Updates
A public record of what's been added, fixed, and corrected, including honest write-ups when a claim was softened, re-sourced, or completed. Follow new rounds via RSS.
- 2026-10-22
Post-1820 claims narrowed to their sources
A second audit covered the timeline, home page, Year Quest, Landmarks, Sources, and Educators, chiefly from 1820 on. Unsourced counts and superlatives were removed, the Ellison oath date was corrected, 'first' claims were qualified or attributed, and editorial sentences were cut. Details are on the Corrections page.
- 2026-10-22
Founding-era claims narrowed to their sources
An audit checked every founding-era claim on the home page, Year Quest, Sources, and the timeline against the Ideas essays. Influence claims are now labeled contested, quotations carry their true source, Spellberg's reading is attributed to her, Morocco treaty wording is consistent, and Wikipedia-only cards gained scholarly sources. Details are on the Corrections page.
- 2026-10-22
Shared protections, the opposing case, and both sides of the court record
A sixth Ideas essay shows that founding texts named Muslims in lists with Jews, pagans, Hindus, and others, and quotes Washington's 1790 Newport letter. Methods gains "The opposing case": opponents are quoted in their own words, and rulings against Muslim plaintiffs are recorded. New card: FBI v. Fazaga (2022), a unanimous ruling for the government. The 2023 hate-crime card now gives the anti-Jewish count from the same Justice Department summary, notes that FBI data are reported incidents, and replaces an advocacy-sourced "fifth-highest year" ranking with "the most since 2017" (logged on Corrections). Essay pages gain search titles and question-and-answer markup; the North Carolina essay quotes Lancaster from the Wisconsin ratification transcripts. Lancaster is now described everywhere as an Anti-Federalist warning against the clause, not conceding it (logged on Corrections). FBI v. Fazaga is described as a threshold ruling.
- 2026-10-22
New: Ideas & Arguments, five source-first essays on the intellectual history
New /ideas section, five essays: Locke's Letter and the "Mahometan," Jefferson's Qur'an and the Virginia Statute, the 1788 North Carolina religious-test debate, Arabic scholarship under enslavement, and Treaty of Tripoli Article 11. Each leads with a direct answer, quotes the primary text, labels document, interpretation, and scholarly disagreement, names scholars and works, and ends with what remains open. Not peer reviewed; unchecked items are listed in each essay. Also at /data/ideas.json. The Jefferson's Qur'an timeline entry now says his copy is the 1764 second edition of Sale's translation, not 1734; logged on Corrections.
- 2026-10-19
Source context on three founding-era entries about the idea of toleration
The entries on Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and the North Carolina religious-test debate now carry a "Context from the sources" section. It records what reference works say about the limits of Locke's toleration (atheists and, in his view, Catholics), that the "Mahometan" sentence in the Virginia entry is Jefferson's 1821 recollection rather than a record made at the time, and that the North Carolina delegates argued about how far the principle should reach without agreeing.
- 2026-10-18
Open data downloads, and a clearer analytics notice
The timeline, the claim ledger, the primary sources, the corrections log, and the population estimates can now be downloaded as JSON or CSV under the same CC BY 4.0 license as the site. The files are generated from the records the pages render, and every population figure keeps its evidence label and citation. They are listed in the new Open data section of Methods. Analytics now count a few actions besides page views (expanding a timeline entry, finishing the quiz, downloading a generated file, and searches that find nothing), and the Privacy page lists each one.
- 2026-10-18
Context on the 1805 sunset dinner
The entry on Jefferson's dinner for the Tunisian envoy now carries a "Context from the sources" section: the White House Historical Association says the dinner is believed to be the first iftar at the White House, a hedged claim that some commentators dispute.
- 2026-10-18
Source-attributed context on four timeline entries; Tripoli link and wording fixed
The Morocco 1786, Tripoli 1797, Omar ibn Said, and Keith Ellison entries now carry a "Context from the sources" section: what the State Department, Library of Congress, House Historian, state archives, and university encyclopedias themselves say about each, including what stays unsettled (the missing Arabic Article 11 of the Tripoli treaty; sources that differ on Omar ibn Said's religion after 1820). The Tripoli entry linked the 1786 Morocco treaty instead of the 1796 Tripoli text; the link is fixed. The Tripoli treaty was described as ratified unanimously on the home page, Year Quest, and the entry, but only secondary sources support unanimity, so the word is removed. Logged on the Corrections page.
