Why this course matters

Every Mason is asked at some point where his Craft came from. The short answers (1717 in London, Anderson in 1723, the Antient and Modern Union in 1813, Santa Fe in 1877) are easy to recite without understanding. The longer answers (what the medieval Old Charges actually said, why the eighteenth-century split happened, what the Baltimore Convention tried to fix in 1843) are what let a brother talk about his fraternity to a curious neighbor or a new initiate without flinching.

This is the published, three-century walk through the history. Most members carry three or four of the dates and a vague sense of the rest. The course is built to give you the timeline as one coherent arc rather than a pile of unconnected facts, so that the next time someone asks where Masonry came from, you can answer the long version in two minutes and have it land.