Violaine Sebillotte Cuchet —

Artemisia, who fought at Salamis, was not at all an ordinary woman. Herodotus affirms this. Her courage made her admirable and worthy of appearing in his account. Nor were the Amazons who founded the Sauromatian people ordinary wives. They refused to join the households of their companions and obediently stay at home, spinning, weaving, and waiting for their husbands. They were women warriors, like Artemisia. The motif of the ordinary woman resonates with the idea that Herodotus’s audience could conjure of Greek women like Andromache, gently but firmly sent back to the palace. While such remarks only applied to wives—that is, free women— they were often generalized, as if they described the reality of all Greek women, thus attributing a shared lifestyle to the entire female population. To be a woman in a Greek city-state supposedly meant staying at home and doing domestic tasks, or supervising those who were assigned such work. Women—a term that cannot designate all women, since other women worked for them—were supposedly relegated to the private space, while men—a term that, for the same reason, cannot designate all men—supposedly worked and discussed eminently more serious things outside the home. Such a framework does not allow for comprehending the existence of Artemisia; it even renders that existence impossible. Quite happily, numerous counterexamples provided by replenished documentation now offer proof that these representations are very much stereotypes.

Most of the texts handed down to us through manuscripts convey, at one point or another, these received ideas. Herodotus is no exception to the rule. During the war council called by Mardonius, Artemisia declares it straight out: The Greeks dominate the Persians (on the sea) like men dominate women. Further on and not guilelessly, Herodotus puts in the mouth of Xerxes a conclusion as dogmatic as it is ridiculous on the episode at Salamis that witnessed the defeat of the Persian army. “My men have become women and my women men,” Xerxes the Great supposedly said.¹ A few years later, Aristophanes takes up the stereotype, giving it a comic twist; men dominate women, especially sexually. Obviously in Aristophanes’s play that is not at all the case, but just the opposite.² The epic poets, dramatic poets, historians, philosophers, and those who studied nature and the human body: In Herodotus’s time they all conveyed—and sometimes without taking responsibility for them—such sexist stereotypes that reinforced the idea of men and women constituting two absolutely distinct groups, each of them homogeneous and both strictly hierarchized.

Now all Artemisia’s actions demonstrate the opposite. It is Artemisia, a woman, who dupes Xerxes and her Athenian pursuers. Artemisia, the Greek queen of Halicarnassus, is full of andreia and therefore admirable. As we know, stereotypes are often deployed to create a feeling of complicity between the one using them and those being addressed. They simplify complex realities by means of narrative elements that are easy to handle and manipulate.³ In this way they are an essential entry point for apprehending the discourse on Artemisia, and especially for understanding a framework through which the ancients and the moderns could have conceived her figure, to the point of rendering it extraordinary and implausible.

Very often stereotypes were not identified by modern historians who, in general, paid no attention to them. Indeed, gender stereotypes belonged to the pool of familiar, obvious facts. Because she did not correspond to the idea they held of a true woman, modern historians thus characterized the strong and courageous Artemisia as a “virago” or a “man-woman.^“4 In their eyes, her actions and behavior did not fulfill the expectations for her sex/gender. Of course, historians could argue that by characterizing Artemisia as masculine they were only reconstructing what the Greeks thought. Nevertheless, in this case, nothing in Herodotus’s Histories suggests that Artemisia’s behavior was considered to be out of conformance with her gender, except the attitude of the Athenian leaders, from which, moreover, our ancient historian distances himself. In his eyes, to the contrary, Artemisia’s andreia was completely positive. The problem with ancient stereotypes is that they are often ours as well, and for this reason, may pass unnoticed. Yet it is in resisting the appeal of false stereotypes—about women and men in general—that we can identify them and consider them for what they were, rhetorical motifs.

