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What first drew you to Cruse and his work, and why do you think his story deserves to be revisited now?

Vincent Lloyd: When I started directing Villanova University’s Black studies program and teaching our introductory course in Black studies, I realized there was an important question I had to think through: What is Black studies? Black studies might seem like just the history of Black people. But it is more than just history (history departments already teach that); it involves the culture and experience of Africans and the African diaspora, and it also involves economics and politics. Undergirding all of this, Black studies involves analyzing the dynamics of domination and resistance that affect the Black community—dynamics that are part of the human condition.

Harold Cruse was a crucial founder of the field of Black studies: student activists pressed universities to build Black studies programs, and Cruse provided an intellectual agenda. He urged the field to integrate history, culture, politics, and economics, and most of all, he urged Black studies to maintain its rigor. He invited and celebrated vigorous argumentation, testing ideas and theories against the evidence and debating concepts and narratives. Cultivating that sense of rigor struck me as essential to Black studies at its best—and essential when the field is under attack. Telling Cruse’s story was a way I could help my students and colleagues remember the core commitments of our field.

Your biography draws on Cruse’s letters and unpublished writings, as well as numerous interviews. What did these materials reveal about Cruse that you could not have captured through his published work alone?

VL: Cruse was a man who lived many lives. As a young man in the 1930s, he was part of the Harlem theater scene. He had a life in the US Army. He had a life as a Communist Party member and staffer. He was part of the Greenwich Village scene in the 1950s and 1960s. Then he led an entirely different life after becoming a university professor in 1968, at the age of 52. He was associated with the University of Michigan for more than thirty years. 

Cruse is known as the author of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, his acclaimed 1967 critical history of Black thought and politics. Cruse’s unpublished writings and the memories of his colleagues, students, and friends allow us to understand that he was much more than the writer of one famous book. For example, his time as a professor putting his vision of Black studies into practice while navigating the enthusiasms and demands of Black student activists is highly illuminating and speaks to our present moment.

Cruse is described as a man who was “beloved, feared, hated, reviled, praised.” What made him such a polarizing figure, and how did his personality shape his intellectual relationships and career?

VL: Many people who encountered Cruse described him as a curmudgeon, although with family members, friends, and those he mentored, he could be sweet and gentle. Cruse had little patience for political figures and scholars he took to be unserious. As a man who grew up poor, he was particularly irritated by the affectations of middle-class Black Americans—and he found his peers in political and academic spaces often had or aspired to have this class status. Precisely because of Cruse’s willingness to call it as he saw it, even if that meant being impolite, he won the admiration of generations of young people who found Cruse’s voice refreshing.

Cruse’s views on integration, liberal pluralism, and multiculturalism became increasingly critical over the course of his life. How did his thinking evolve, and what experiences contributed to those shifts?

VL: Cruse grew up in Petersburg, Virginia, where self-determination had been a core value of the Black community since the nineteenth century. Cruse was, of course, against racism, but he did not see why integration should be adopted as the overarching framework for ending racism. In a sense, he was taking the lessons he learned in Petersburg and applying them to the US at large: what Black Americans needed to do, in his view, was develop cultural, political, and economic institutions that would allow them to pursue self-determination. By the late 1960s, as young activists were calling for Black power, Cruse had a program to meet the moment. 

On the other hand, Cruse was also a realist. He was part of political organizations that had multiracial memberships, and he eventually taught racially mixed classes at the University of Michigan. Navigating between principles and practicalities is something we all deal with, and I found it particularly fascinating to track how Cruse tried to do so over time.

Cruse spent years making his living through manual labor while writing The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, before becoming a tenured professor and mentor to student activists. What does this trajectory tell us about the relationship between intellectual life and lived experience?

VL: You don’t have to be a professor to be an intellectual. Cruse is a wonderful reminder of this: he went to the New York Public Library day after day, he drafted and redrafted countless pages of historical analysis and cultural criticism, and he sharpened his arguments in dialogue with fellow activists working on political projects. He was an intellectual before he became a professor—and when he became a professor, he discovered that many of his faculty colleagues were not intellectuals. They did not have the passion for ideas or for putting those ideas into action.  

What do you hope readers will take away from Cruse’s life and ideas—and what might his story teach us about the history of Black Studies and the ongoing debates over Black intellectual and political thought?

VL: First, Cruse reminds us of what Black studies can be at its very best: the rigorous pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty through grappling with the Black experience and through grappling with the ways systemic injustice relies on lies, amorality, and banality. Second, Cruse’s life and his singular character remind us that intellectual life is also embodied, that the passion for ideas grows out of particular experiences and relationships. Third, Cruse offers a model of what it means to be committed to racial justice while also maintaining a critical attitude, challenging comrades in the struggle when their ideas go wrong while remaining part of that shared struggle.

Vincent W. Lloyd is professor and former director of Africana Studies at Villanova University. His recent books include Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination and the coauthored Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons. His writing has appeared in Commonweal, The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Plough, and other publications.

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Charles Kupchan—

The character of the emerging international system will depend in no small part on the character of relations between the United States and China. If the world’s two leading powers can tame their rivalry and collaborate on managing today’s major geopolitical and economic issues, effective global governance may be within reach. If their rivalry continues to build and leads to an irreparable rupture, the collective initiative needed to manage a globalized world will be dangerously out of reach.