- 2026-10-18
Al-Sadiq Mosque: from "oldest standing" to "among the earliest"
The landmarks card for Chicago's Al-Sadiq Mosque (1922) no longer calls it the oldest still-standing mosque in the United States. That label rested on Wikipedia, which itself flags it as needing a better source, and it depends on the definition: the mosque began in an existing building, while the National Park Service describes the Mother Mosque of America (1934) as the oldest surviving place of worship built for Muslims. The card now says Al-Sadiq is among the earliest US mosques and notes that the "oldest" label is not settled. The change is logged on the Corrections page.
- 2026-10-18
A timeline index, a contrast fix, and a narrower Mother Mosque claim
A new Timeline page lists all 49 entries by era, each linking to its own cited page, and the footer now links to it along with Media coverage, Year Quest, and Updates. Gold label text on the cream background measured 2.4 to 1 against the 4.5 to 1 the accessibility standard asks for; text now uses a darker gold, and fills and borders keep the original. Several buttons whose spoken names did not match their visible labels are fixed, the Save card buttons are large enough to tap, and the interactive map is no longer marked as a single image around its own buttons. Search snippets now end at a sentence or clause instead of mid-thought. The Mother Mosque is now described as the oldest surviving purpose-built mosque in the United States, as the National Park Service describes it, rather than in North America; the correction is logged on the Corrections page. Site markup now names the editor and links the Methods and Corrections pages as the site's publishing, ethics, and corrections policies.
- 2026-10-18
Methods now describes the reviewer process
Methods now describes how subject-matter reviewers in history, demography, and education will work: a credit names only what was reviewed and when, reviewers disclose any stake, and the site will not describe any entry as peer reviewed. No reviewer is credited yet. The research roadmap adds the interior and rural United States, refugee-resettled communities, and state and metro population tables, which stay unpublished until their sources are checked.
- 2026-10-04
Fact-check corrections: the Hyder Ally, Mysore, and 13 timeline entries
A source review found that the Hyder Ally was a Pennsylvania state ship rather than a Continental Navy ship, that a quotation credited to the Naval History and Heritage Command could not be found, that Nicholas Said arrived in 1860 rather than 1856, and that Morocco briefly declared war during the First Barbary War before reaffirming its treaty. Each is fixed and logged on the new Corrections page. Thirteen timeline entries that lacked a cited source now carry one, and every timeline entry and document now has its own page.
- 2026-09-05
The Coverage Record: a cited evidence hub on media representation
A new page at /media answers the question this project gets asked most often (what does the research actually establish about how American media represents Muslims) without overstating it. Twelve studies are indexed with their methods attached: Kearns, Betus and Lemieux in Justice Quarterly (all 136 US terrorist attacks from 2006 to 2015; attacks by Muslim perpetrators drew 357% more coverage, and perpetrator religion was the largest single predictor); the Media Portrayals of Minorities Project at Middlebury (26,626 articles from 2018, where 17% of articles about Jewish people named antisemitism and 2% of articles about Muslims named Islamophobia); Bleich and van der Veen’s Oxford University Press study of two decades of newspaper tone; two USC Annenberg counts of speaking characters in 200 films and 200 television series; Murrar and Brauer’s randomized experiments showing a sitcom measurably lowered prejudice four weeks later; and Pew’s September 3, 2026 portrait of Muslim Americans. The page shows a disagreement rather than resolving it: the widely quoted ‘four times longer sentences’ figure comes from a 52-case think-tank study, and a peer-reviewed analysis of 825 terrorism cases from 2001 to 2018 does not reproduce a general disparity of that kind: both are on the page, with the caveat stated on each card. Two sources with a stake in the finding (the Centre for Media Monitoring and ISPU) are labeled as such and paired with independent research rather than standing alone. Alongside the evidence: a six-entry language and framing lexicon (the AP Stylebook’s own instruction on ‘Islamist,’ the January 2015 ‘no-go zones’ corrections, Cemil Aydin on ‘the Muslim world’), an eight-question newsroom checklist, and a downloadable style guide. A claim that circulates widely (that more than three-quarters of social posts about Muslims are strongly Islamophobic) was left out because we could not read the study behind it, and the page says so.