As grounds for the idea that the Greeks conceived of women as beings apart, contemporary historiography has made much of Pandora, a mythic figure from Hesiod’s poetry. Pandora embodied all that the Greeks supposedly thought of women and their nature—considered as different from their own and responsible for all evils.⁵ The Hesiodic myth and its variants shed light on a more complex attitude regarding women, referring uniquely to the category of wives here in the myth as in most uses of the sexist stereotype. Aristophanes expressed this crudely: Gender stereotypes had as their backdrop the sexual relationship that was the basis of legitimate marriage, necessarily heterosexual.

In fact, at the heart of the stereotyped image that opposed women and men, of course we find the question of generation. Sexual difference was central to it and gave rise to various theories on the nature of women and men. Even so, had those specialists in the human body, whose works were widely read in Herodotus’s time, developed a theory on sexual difference? Feminist philosophers and historians have insisted on the role that Aristotle played in the idea that this difference divided and structured humanity by establishing a sexual distribution of social functions in the city-state. This differentialist discourse ought to be reinscribed into the more diverse panorama of ancient representations of the human body if we want to avoid developing what would be, this time, a contemporary stereotype of ancient Greece.

It is not a matter of contesting that, in antiquity, women were the subject of discourse that described them as naturally opposite to and socially dominated by men, and even as being born defective. But it is essential to identify the stereotyped nature of these formulations to avoid, in our turn, spreading modern prejudices about ancient Greeks and Artemisia. In this way we will be able to understand the extent to which Artemisia, very much a leader and warrior, was an ordinary woman. Artemisia is not weak, fearful, or fragile. Nor is she an inveterate, fatal seductress. She is not even that woman described by Plato as naturally driven by the single desire to have children. Does that make her an extraordinary woman? Her political intelligence, her vigor, and her courage—could they be perceived as normal characteristics for a woman?

1. Herodotus, Histories 8.88, Purvis 2009 trans. ︎
2. Aristophanes, Lysistrata 674–80. ︎
3. Harris 2018, 167. ︎
4. Hornblower 1982, 24; Munson 1988, 103, 106. ︎
5. Among others see Nicole Loraux, “Sur la race des femmes et quelques-unes de ses tribus,” in Loraux 1981b, 75–117; Zeitlin 1996. ︎

Violaine Sebillotte Cuchet is professor of ancient Greek history at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a specialist in the history of women and gender. Jody Gladding is an award-winning poet and translator.

The post An excerpt from Queen, Warrior, Captain: The Story of Artemesia of Halicarnassus appeared first on Yale University Press.

Eva Mroczek—

The Dead Sea Scrolls—a cache of Jewish manuscripts copied between ca. 300 BCE – 50 CE, including the oldest copies of biblical texts ever discovered—are on display at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC through September. The Museum of the Bible is a conservative Christian institution established by the owners of the craft store Hobby Lobby.

You may remember Hobby Lobby from a landmark Supreme Court case (Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 2014), where the company successfully argued for the right to deny their employees insurance coverage for birth control on religious grounds. Or you may have heard of them back in 2011, when US Customs caught them illegally smuggling ancient cuneiform tablets looted from Iraq—mislabeled as ceramic tile samples— for their new museum. In 2017, they were forced to repatriate 3,800 artifacts to Iraq and pay a three million dollar fine.

The last time the Museum of the Bible exhibited “Dead Sea Scrolls” (2017-2020), every single one was exposed as a modern fake. The forged fragments, which had “mysteriously” appeared on the antiquities market, cost the museum undisclosed millions. The same back room deals for forged ancient manuscripts had also duped the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Texas, a few other conservative American institutions, and the Norwegian manuscript collector Martin Schøyen.