There are reasons to be cautiously hopeful. President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping have already met twice this year. They are set to meet twice more in 2026—at the APEC summit in Shenzhen, China in November and at the G20 summit in Miami in December. Trump has touted his “truly great friendship” with Xi, and the two leaders have endorsed the goal of building a “constructive relationship of strategic stability.”

The positive rhetoric, however, has not yielded meaningful progress on any of the major issues that divide Washington and Beijing. The summits between Trump and Xi offer impressive displays of pomp and flattery, but they have yet to produce tangible deliverables.

It is not too late for the two countries to take advantage of the opportunity afforded by the Trump presidency. Trump’s America First statecraft is the target of sharp criticism—most of it fully justified—but he does deserve credit for reaching across ideological dividing lines and building a working relationship with Xi.

In so doing, he is challenging the traditional consensus in Washington in favor of a policy of confronting and containing China. Trump’s readiness to set aside democracy promotion and seek pragmatic cooperation with the world’s leading autocracy represents a welcome policy shift and provides a diplomatic opening that could set U.S.-China relations on a more cooperative course.

To turn good atmospherics into concrete deliverables, Trump and Xi need a workplan as they prepare for their next summits. The conflict between Iran and the United States is the best place to start. It has caused widespread death and destruction and disrupted the flow of oil from the Middle East, leading to soaring energy prices worldwide. Ending the war is an urgent priority.

Trump could use Xi’s help to close out the conflict. Xi has more influence over Tehran than any other foreign leader; China is Iran’s diplomatic and economic lifeline. So far, Xi has chosen not to use that leverage to encourage Iran to end the conflict at the negotiating table. On the contrary, China is still buying Iranian oil and providing Tehran both military intelligence and dual-use items that end up in Iranian drones and missiles.

Trump should do his best to convince Xi to change course. There is a reasonable chance he would succeed. As the world’s largest oil importer, Beijing has a vested interest in bringing oil prices down by restoring the free flow of ships through the Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb straits. The Chinese economy has been buffered from the spike in oil prices by the large reserves it had stockpiled. But those reserves are being depleted, increasing China’s economic exposure should the conflict drag on. And as the world’s largest exporter of goods, China also suffers from the dampening effect of high energy prices on global growth.

Xi may well expect a quid pro quo if he is to accede to Trump’s request to lean on Tehran. Given the fraught state of U.S.-China relations, compromise by one side likely necessitates compromise by the other. Trump’s best card to play would be scaling back tariffs and ending the prospect of new trade war with China. That move would help China address its domestic economic woes—a priority for Xi. And even though Trump is a “tariff man,” he may well find it expedient to bring down the protectionist barriers that have contributed to the worsening affordability crisis in the United States and weighed down Trump’s popularity.

Trump and Xi might also look for an easy win—an opportunity to team up on a non-controversial issue. One option might be a joint medical mission to fight the current Ebola outbreak in Africa. Trump and Xi have a model they can build on. The United States and China worked together to contain both the H1N1 outbreak in 2009 and the Ebola outbreak in 2014.  Given that Washington and Beijing have cooperated in the past on public health, they should be able to do so again.

Many other issues deserve sustained dialogue between Washington and Beijing—Ukraine, Taiwan, North Korea, arms control, and AI safety among them. But it is best to start slow and aim for tangible progress instead of loading up the agenda and coming away empty handed. The goal should be to set a precedent for collaboration that can be built upon down the road.

Should Trump and Xi start moving from friendly talks to concrete teamwork, the United States and China will not be the only beneficiaries. The U.S.-China relationship is the central axis in today’s world. If Washington and Beijing can start moving away from distrust and rivalry toward even limited cooperation, a world in disarray will begin to be steadied.

Charles A. Kupchan is Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.  He is the author of Bringing Order to Anarchy: Governing the World to Come.

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Benjamin Heber Johnson—

Part of the mythos of Texas is that it is conservative. Texans, the assumption goes, and especially white Texans, and even more so rural white Texans, believe in unregulated capitalism and celebrate male bravado and prowess. They have for a long time, the myth continues, and there is no end in sight. After all, Texas was a slave state, part of the Confederacy, practiced formal racial segregation until the Civil Rights Movement stopped it, and as of the publication of this book has not elected a Democrat to statewide office for thirty years. If you want to find labor unions, leftist politicians, and people who experiment with gender roles, try California or New York.

The People’s Party (or Populist Party) of Texas and the farmers’ organizations from which it emerged contradict this myth. In the 1880s and 1890s, hundreds of thousands of farmers and their families—mostly white people born in Texas and nearby southern states, but also considerable numbers of African American, Bohemian, German, and Hispanic Texans—supported a third party that was all about reforming capitalism, that opened up new roles for women, and that at times practiced interracial cooperation and solidarity. In the 1890s, Populists won twenty-two seats in the Texas House of Representatives and two in the state senate. They earned as much as 44 percent of the statewide vote (peaking in the gubernatorial contest of 1896) and made credible runs for national congressional seats. The threat to the monopoly on power of the Democratic Party was serious enough to prompt leading Democrats to address the key issues of railroad regulation and the banking system. (And later, it made Democratic leaders see the appeal of stricter and more codified racial segregation, to prevent another serious challenge to their single-party rule.) Populism was strong across the South, in much of the Midwest and Mountain states, and even in places on the West Coast. Nationally, it is the most successful third-party movement since the solidification of the Republican Party in the 1850s. Its key institutions and ideas and many of its leading figures came from Texas. Though ultimately defeated as a political movement, Populism changed the institutions, policies, and politics of Texas and the United States.