- 2026-07-21
A new Civil Rights & Civil Liberties thread joins By Field
A dedicated verification sweep, the same discipline used for the Women's Thread and By Field expansions, turned up four facts solid enough to publish, without duplicating what The Tested Thread already covers (the 9/11 hate-crime spike, NYPD's Demographics Unit surveillance, Trump v. Hawaii). New: the Council on American-Islamic Rights' 1994 founding, stated as plain fact rather than adjudicating the organization's own contested reputation; Ibrahim v. DHS (2014), the first-ever trial win against a federal no-fly listing; Tanzin v. Tanvir (2020), where the Supreme Court let three Muslim men sue FBI agents individually over watchlist retaliation, worded carefully, since the ruling decided only that such suits can proceed, not that the watchlisting itself was unlawful; and the FBI's 2023 hate-crime data (236 anti-Muslim incidents, a 49% jump), a current data point beside the site's existing 2001 figure. The Trump v. Hawaii card also now names the actual sequence (Executive Order 13769, its revision 13780, then Proclamation 9645) instead of just "a proclamation." One research lead, a second civil-rights organization's founding story, came back short of this site's sourcing bar and was left out rather than shipped on thin footing.
- 2026-07-21
Myth fact cards go straight to the share sheet on supporting devices
The "Save card" button under each Myths & Evidence card now shares its image directly through the device's native share sheet (WhatsApp, Instagram, X, Messages, etc.) on browsers that support sharing files, instead of only downloading a PNG that then has to be attached by hand. The capability check runs after the page loads rather than during the initial render, so the server and the first client render always agree on what the button says, a real hydration bug this round's testing caught and fixed before shipping. Devices without file-sharing support, or a canceled share sheet, still fall back to the original download exactly as before.
- 2026-07-21
Enterprise & Labor and Health & Medicine grow from one card each to five and two
The two thinnest By Field threads grow using content already verified and sourced elsewhere on the site, cross-linked rather than re-researched. Enterprise & Labor adds four distinct labor stories: the V Street Mosque in Sacramento (farmworkers building the first purpose-built mosque on the West Coast, 1947), the Pepperell Mill community in Biddeford, Maine (Albanian millworkers, 1915), the Islamic Center of New England in Quincy (built alongside a Navy shipyard by immigrant labor, 1964), and Nagi Daifallah, the Yemeni United Farm Workers strike captain killed during the 1973 Delano grape strike. Health & Medicine adds the Islamic Society of Greater Houston's 1969 origin near the Texas Medical Center, framed honestly as an institutional-proximity story, not a claim that Muslims founded or staffed the Medical Center itself. Every new card's sources are copied verbatim from the existing Landmarks or Timeline entry it draws on.
- 2026-07-21
The Women's Thread grows: three new cards, a corrected citation, and full names restored
The Women's Thread section grew from six cards to nine, each added only after live source verification: Nusrat Choudhury, confirmed June 2023 as the first Muslim woman on the federal bench; Bilali Muhammad's daughters (Magret, Bentoo, Chaalut, Medina, Yaruba, Fatima, and Hestuh) remembered by name through his granddaughters' 1930s Georgia Writers' Project interviews, framed honestly as descendant memory rather than plantation documentation; and the 2020 U.S. Mosque Survey's actual numbers on women's institutional role (67% of mosques now have women on their governing board, up from 50% in 2000, alongside the survey's own finding that a majority still score only fair or poor on women-friendliness). The 1790 Free Moors timeline entry now names all four wives from the South Carolina House journal (Fatima, Flora, Sarah, and Clarinda) not just Fatima, and cites the primary journal transcription directly. Clara Muhammad's citation was strengthened by pairing the Institute of Muslim American Studies alongside the Foundation's own site, per this site's rule against resting a claim solely on an institution's self-description. Two research leads (a named Cedar Rapids women's auxiliary and Ross, North Dakota's women organizers) came back unverifiable this round and were left out rather than guessed at; the section's array was also lifted to a top-level const so it's now searchable via the site's command palette (⌘K).
- 2026-07-21
Year Quest grows: stats, a past-week archive, ten more puzzles, and its own share card
The daily game's puzzle pool grew from 34 to 44 entries: every addition drawn 1:1 from the source-verified timeline, with a few deliberately excluded for honest reasons (a manumission date the record itself hedges, an era-spanning story with no single event year, and a clue that would have been indistinguishable from an existing puzzle). Finishing a puzzle now shows Wordle-style stats: games played, win rate, streaks, and a wins-by-guess-count chart, existing players' saved streaks carry over untouched. A 'Previous puzzles' list shows the past seven days with links to each timeline entry (capped at seven by design, so the rotating pool never gets spoiled ahead of a repeat). Shares of /daily now carry a dedicated Year Quest card instead of the generic site cover.