This time, the batch of Dead Sea Scrolls on display at the Museum is the real deal: authentic fragments on temporary loan from the Israel Antiquities Authority. But the rhetoric about the Scrolls, real or fake, is the same: the Scrolls, the oldest copies of biblical texts ever found, are physical proof that the Bible is valid. What exactly this means is rarely explained. Some fundamentalist personalities leave it at that, allowing their audience to believe that Hellenistic-era documents somehow prove that all the stories in the Bible—creation in seven days, Abraham and Sarah, the Exodus from Egypt, King David’s rule—are literally true. But the Scrolls can say nothing at all about what was actually happening in 2000 or 1000 BCE. They can only tell us how Jewish writers hundreds of years later, in the Hellenistic and Early Roman periods, were writing about the tales and traditions of their ancestors.

Other commentators are more specific, explaining that the Scrolls prove that the text of the Bible has been accurately transmitted over two thousand years. There is some truth to this, but only in a limited way: among the Scrolls are partial copies of every book in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) except Esther, and many of those texts are very similar, nearly identical to the traditional Hebrew text, transmitted by generations of Jewish scribes, that serves as the basis for our modern translations. But the biblical texts we use today were only one version of several that were circulating during the time the Scrolls were copied. Contrary to claims that the Scrolls reveal that “the Bible” was always identical, what they actually reveal includes at least two different editions of Exodus, a long and a short Jeremiah, a dizzying variety of psalms including many that are not in the canonical Bible, and dozens of alternative stories, prayers, and visionary texts that made up the sacred library of early Judaism.

Whether maximalist (the Scrolls prove everything in the Bible is true!) or more limited (the Scrolls prove the biblical text has not changed!), most religious claims pay little attention to the content of the texts. They rarely go into any detail about what’s in them, except to repeat the claim that they are the same as our own Bible. What a shame to miss so much that is new about the Scrolls: superhuman heroes on heavenly journeys, racy dialogues between patriarchs and their wives, apocalyptic battles that rival Peter Jackson’s vision of the war for Middle-Earth. What’s really in the Scrolls, and accessible in translation for anyone to read, is rarely part of the story.

Instead, what religious audiences always learn is the oddly symbolic-sounding account of their discovery: a Bedouin shepherd boy was looking for his goat in the hostile desert, and providentially stumbled upon these precious writings forgotten in a cave for two thousand years. Often, the year of the discovery—1947, the year before the State of Israel was established—becomes a central symbol. Christian Zionists believe that this political moment fulfilled biblical prophecies of the “Ingathering of Israel” to the land, a step on the way to the second coming of Jesus, after which Jews would be converted or damned. It was no coincidence that the spectacular discovery of the Scrolls, long-lost “proof” for the Bible, occurred just before one of its most dramatic prophecies, in their interpretation, came true. It was a sign of God’s work in the world.

What matters most to the popular imagination is not the Scrolls themselves, but the story about them. Hidden Scrolls, Buried Bibles: How We Discover the Sacred Past shows that the story about their discovery by a shepherd in a cave, while mostly true, is a version of a much older religious tale told by Jews and Christians. The tale of ancient manuscripts that were lost for generations, found again at a time of crisis, and changed everything is as old as the story of King Josiah in the Bible itself. Stories like this continue to be told over centuries, and many sound the same: hostile landscapes, remote caves, animal guides, illiterate and reckless discoverers, and looming disaster. Ancient texts have a powerful aura as physical objects, and the saga of their loss, survival, and recovery is providential. This is why even tiny, illegible fragments of parchment are displayed as holy relics of biblical truth.

Hidden Scrolls, Buried Bibles shows that our fascination with stories about lost texts is rooted in ancient religious ideas, and that even modern scholarly accounts of manuscript discovery are shaped by ancient Jewish and Christian storytelling. It’s a literary and religious genre worth understanding. It explains why people revere the Dead Sea Scrolls as an idea, even when they have little interest in what’s in them, and why institutions will pay millions to buy illegible scraps of the ancient past. But it also serves as a warning: such captivating stories distract us from the looting, smuggling, violence, and forgery that plagues archaeology and the antiquities trade, mythwashing these crimes in tales of mystery and revelation.

