what people think about Masonic secrecy, over the centuries a number of books have revealed much about what goes on in lodges. Certainly Jeremy Cross was relied on as a crib for nervous officers when they put on degrees, and his readers were not just the curious, but the Freemasons thems...

The papers of Hans Paul Caemmerer (1922-1954) are deposited in the National Archives and include considerable correspondence concerning this book about Pierre Charles L’Enfant (1754–1825). It was Caemmerer who dispelled the belief that L’Enfant was an engineer, and found that he studied in the Frenc...

In this moving and funny memoir, award-winning playwright Guillermo Reyes untangles his life as the secretly illegitimate son of a Chilean immigrant to the United States and as a young man struggling with sexual repression, body image, and gay identity. But this is a double-decker memoir that also t...

The tension in Freemasonry over its legendary and real origins and with its Enlightenment ethos in contrast with Christian views is apparent in this work by an Irish Episcopalian priest who came to American in the later part of the nineteenth century and immersed himself in Masonic study. Considerin...

This book by Gaston Lichtenstein is an antiquarian’s pleasure. An antiquarian is an enthusiast for things historical, and historians sometime regard being called an antiquarian as an insult, as a slur on their scholarship. But rather than a term of abuse, the word can be a compliment, suggesting int...

The antiquity of Freemasonry is much debated. As a philosophical and ritualistic society, rather than a group of stonemasons, it certainly existed in the seventeenth century. But its beginnings are intertwined with the building of the great cathedrals of Europe, so Masons speak of speculative and op...

Such was the revulsion in the United States over the purported murder of William Morgan, an upstate New Yorker who in 1826 disappeared after threatening to expose Masonic secrets, that political groups campaigned to drive Masons out of office and close down their lodges. President John Quincy Adams ...