°°°

“Secure to our people freedom from the onerous and shameful abuses that the industrial classes are now suffering at the hands of arrogant capitalists and powerful corporations,” thundered the Grand State Farmers’ Alliance in its 1886 meeting at Cleburne, a farm town thirty miles south of Fort Worth. Founded in 1877 in the Hill Country town of Lampasas, the Alliance sought to improve the economic security of farm families by aiding in their self-education about such practical matters as accounting, bookkeeping, crop yields, and interest rates, but also in more intellectual fare like the histories and politics of the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Asia, with an emphasis on the role of farming and farmers. In this regard, it was clearly a part of the intellectual and cultural awakening of the 1870s and 1880s. The organization’s work was wildly popular. By the end of the 1880s, it had 225,000 members statewide—more than 10 percent of the population—and 1.2 million nationwide. Alliance leader Charles Macune, from Cameron, predicted that the organization would become “the most powerful and complete educator of modern times.” He had reason to brag. In addition to education, the Farmers’ Alliance also fostered economic cooperation. County Alliance chapters bargained with merchants for lower prices in exchange for Alliance members’ business, and many began to open farm supply stores and mills for cotton and grain of their own, hoping to keep more of the wealth produced by farming in the hands of farmers rather than with merchants and banks.

These efforts at economic cooperation raised political questions. Farmers needed loans for their spring plantings and household essentials until the fall harvest, so it made sense to concern themselves with how money and credit were created. Most were dependent on railroads to get their harvest to markets, so they discussed whether state governments should regulate railroad companies (especially since the companies had benefited from government funding and land grants) or let them set their own prices. Some Alliance members and leaders opposed any move into politics, believing it most effective for farmers to defend their interests only by education and cooperation, and fearing that partisan competition would bring rivalry and division. Others saw developing populist policies and running candidates to implement them as the logical next step for the Farmers’ Alliance. In 1891, these Texas Alliance members met in Dallas and founded the People’s Party, which began competing for office the following year.

It is hard to make the Populist platform fit neatly into current ideas of what is liberal or conservative. Populists seem left-wing in their condemnation of corporations and concentrated wealth, which they felt were strangling democracy. “Corporations are wielding dread influences in national and state politics,” proclaimed the Texas party’s first platform, and “the United States senate has become a den of millionaires, who are infinitely a more terrible menace to free government than the dreaded house of lords of Great Britain.” For Populists, wealth rightly belonged to those whose work produced it, and its theft by the rich threatened democracy itself. As the party’s national platform declared in 1892, “The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty.” In this vein, Populists supported the right of wage workers to form unions, and laws limiting work to eight hours a day. The call for railroads and telegraphs to be regulated, and if necessary owned by the national government, struck many Texans as a call for Socialism.

On the other hand, the purpose of this regulation was to allow Americans to live proudly and independently as owners and operators of farms and other small businesses. So the desired outcome was in one sense an intensely capitalist society, in which property was owned by individuals and goods and services were exchanged in markets they freely joined. The party’s denunciation of excessive government expenditures and the ownership of land by foreigners seems to anticipate later conservative ideas. So does the widely shared sense in Populist circles, or at least among white Populists, that common people had been better off in the past, that bankers in far-off cities had somehow robbed the common working people of their birthright. They wanted America to be great again.

Benjamin Heber Johnson is professor of history at Loyola University Chicago. Raised in Houston, TX, he is the author of numerous publications, including Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans. Johnson lives in Chicago, IL.

The post An Excerpt From Texas: An American History appeared first on Yale University Press.

On October 27, 1906, Edward Hopper arrived at Le Havre, France, on the SS La Touraine. Though he tired of the endless water during the weeklong voyage, Edward enjoyed the “simply splendid” quality of the French cuisine, writing to his mother: “No more American cooking for me.”

Taking the train from Le Havre to Paris, Edward hastened to lodgings secured for him through Mrs. E. M. Saunier, the wife of a minister of the Nyack Baptist Church. Via the American Baptist Mission Church in Paris, Saunier found a room for Hopper in a top-floor apartment at the Église Évangélique Baptiste, at 48 rue de Lille. Like the Hopper home, the setup was matriarchal and run by Louise Jammes, a widow who was mother to two teenage sons, Casimir and Théoronne. There Edward joined Miss Cuniffe, an Irish American boarder from San Francisco, who quickly became a surrogate mother figure: both she and Jammes quickly took to calling Edward “mama’s boy.” Three days after his arrival, Edward wrote home to tell his parents that he had “a good room and plenty to eat.” He also described his first impressions of Paris:

Paris is a very graceful and beautiful city, almost too formal and sweet after the raw disorder of New York. Everything seems to have been planned with the purpose of forming a most harmonious whole which has certainly been done. Not even one jarring note of color is there to break the dismal tone of the house front, which is a universal grey or buff. . . . The climate here seems very mild to me. I do not believe they have the biting cold of New York, nor do you see here the deep blue sky and gorgeous sparkle of color we have at home. Everything seems to be pitched in a milder key.

Hopper’s contrast of Paris with New York revealed his sense of the United States as a nation whose “raw disorder” bespoke its authenticity, as opposed to the more curated aesthetic of Paris. Here, Hopper was alluding to the major renovations to Paris enacted by Baron Haussmann from the 1850s onward, which had transformed medieval Paris into a spectacular city of wide boulevards and open spaces, displacing more than 350,000 people in the process—most of them the Parisian working class. Crumbling tenements were replaced with lavish apartment blocks, carving out a modern Paris segregated by class that many deemed a betrayal of the city’s original spirit. As one playwright put it in 1866, “It is the old Paris that is lost, the real Paris! A city which was narrow, unhealthy, insufficient, but picturesque, varied, charming, full of memories.”