Eva Mroczek is the Simon and Riva Spatz Chair in Jewish Studies and professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at Dalhousie University in Canada. She is the award-winning author of The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity.

The post What do the Dead Sea Scrolls really prove? Forgers, smugglers, and the myth of discovery appeared first on Yale University Press.

No There There

In 1935, while Gertrude Stein, who lived in Paris, was on an American lecture tour, she visited the Bay Area and spoke at Stanford and Berkeley. She had spent her formative girlhood years on a ten-acre farm in rural East Oakland, but when she sought it out she found that the farm had been subdivided into residential lots. “The house the big house and the big garden and the eucalyptus trees and the rose hedge naturally were not any longer existing,” she wrote with her usual scant punctuation. Her visit to Oakland was the source of one of her best-known aphorisms: “What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.” There is no there there. She was not referring to the city of Oakland, as is sometimes claimed; she was making a point about memory and loss, but the pithy aphorism became a popular cultural trope for the anonymity of many modern cities.

What happened? In the distant past, architecture was limited to monumental buildings, churches and palaces, surrounding which were ordinary buildings that reflected the local vernacular. Thus, English towns were different from Italian hill towns, just as the tall row houses of Amsterdam were different from the mietskasernen (rental barracks) of Berlin. This remained true in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when architects were designing not only civic and religious monuments but also offices, apartment buildings, hotels, department stores, and movie theaters, because architectural eclecticism and the presence of ornament— simple and complicated, guarded and extravagant, often local in character—guaranteed a degree of variety. Things started to change in the 1950s, with the ascendancy of an architecture that favored severely functional buildings without ornament and without evidence of craftsmanship. Not for nothing was it called the International Style. Thanks to industrialization, building techniques were standardized, and the same steel-and-glass curtain walls appeared in Boston and Berlin, Montreal and Mexico City, Philadelphia and Phnom Penh.

By the 1980s, some architects had grown dissatisfied with this homogeneity. “For many of us working with the language of abstract modern architecture, Bauhaus International Style, call it what you will, this language has become repetitious, simplistic, and too narrowly confining,” observed James Stirling. Stirling’s solution was to look to history for inspiration, often recent history; others looked to local building traditions. Late in his career, from the mid-1980s until his death in 1997, Paul Rudolph built a number of office towers in Southeast Asia, not only in Hong Kong but also in Singapore and Indonesia. They include the Wisma Dharmala Headquarters Building, a twenty-four-story office building in Jakarta. “I wanted to make a building that was uniquely Indonesian,” Rudolph explained to an interviewer. He had visited Indonesian villages and been impressed by the way that overhanging roofs protected houses from the sun. “That had to do with roofs and so this, even though it’s a vertical building, and even though it’s air conditioned, uses a series of roofs. It also has to do with terraces, even though it’s an office building. The planting there is so fantastic. The office with planting seemed important. . . I wanted to take a cue from the vernacular architecture of Indonesia and really have a building that was truly protected from the sun. That’s essentially why I think it belongs there. It would be ridiculous to build it in New York City.”

Stacked-up house roofs compose the basic form of the traditional pagoda. Unlike a pagoda, however, the sloping roofs of the Dharmala Building are highly abstracted, and the building’s columnar structure, which is concealed in a pagoda, is plainly visible. Although the structure is reinforced concrete, the exterior surfaces, including the roofs, are covered in white ceramic tile. In addition, the rotated floor plans introduce considerable three-dimensional richness; this is anything but a box. The presence of outdoor terraces and planting creates the impression of a hanging garden. Is it Jakarta or Babylon—or maybe both?

