Nancy Bradeen Spannaus of Lovettsville, VA, author and public historian, died on January 16, 2026 at Inova Loudoun Hospital. Nancy had been fighting cancer over a span of eleven years, and was battling a rare and particularly virulent form of the disease for the past two years.
Nancy had been studying U.S. history, with an emphasis on the country’s economic development in general, and Alexander Hamilton in particular, since the 1970s, and in 1977 she co-authored a book of writings on the Political Economy of the American Revolution. In 2017, upon retirement from a career in journalism, she established the blog American System Now, which contains more than 600 articles on the history and principles of the American System of Economics.
In 2019, she published the book Hamilton Versus Wall Street: The Core Principles of the American System of Economics. In 2023 she published Defeating Slavery: Hamilton’s American System Showed the Way.
In early 2025, with an eye to the upcoming 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, she published a collection of essays from the blog in a volume entitled From Subject to Citizen: What Americans Need to Know about Their Revolution.
In recent years, she was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution (Ketoctin Chapter), the Alexander Hamilton Awareness Society, the Lincoln Group of D.C., the Loudoun 250 Committee, and the American Friends of Lafayette.
Nancy spoke on Alexander Hamilton and related topics at many local events, including history groups and the public libraries. She was also a volunteer for the Western Loudoun Food Pantry (acting as its manager in recent years), and the Lovettsville Historical Society. She taught in Lifelong Learning programs, often as an Adjunct Professor, at Shepherd University, Long Island University, Johns Hopkins University, and Frederick Community College.
Nancy was born in Portland, Maine, of parents Donald and Mary Lou Towle Bradeen, in 1943, and spent her younger years in Washington, Pennsylvania and Cincinnati, Ohio. She was a graduate of Bryn Mawr College (B.A., 1965), and Columbia University School of Social Work (M.S., 1967). As a journalist, she was for many years the editor-in-chief of several national publications affiliated with the Lyndon LaRouche organizations, and she also ran for statewide office in Virginia in the 1990s.
She is survived by her husband of 57 years, Edward; her second son Andrew, a journalist based in Milan, Italy; and grandson Christopher Ziboni Spannaus of Italy. She was predeceased by her first son Michael (1970-1990). She is also survived by four younger brothers and sisters: Robert Bradeen and wife Ellen, of Haughton, Louisiana; Judy Bradeen, of Lebanon, New Hampshire; David Bradeen and husband NJ, of Camden, Maine and Indian Wells, California; and Susan Bradeen Haimes and husband David, of Seneca Falls, New York.
In her own words:
In 2018, Nancy wrote a biographical essay for the DAR, which she adapted just this last November for a website on influential women. Here are a few excerpts, beginning where she was discussing her mother’s side of the family as “decidedly a matriarchy.”
My father represented a clear countervailing, and broadening influence. As a Classics professor and twice a fellow at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, he was a rigorous scholar and very demanding of me, his oldest child. He had an in-depth historical view (“Everything after the 5th Century B.C. was current events,” he said.) He never gave any indication that my gender should interfere with the highest level of intellectual achievement—and pushed me to go to a top woman’s college, Bryn Mawr, in order to get the best education possible. Bryn Mawr had a strong Classics tradition, including school songs in Classical Greek and a de facto patron goddess, Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom (and war). I majored in philosophy . . . .
My own concentration of study on the American Revolution, which began in the mid-1970s, did not focus on the role of women, but on the ideas which the leading Founders, such as Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, developed in order to create the new nation. And while these heroes of mine were by no means concentrated on advancing the role of women per se, their political ideas were equally applicable to liberating the minds of men and women.
For as long as I can remember, I always felt an obligation to act to improve society. By the time I finished my formal education, this concept had broadened considerably beyond just working in a local community, to encompassing the world as a whole. When I had my children in the early 1970s, my determination to play that larger role in the world, specifically through politics, became even stronger. I owed it to my children, as well as those of others, to create a world where they could thrive. My husband shared this view . . . .
I have retired, but will actually never really retire. It is still my obligation to use what knowledge I have acquired to educate, and if possible, inspire, my fellow human beings to improve this world—indeed, to bring it out of crisis. My activities, including starting a blog and joining DAR, have been embarked on with this intent. That is my role as a privileged human being . . . .
For Nancy, the history of the American Revolution was a living project. She was passionate about the good the American Revolution had brought to the world, and she was determined to help people understand it so that the visions and ideas of Alexander Hamilton and the American founders could shape our future. Nancy breathed life into the figures of the past in a way that forges a direction for now, and for the times to come. To this end, she continued to write and think about more speaking events — right up through the very last weeks of her time on Earth.
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Services will be held on Saturday, January 31, at 11:00 a.m., at New Jerusalem Lutheran Church in Lovettsville. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations to the Western Loudoun Food Pantry, the Alexander Hamilton Awareness Society, or the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation (the voice of Christians in Palestine and the Holy Land).
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