Hopper had little to no sense of this old Paris at first. He knew Haussmann’s Paris through the paintings of the impressionists, who had brought the world’s attention to the city as a place of unmatched spectacle and elegance. This vision of Paris allowed Hopper to indulge in a common national habit of gendering the United States as masculine and Europe as feminine; indeed, his emphasis on Paris as “graceful and beautiful” conjured the capital as a hub of feminine beauty, as opposed to the gritty virility of New York. Such language extended to his description of French and American bodies: “The Frenchmen for the most part are small and have poor physiques. You will not see here as you do on ‘Broadway’ the finely built young fellows with their strong, well cut features. However, the French must conceal ‘the goods’ somehow or other, as we know they are on the spot when the time comes, in spite of their little beards & long shoes.”

By denigrating French masculinity, Hopper internalized narratives of American virility, perceiving the “finely built” American as the antithesis of the supposedly effete Parisian type. Buried in this description was a more general uneasiness about foreign bodies, since many Americans also associated Paris with the lures of bohemianism and its implied sexual and material excesses. Hopper’s gesture to sexuality hinted at his awareness of potential illicit encounters in a city far from home.

Long before Hopper arrived in Paris, American commentators and critics warned painters against the city’s temptations, cautioning against moral corruption and distraction from art making. Conflated with this was a profound insecurity about the pervasive influence of France upon American art. This would become a worry for Hopper, too: many years later, he would complain that “in almost every judgement he makes the contemporary Am[erican] artist refers in his mind to the School of Paris.”

Hopper’s uneasy relationship with Parisian life can be ascertained from a drawing he made shortly after his arrival. Sketched from his bedroom balcony overlooking an inner courtyard, the work speaks to the temptations of the city that Hopper probably felt were rather literally on his doorstep, picturing a curvaceous female nude peering across at the artist from her own apartment. Perched in darkness, she dons the pose of a classical nude, her arm tenderly touching her neck, her stance suggestive and sensual. The open window and bedsheet draped over the balcony railing, meanwhile, serve as an invitation into the woman’s private domain, bridging her bedroom to the space beyond. The composition is chaotic, consisting of architectonic diagonals sketched in rapid strokes, as if to evoke the flushed disorientation felt by the artist under the gaze of the watchful nude. A kind of Bathsheba to Hopper’s David, the woman embodies the sexual freedom of Paris, challenging the sexual reticence of Hopper’s American Protestantism.

Hopper’s nude could also stand for the temptation of European artistic tropes and conventions; the confrontational nude had become a favored subject of modern Parisian artists since Manet’s Olympia in 1863. That very autumn, Pablo Picasso was starting work on his revolutionary Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which, as well as initiating the cubist movement in modern art, conflated the eroticism of the brothel house with the common fear of sexually transmitted disease. Hopper had probably been warned of the dangers of venereal disease that plagued Paris, particularly during the 1890s. In sum, it was his own fear of foreign contamination—both physical and cultural—that stared back at him in the form of the nude on the balcony. Although the artist later said that his only concession to bohemianism was a thin red moustache that he shaved off after two weeks because “it looked silly,” his drawing makes clear that his anxieties surrounding his sexual and personal freedom traveled deeper than the hairs on his face.

Hopper’s discomfort regarding uninhibited self-expression revealed itself in a letter to his mother that November: “I received yours of the twenty-seventh and read the contents carefully,” he wrote. “I find in it a tendency towards sentimentality which is not consistent with your hardy Anglo-Saxon nature. The little incident of my room is told with much tenderness and pathos, but if you persist in so exposing your torn heart, our friendship must cease.” However humorous his note was intended to be, Hopper’s language revealed a discomfort surrounding overt displays of emotion and furthermore linked this restraint to his “Anglo-Saxon” genealogy.

It was likely due to the negative implications of French bohemia, as well as his desire to stress his individualism, that Hopper later claimed to have mixed with almost no one in Paris at first—neither the famous European painters making waves in Montparnasse nor the large American art colony known as Little America, which clustered in clubs, cafés, and churches around the Left Bank. Unlike other Americans, Hopper made no attempt to exhibit his works and avoided opportunities to show with the American Art Association of Paris, founded in 1890. “About the only important person I knew was Jo Davidson,” he told a later interviewer, referring to the American sculptor whose fiancée he had met on his voyage over to France. “Whom did I meet [in Paris]? Nobody. I’d heard of Gertrude Stein, but I don’t remember having heard of Picasso at all.” Another interviewer relayed that Hopper allegedly spent his time in Paris “reading extensively in French literature, and avoiding bohemia. . . . Hopper had not heard of Matisse, nor had he been in touch with any of the radical movements then current in Paris.”

Hopper may have heard of Gertrude Stein through his former New York School of Art colleague Patrick Henry Bruce, who met Stein and her partner Alice Toklas in late 1906 and would soon become friends with Henri Matisse and Picasso in early 1907. Hopper saw Bruce regularly following his arrival in Paris, reporting home that Bruce was “very much more agreeable than formerly.” Together they enjoyed dinners on the boulevard Arago, as well as studio visits where art was apparently discussed “seriously, frowningly, with no funny business.” Hopper spoke little of others, including his friend and fancy Alta Hilsdale, who was also in Paris and to whom he wrote in November, suggesting a trip together to the Parc de Saint-Cloud. In general, Edward’s thrust was that he was largely alone, a legend repeated by Jo Hopper in later life: “He was just a lonely boy painting a blonde Paris.”