The high-rise buildings Rudolph built in Southeast Asian cities are redolent with local character. The challenge with this approach is identifying what exactly qualifies as “local.” Few places have the sort of distinctive climate and traditions Rudolph encountered in Indonesia. Philadelphia, for example, has many brick buildings, but so do other East Coast cities. Nor does the city have a distinctive architectural style. Surviving colonial buildings such as Independence Hall tend to be Georgian, but later buildings demonstrate a variety of architectural styles: the prominent City Hall is Empire, an imposing art museum is Greek Revival, a concert hall is an example of German Rundbogenstil, or round-arch style, and the central library is French Neoclassical, modeled on the Place de la Concorde. As for Frank Furness’s creations, they defy easy categorization.

We have all seen airport bars and restaurants that attempt to create a sense of place with period photos, team pennants, and other knickknacks. Or “Main Street” shopping malls that resemble movie sets rather than real places. Sometimes the harder you work at what architects optimistically call “place-making,” the more artificial are the results. On the other hand, the Cherry Street Tavern, where I sometimes have lunch, with its worn wooden bar and faded Bob Dylan posters, is a real place. That is, it is real for me. That is why the architectural goal of place-making is so elusive; place is often in the mind of the beholder. If there is a there there, it may be the result of experience, memory, or even myth. I remember the first time I walked into the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street, long before its current heartless renovation. My experience of this legendary locale had less to do with its physical design, which was not particularly memorable, than with its literary reputation—there in the corner of the Rose Room was the fabled Round Table; there sat Harold Ross and Dorothy Parker.

Is place-making a futile endeavor? Not necessarily. Take two buildings in Philadelphia: the thirty-three-story Francis Drake Hotel and the seventeen-story US Customs House, which date from around 1930 and were both designed by the local firm Ritter & Shay.* The buildings combine Art Deco features with traditional motifs. Their unprecedented (for that time) height is handled by modulating the ornamentation: more at the bottom, less on the way up, and something interesting on top. The undecorated brick shaft of the Drake is capped by terraces, tile roofs, and a Spanish Baroque dome, while the limestone-and-brick Customs House is finished off to great effect with an octagonal lantern that originally contained a furnace that glowed at night and emitted dark smoke during the day. The Drake has been converted into condominium apartments, and the Customs House continues to be a federal office, although it is slated to be sold. There is nothing particularly Philadelphian about Spanish domes or smoking lanterns, yet walking by these striking buildings I look up and recognize old friends, and I know exactly where I am.

*Verus T. Ritter and Howell Lewis Shay were in practice together from 1920 to 1933, and became the leading architects of high- rise buildings in downtown Philadelphia, including the Packard Building, for which they received an AIA Gold Medal. The federal Customs House commission was the result of a national competition.

Witold Rybczynski is an architect and emeritus professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Home: A Short History of an Idea and The Story of Architecture.

The post An excerpt from What Architecture Is appeared first on Yale University Press.

Nelson Lichtenstein—

One might think that the kind of big political strikes cum public manifestations frequent in Latin America, eastern Europe, France, Italy, and the rest of southern Europe are entirely alien to the United States. We have had big marches, some sponsored or co-sponsored by the unions, but they are held on a Saturday. But this weekend protest tradition is actually of relatively recent ori­gin, with an unexamined politics and strategic outlook that has weakened the very impact of the cause those participating seek to advance. Although more people might be expected to show up on a Saturday, the potency of their protest is diluted by creating a divide between what people do in the arena of politics and how they conduct themselves in the world of work.

In the nineteenth century and for decades thereafter, one could hardly make such a distinction. A demonstration, a strike, and a march were all part of the same protest. Workers in tightly packed industrial districts “turned out” of their factories and mills and, marching by neighboring worksites, called on their mates to down tools and join the parade. In their demand for a shorter workday, union recognition, or higher wages, they sought not just to stop production but to occupy the public square—civic space—in order to demonstrate their power both as workers and rights-bearing citizens. Thus did the women of the antebellum Lowell Mills declare themselves “daughters of freemen” in protest against the “Lords of the Loom and the Lords of the Lash.” Clashes with the police or militia were frequent because the local bourgeoisie were just as determined to deny such public legiti­macy to a proletariat organizing itself for political and economic combat.¹