- 2026-07-21
Year Quest: a daily history puzzle, plus shareable quiz results
A new daily game lives at /daily: every day, one verified moment from the site's timeline becomes a guess-the-year puzzle (five tries, higher/lower hints, and the full sourced story revealed at the end, with a link to the timeline entry it comes from). Results share as a spoiler-free emoji grid with a running streak. Every puzzle is drawn 1:1 from the existing source-verified timeline (same facts, same citations: the QA gate now machine-checks that correspondence on every change, and also checks that no clue leaks its own answer). The Knowledge Quest quiz also gained a share button: finished quizzes now produce a per-question emoji grid you can post or send, and existing visitors' saved scores and progress carry over untouched.
- 2026-07-17
Methods & Ethics deepened; two new By Field threads; corrected an acreage claim
The Methods & Ethics page now names Saeb Ahsan explicitly as the site's sole editor, carries a five-tier Evidence Label Legend, a five-item 'What Historians Debate' module (enslaved-Muslim population share, the definitional 'first mosque' question, enslaved-era-to-immigrant-era continuity, the contested Locke/Ottoman-influence claim, and current U.S. Muslim population estimates), and an expanded Representation & Ethics section naming five specific sources of archival bias (geographic, racial, class, gender, oral-vs-written). The Corrections page section now spells out what happens after a submission and what becomes public. Two new 'By Field' threads were added to the homepage: Enterprise & Labor (the Highland Park mosque and Detroit-area auto-industry labor migration, cross-linked to the Landmarks entry rather than duplicated) and Health & Medicine (ISPU's mosque count, the 2018 Muslim-run-clinics survey, and the Southeast Michigan healthcare-access study). The Mother Mosque of America's Landmarks entry was corrected to merge its street address into one line and to explicitly hedge the '10 acres' cemetery-donation figure as secondary-sourced rather than NPS-confirmed. Landmarks entries now carry stable anchor ids and cross-link to the relevant debate. Evidence labels touched: Institutional Estimate; Interpretive Inference.
- 2026-07-11
Sitewide search completed; export libraries deferred
The last two content arrays invisible to ⌘K search, geography cards and Continental Threads, are now indexed, completing sitewide search. The PDF and PNG export libraries (used by a handful of download buttons) now load only when clicked instead of on every page visit, shrinking the initial download for every reader.
- 2026-07-11
Credibility hardening: an open license, a public README, and honest completions
The site's content is now licensed CC BY 4.0 and its code MIT, stated plainly in a new LICENSE and README, so any educational or civic institution can adopt it. Several weak citations were replaced with institutional or primary sources (a Cato op-ed swapped for Reagan's actual 1981 transcript; a personal homepage swapped for Britannica; a mosque's own site paired with the National Park Service). Two historical threads were completed for balance: the 1978 split that reconstituted the Nation of Islam outside mainstream Islam, and the 1786 exchange where Tripoli's ambassador justified attacks in religious terms, shown alongside the site's existing commerce-and-security framing.
- 2026-07-11
The civilizations behind the story
A new thread on the West African scholarly world (Timbuktu, the Sankoré tradition, Mansa Musa) that produced the enslaved scholars profiled elsewhere on the site, an honest treatment of al-Andalus (its brilliance and its limits, together), and the Arabic roots woven through the Spanish many Latino Muslims speak.
- 2026-07-11
The Record at 250: Article VI, the tested thread, and the present
A dedicated telling of the 1788 debate over whether a Muslim could hold office, the FBI and court record of where that promise has been tested since, and where the community stands today, plus Cham, Yemeni, Afghan, Persian, and Latino Muslim migration history, and a standing content-integrity QA gate that now runs on every change.
- 2026-07-10
Primary Source Explorer, the Documents viewer, and Landmarks
Three new pages: a searchable library of founding-era treaties and letters with full citations, a zoomable viewer for the actual primary-source images, and a field guide to documented Muslim American landmarks by region.
- 2026-07-10
Population & Demographics, and a dozen verified historical threads
A 250-year data view of the Muslim population in America, honestly labeled by epistemic status (estimate, survey, or projection), alongside newly added, individually verified stories: the 1790 Free Moors petition, the 1805 White House Ramadan dinner, the U.S. Camel Corps, the 1893 Parliament of Religions, the first American-printed Qur'an (1806), and more.
- 2026-07-04
Threads of Connection launches
The interactive timeline, the Founders' record on Islam, Deep Roots, the migration-wave map, and Myths & Evidence go live for the first time, built for the United States' 250th anniversary.