Louis Shadwick is an independent art historian.

The post An excerpt from Edward Hopper: A Life appeared first on Yale University Press.

Nandini Das—

The Parthenocissus quinquefolia, we are told, is ‘justifiably popular.’ My source is the website of that most august of English institutions, the Royal Horticultural Society, whose webpage on the plant glows with the brilliance of its five-pointed leaves. In England, as summer turns into damp cold, the Parthenocissus quinquefolia—known to most as the Virginia Creeper—spreads across walls and houses in cheerful defiance: a great shout of red among muted greys. It is such a familiar sight that there is something almost surprising about its common English name, worn smooth by generations of familiarity, like an odd family name whose origins you barely remember. Virginia creeper: a little piece of elsewhere, hiding in plain sight.

In 1637, a man called John Tradescant the Younger had landed in what was then the still fledgling English colony in Virginia, a settlement of tobacco plantations driven by slaves and indentured labour, with Indigenous life, both human and non-human, kept precariously at bay outside its palisades. He came from an unusual family. His father, John Tradescant the Elder, had risen from obscure origins to become gardener to some of the most powerful people in England, including Robert Cecil, the Secretary of State and Lord High Treasurer, George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, and Charles I, the king himself. Both father and son were compulsive travellers and collectors. Their house at South Lambeth became famous for its extraordinary collection of objects from across the world, fondly dubbed “the Ark” by its many curious visitors. Outside grew an equally extraordinary garden: foreign tulips alongside old English medicinal herbs, bananas from Bermuda and plants from North America.

John the Younger returned from Virginia with a small botanical world in tow. Getting it home was an achievement in itself: delicate seedlings had to survive an Atlantic crossing, their roots wrapped in moss, specimens packed into boxes and barrels, vulnerable to salt, moisture, and heat. Among numerous plants later credited to John the Younger are the tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera), the red maple (Acer rubrum), the Jerusalem Artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus), an aster (Aster tradescantii) and the Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia). These are all species that would, in time, become naturalised in English gardens, their foreign origins largely forgotten.

For the Tradescants, that act of naturalising of a foreign plant was driven partly by curiosity, and possession. Their garden and the Ark inside their house were products of the same expanding networks of trade, diplomacy and colonisation that carried English people outwards and brought objects, plants and knowledge back. From Virginia came roots and feathers, bulbs and moss and the cowrie shell-decorated ceremonial robe that is still displayed in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford as ‘Powhatan’s Mantle,’ its name forever tying it to another transformed figure, Matoaka, the Virginian girl whom the English called Pocahontas. From Asia and the Middle East came manuscripts and mummies, stuffed birds and unicorn horns. A crocodile from Egypt attracted awed comments from visitors.

Successfully transplanting a foreign species into English soil demonstrated that the strange could be collected, classified, and made familiar. Yet there is something wonderfully odd about the word for the process: naturalisation. We use it of plants, but also of people. In either case, it describes a metamorphosis. Something that began elsewhere, over there, is now here. In fact, it has remained here long enough to become part of the place where it now lives. Once planted, things grow.

People are not plants. Following individual lives through the archives, however, repeatedly reveals how inadequate the apparently neat categories of native and foreign, belonging and estrangement, have always been. Seventeenth-century England was full of people on the move: Italian merchants and Japanese sailors, English religious refugees in Rome and Rouen and Goa and Boston, Moroccan diplomats in English halls. Hatmakers, artists, scholars. Some left again. Others stayed. They loved and married, worked and raised children, quarrelled with neighbours, and acquired new languages. The strange smells of unfamiliar cooking seeped into the new English clothes that some wore. Foreign shrouds wrapped the old English bones of others. And in the process, they discovered that the place where they had once been strangers had become home. Their stories illuminated something that broader histories can obscure, that neither belonging nor identity are characteristics conferred from above. They are made through the ordinary business of living.

There is an inevitable loss engraved in that process. The Virginia creeper had not, of course, been waiting in an empty landscape for an Englishman to discover it. What was new and unknown to John the Younger was familiar to the Indigenous inhabitants of the land through which he travelled. Plants arrived in England separated from many of the names, uses, and meanings they had possessed before Europeans collected and classified them. They could acquire a new home, a new identity, while simultaneously losing part of their old ones.

Yet that process did not necessarily require one identity to be exchanged for another. In flourishing in Lambeth, the Virginia Creeper did not somehow become less Virginian as it became increasingly at home in England. Its name carried one history with it even as the plant acquired another. Belonging works like that, too: it need not be singular, any more than it requires us to forget where we began. The harder question is whether states and societies can accommodate that human reality—whether belonging can be imagined as capacious enough to accommodate multiple histories and loyalties, or made conditional upon choosing between them. Identities can accumulate and overlap. The categories through which nations recognise them, however, have often proved rather less flexible. When states and political discourse demand a singularity that human lives refuse to observe, political categories are not the only things that come under strain. The attempt to enforce them tears apart the very things from which a shared society is made.

On both sides of the Atlantic today, debates about identity and rights, citizenship and migration circle insistently around the question of who belongs and who remains an alien, a stranger. Even the language of the garden can acquire an unexpected resonance in such circumstances. The Royal Horticultural Society describes Virginia creeper as ‘vigorous’ and ‘self-clinging,’ a plant that will ‘quickly romp across a large wall’ and ‘smother other plants it finds in its way.’ There are perfectly sound horticultural reasons for the warning, although it is hard, amid contemporary anxieties about borders and belonging, not to hear something familiar in that vocabulary of unchecked growth and encroachment. At the same time, this potentially unruly foreign arrival is, in the RHS’s words, ‘justifiably popular’ for its ‘unrivalled autumn colour.’ Few of us looking at that riotous blaze of red would think of a seventeenth-century ship crossing the Atlantic with fragile roots wrapped in moss below the creaking planks of its deck. Stranger still is the thought that this thoroughly familiar feature of the English garden was once strange.

It is precisely why this past demands our attention. It cannot tell us who should cross a border, acquire citizenship or possess particular rights. Yet what it does is disturb the assumption that belonging has ever been simple, or, indeed, singular. Belonging, for people as it is for the worlds people make, may not require origins to be erased. It may begin instead with the more complicated recognition that what was once strange can, over time, become part of what we call home.

Nandini Das is professor of early modern English literature and culture and fellow of Exeter College at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Courting India: England, Mughal India, and the Origins of Empire, which won the British Academy Prize, was longlisted for the Cundill Prize, and shortlisted for the Duff Cooper and Wolfson History Prizes, and, most recently, This Little World: A New History of Tudor and Stuart England. She lives in Oxford, UK.

The post Virginia Creepers and the Complicated Nature of Belonging appeared first on Yale University Press.

Divination has been a constant in recorded human history – like its cousin, Magic – and continues to engage and excite people across the world. The belief in astrology in the West, for instance, has been a regular topic for opinion pollsters for decades. In 2020, some 30 percent of Americans believed in astrology. Some divinatory traditions have translated well into the digital and internet age. To give just one example, consider the apps that allow clients to send photographic images of coffee cup dregs to fortune tellers. One such Turkish app had over 5 million users in 2024.

So what is Divination and why does it divide opinion?

Yet divination, in all its diversity, has also long attracted condemnation as an irrational ‘superstition’. It remains relevant because its performance has always been interwoven with religion, politics, propaganda and culture, but also because it feeds the fundamental, universal desire to make sense of an always-unpredictable world by seeking foreknowledge. Exploring the visual history of divination helps us understand its continued hold on humanity across continents today.

Divination is, in essence, a means of obtaining answers to matters otherwise unknown. It was and is used to reveal information about past as well as present situations, such as identifying the whereabouts of stolen property. But across history it was principally the desire to know the future that drove people to divination. The uncertainties of life are and were myriad, and to be forewarned is to be forearmed, whether it be with regard to the weather, harvests, battles, dynastic successions, journeys, health, wealth, marriage, fertility, and commerce. So, divination is a guide for what to do and when to do it; how to ensure good fortune and to avoid bad luck.

The term ‘divination’ derives from the Latin divinare, and the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero (106 BCE-43 BCE) provides us with the first definition: ‘Divination, which the Greeks call mantike, is the foreknowledge and science of future matters’. The Greek mantike, in turn, gave to some European languages the suffix ‘mancy’ to denote a type of divinatory procedure, such as cartomancy and chiromancy. The practice of divination has attracted much condemnation from antiquity onward, variously considered as a political threat, a religious perversion, a deception, or a false science. Some heads of state and organised religions have tried to control access to the practice, using it as a propaganda tool or as a source of revenue for priesthoods. Others have attempted to ban it outright.

Divining the future can be a deadly serious activity, and its study provides insights regarding cultural anxieties in the past and present. But for centuries, possibly millennia, it was also a form of entertainment, a means of passing the time. Tourism and pleasure seeking play their part. The working-class seaside resorts that flourished in Britain and America from the late nineteenth century became honey pots for fortune tellers servicing holiday makers. In the big cities of China and Japan today, some temple sites and their surroundings have developed into what has been described as locations for ‘luck tourism’ and ‘occult hunting’. The streets leading to the temples (not the temples themselves) have become theme parks where native and international tourists seek divinatory fun. Maybe the visitors to ancient Greek temple sites who rolled dice to seek answers to their future were doing the same.

Divination has been the subject of much intellectual theorising by psychologists, psychoanalysts, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, historians and archaeologists. As a range of practices, it has been considered variously as a personal and communal technique of ‘psychological release’, as a tool of ‘social control’, and a manifestation of symbolic social and emotional negotiations. The ongoing relevance of divination to the human condition is in part because it has always been interwoven with religion, politics and culture, and in part because it addresses fundamental personal emotions. The ability to predict the future remains plausible because, from the top to the bottom of society, we want it to be possible.

Owen Davies is professor in history at the University of Hertfordshire and an expert in the history of magic, witchcraft, ghosts, and popular medicine from the ancient world to the modern era. His many books include Art of the Grimoire: An Illustrated History of Magic Books and Spells.

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Beth Kurth—

The Hard Path to Unity is a short book, 133 pages all-in—equal parts economics, history, politics, and wit. Author Barney Frank makes the case that Democrats must reform “the left wing of the left wing” if we are to rescue liberal democracy, defined as rule by a majority that respects the voices of minorities, from the allure of “us vs. them” populism.

Frank, a long-time liberal congressman from deep blue Massachusetts, believed passionately in Democrats’ long-standing support for mutually respectful, inclusive governance. While the party’s left-wing has become more focused on social change, he argues that moderate Democrats have an opportunity to regain both the party’s popular narrative and the upper hand at the voting booth.

Frank acknowledges that Democrats were slow to understand the economic pain of globalization and technological advances. The party’s “progressive” wing conflated calls for economic change with a misguided focus on deep social change.

Frank’s advice? Democrats must understand that “words speak louder than silence” when disavowing “voter-repellant” social change, while also working to persuade the dissident left not to make their most controversial positions a litmus test for the party as a whole.

To understand Frank’s argument, it may make sense to take a step backward in time—to trace the history that led the left to the place it stands today and look forward to potential paths for the party’s future.

In 1936, John Maynard Keynes introduced the theory that governments can use macroeconomic policy to improve economic growth and minimize unemployment.  Franklin Roosevelt based the New Deal on Keynesian economics to help lead the United States out of the Great Depression, and the theory’s underlying principles were also foundational to 1948’s Marshall Plan, which allocated approximately $13 billion into the rebuilding of Germany and Europe at the end World War II.

The era of liberal democracy—characterized by its steady, shared economic growth and the introduction of liberal democratic political systems in Germany, Japan, and Italy—began with the wide-scale adoption of Keynesian theory. By the 1980s, Greece, Spain, and Portugal, the last surviving non-Communist dictatorships in Europe, had also adopted liberal democratic governments as had South Korea and Taiwan; 1991 saw the collapse of the Soviet Empire.  

However, the globalization and labor-saving advances in technology were beginning to erode the shared economic success and economic inequality began to take root domestically, accelerating with the 1994 implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement that removed trade barriers. Middle-class manufacturing workers, a traditionally Democratic constituency, were disproportionately affected when many well-paying manufacturing jobs moved to lower-cost locations including Mexico and Canada. 

The 35-year afterglow of post-WWII economic growth obscured the increasing anger felt by the losers in this new economic landscape; that is, until the financial collapse of 2008. Keynesians failed to adapt and instead allocated a whopping $700B in government intervention to the Troubled Asset Relief Program, a “substantively successful, politically disastrous” initiative. Voters typecast the allocation as a $700B gift to banks and continued to lose confidence in the Left’s commitment to addressing the maldistribution of wealth. As a result, populism began to gain steam.

In good news for Democrats, a subgroup within the party recognized that this neglect of equity was morally and politically mistaken, and waged an ultimately successful campaign to correct it.

However, the opportunity to reverse the populist tide was offset when a faction of this group—“the left wing of the left wing’s left” —convinced itself that voter resentment at economic inequality could be channeled into support for far-reaching changes in health care policy, climate policy, immigration, racial justice, and transgender rights. Frank notes that many voters determined that keeping Democrats out of power was “their only defense against Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, Defunding the Police, Open Borders, and the rule of the pronoun police.”

He also advises his party’s progressive wing to stand down from making their most controversial posi­tions requirements for intellectual membership.

“In arguing that we must separate the Left as a whole from radical demands for unpopular social changes, I do not claim, like Donald Trump, that ‘I alone’ can solve this,” Frank writes.

Having sat clearly on the Left for his entire electoral career, Barney Frank makes a compelling case for reforming the left to rescue democracy.

Beth Kurth is a long-time Democrat who, as Barney Frank’s niece, had the honor and privilege of sitting alongside him at many family brunches and dinners. Through him she learned the importance of good governance and commitment to public service, including the use of facts and humor to make important points.  

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Michael Leroy Oberg—

Margaret Elm, a young Onondaga girl, began attending the Lincoln Institution in Philadelphia in December of 1902. She was five years old. Soon, Lincoln, an Indian boarding school originally built for the orphans of Union Army soldiers, would become a “White Boys School.” Margaret was left in need of a new educational home, so her mother sent her to the famous Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Margaret was not dragged away to boarding school against her will—she was sent there by her widowed mother who had her hands full enough at home.

Margaret remained at Carlisle from late November 1907 to June 1914.  She then attended Cazenovia College, not far from her home on the Onondaga Nation Territory. She graduated from college and returned to the Onondaga Nation Territory, which housed the central council fire of the Iroquois League of Six Nations, or the Haudenosaunee. She married, becoming Margaret Elm Wheelock, but lived an uneventful life until her name appeared in the newspapers in the late 1920s.

Onondagas, during these years, tolerated the presence of missionaries so long as they behaved well. Margaret had faced unwelcome sexual advances from a Seventh-Day Adventist Missionary named J. W. Davis. Her husband understood perfectly well why his wife “did not intend to go to services any longer.” He told the Onondaga sachems about Davis and they in turn told the missionary to leave. Davis defied the men who held titles that originated in the mythical past.

When Margaret saw Davis on the Nation Territory, she approached him angrily. “I told you to stay off the reservation,” she said. Davis said something back and Margaret began throwing rocks, shattering the windshield of Davis’s car. The county sheriffs came to arrest her.

“There is not a word of truth in anything this woman may have to say against me,” Davis told them. 

Margaret made it clear that she looked forward to her day in court. “I will have a whole lot to say about the minister.”

At her arraignment the next evening, “a crowd of 100 persons, most of them Indian women from the reservation, and including about 25 children,” showed up to support her. Onondaga women stuck together. They heard Margaret plead not guilty to a charge of disorderly conduct. Davis could see that the Onondaga women knew all about him, and that they stood behind their friend, their kin, and their neighbor. David had seen enough. He chose not to appear at Mrs. Wheelock’s trial two weeks later, and all charges against her were dropped.

Three decades later, at nearly sixty years old, Margaret Elm Wheelock appeared in the Syracuse newspapers once again. She wrote a letter in September 1956 to the editor of the Syracuse Post-Standard defending the Onondaga Nation from outside critics who described it as a backwards and violent place. “Ever since the white man isolated the American Indian people on this small tract of land, we have done our best to carry on a profitable existence,” she wrote. The reservation had four Christian churches, but also “the Indian faith, a splendid fire-proof school, which supplies a fine gymnasium and other equipment to train our children and youth into proper citizenship.” The Onondagas also had a community building, a health center, a recreation hall, and a fire department that has “been the means of saving many of our homes and also helping the other nearby fire organizations.” Margaret, who expressed her own deeply held Christian beliefs, asked her readers to be less harsh in their critiques of the Onondagas. “Yes, we do have our social problems…and we, too, have a class that calls for mercy and tolerance, but these problems, though magnified by the white man’s law, are still minor compared to the crimes committed off the territory of the Reservation.” There was alcohol abuse. There were unwed mothers, “but the problems were not worse on the reservation than elsewhere.” White people came to the Nation Territory to “carry on their beastly crimes,” she said. “White people,” she wrote, “far outnumber the American Indian in their search for lust and debauchery.”

From Onondaga to Philadelphia, and then to Carlisle, Cazenovia and home again, Margaret Elm Wheelock was a woman whose life was shaped by American efforts to control the Onondagas and transform Indigenous people into something approaching the white middle-class ideal.  Over their long history, Onondagas faced military invasion of their homelands, waves of epidemic disease, and systematic efforts to erase their language, destroy their culture, eradicate their traditional laws and governance, and seize their lands. If any number of people had their way, Margaret Elm Wheelock’s powerful letter could never have been written, for her people would have been gone. Margaret Elm Wheelock’s life story shows that Onondagas were so much more powerful, as individuals and members of an Indigenous nation, than the force directed toward their destruction.

Michael Leroy Oberg is distinguished professor of history at SUNY Geneseo and founder of the Geneseo Center for Local and Municipal History. His books include Peacemakers: The Iroquois, the United States, and the Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794 and Uncas: First of the Mohegans. He lives in Rochester, NY.

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Holly Stephens—

The above photo depicts a noticeboard erected by the local financial association (K. kŭmyung chohap;J. kin’yū kumiai) in Kŭmsan county, in southern Korea. The financial associations were government-backed rural banks, established in the early years of the Japanese colonization of Korea, and they were one of several semi-governmental organizations through which the colonial government implemented its agricultural policies locally. During the Program to Increase Rice Production, for example, the financial associations distributed loans for the purchase of tools and fertilizers, while other organizations distributed high-yielding seed varieties, hosted lectures on new agricultural techniques, or managed the joint-sale of members’ crops. The text on the Kŭmsan noticeboard hints at the connection to colonial policies. On the left, the financial association shared information about how to become a member of the association and the interest rates that it offered on its loans, while on the right it displayed slogans commonly found in colonial campaigns—encouraging diligence, thrift, and savings.

In the colonial setting, coercion was one tool that the financial associations and other semi-governmental organizations could, and did, fall back on. Especially in earlier and later periods of colonial rule, it is not hard to find examples of forced savings targets or measures that directed the sale and circulation of farmers’ crops through the associations. However, coercion was not the only method that the financial associations employed, especially when colonial agricultural policies encompassed more intangible goals such as encouraging savings, the appreciation of profits, the desire to sell more crops, and—by extension—the desire to produce crops with the tastes of commercial purchasers in mind. For much of the colonial period, the financial associations also aimed to persuade their members to adopt new behaviors that aligned with colonial campaigns. The Kŭmsan noticeboard appears in this vein, with slogans promoting the virtues of diligence and thrift, while also enabling the financial association to advertise itself in the local area as a place where like-minded members might find resources and financial credit for the improvement of agriculture.

The photograph of the Kŭmsan noticeboard captures a further dimension: the perspective of the residents of Kŭmsan who the financial association hoped would join as members and adopt some of the practices outlined above. This perspective is easily overlooked in accounts of colonial agriculture. Most remaining documents are produced by the financial associations and similar organizations themselves, and as such are unsurprisingly celebratory about the effectiveness of the associations’ activities and their impact in the local area. Indeed, even this photograph was printed in an official history of the financial associations, included in a section encouraging best practices alongside photographs of a membership ceremony at the Kŭmsŏng association (raising members’ sense of affiliation with the association) and a meeting for members’ wives at the Ulsan association (spreading the associations’ messaging more broadly within villages). All the same, the view of the noticeboard “in action” raises important questions about how the financial associations operated within local communities. What did the people walking along the path think about the noticeboard and the financial association? Were they interested in the information on the sign, and could they even read it? Or did they ignore the noticeboard as irrelevant to their day-to-day activities? If so, where were they going and what were they doing instead? To be sure, a single photograph is not sufficient to answer these questions. But such questions can be an important first step in thinking about the broader history of agricultural change in modern Korea, and the experiences of Korean cultivators who lived through colonial rule.

Holly Stephens is a lecturer in Japanese and Korean Studies in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

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