In the 1930s and 1940s, when the industrial unions were on the rise, the biggest demonstrations also shut down factory districts in Detroit, Chicago, Akron, Oakland, the garment district of Manhattan, and other industrial hubs. In Detroit tens of thou­sands of autoworkers filled Cadillac Square in a series of one-day general strikes that were as much political as economic in their demands. In April 1937 the UAW emptied scores of factories to protest police assaults on female sit-down strikers then occupying department stores and smaller industrial establishments. After the war, in July 1946, the UAW again filled downtown Detroit, with fifty thousand striking workers, to demand the continuation of war-era price controls on meat, milk, and consumer goods es­sential to working-class families. And just fifteen months later, on April 24, 1947, the autoworkers shut down Chrysler, Ford, and many other factories in the city to fill Cadillac Square with more than a quarter million people protesting the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act then pending in Congress. This demonstration, on a Thursday, was by far the largest in U.S. history up to that point.But it was much more than a big assemblage because, as one union leader forecast, it seemed to open an era of class-wide gen­eral strikes deploying “the kind of political power which is most effective in Europe.”²

McCarthyism, prosperity, and the routinization of collective bargaining ended that prospect, but the understanding that dem­onstrations should have a working-class dimension was not lost on those like African American unionist A. Philip Randolph, who or­ganized the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” That demonstration was held on Wednesday, August 28, 1963. The orga­nizers, who included many from the ranks of labor as well as the civil rights leadership, did not intend to shut down work in Wash­ington, DC. But that is exactly what the march accomplished.

“At 8 a.m.” reported journalist Russell Baker, “when rush-hour traffic is normally creeping bumper-to-bumper across the Vir­ginia bridges and down the main boulevards from Maryland, the streets had the abandoned look of Sunday morning.” Many Afri­can Americans in government employment and elsewhere un­doubtedly skipped work to join the march. But of the 160,000 federal and city employees, most were white and most of them stayed home, while nearly half of local businesses were closed. White tourists also avoided the city, leaving many hotel rooms vacant. As in the nineteenth century, the occupation of public space by a seemingly alien stratum of the populace had proven profoundly disquieting to those accustomed to the deference and invisibility of that social element. “For the natives,” Baker wrote, “this was obviously a day of siege, and the streets were being left to the marchers.”³

Ironically, it was the generation of self-consciously radical young people, organized into the Students for a Democratic So­ciety (SDS), who ended the century-long tradition that linked demonstrations, marches, and the world of work. When SDS leaders planned the first big protest against the war in Vietnam, a march down the National Mall from the Washington Monument to the Capitol, they chose Saturday, April 17, 1965, for the event. Most undoubtedly calculated that more students and workaday adults would show up on a weekend, but SDS was thereby repu­diating the tactics first deployed by the generation of antiwar ac­tivists who, in the 1930s, had tried to shut down Brooklyn College, Columbia, the Seven Sisters, and the rest of the Ivy League. Mimicking industrial labor, those Depression-era peace strikes were invariably held when weekday classes were still in ses­sion, much to the annoyance of college and university adminis­trators, who often redbaited and expelled the ringleaders.⁴

In the 1960s, however, we had antiwar marches, not student strikes. Almost regardless of who organized them, they were held on a Saturday. Even the radical March on the Pentagon, designed to stop the war planners, came on a Saturday and Sunday in the fall of 1967. In these marches the main idea was not to exercise a degree of shut-it-down economic power but to bear witness to the immorality of the war, to recruit new layers of society to the cause, and to make a political statement that would encourage politi­cians to defund the war or otherwise shift their policy posture. There were exceptions to this strategy, as with the genuine student strike that came in the wake of a May 1970 National Guard shoot­ing at Kent State University, which killed four protesters. The protest was bigger than anything in the 1930s; millions of students forced the closure of more than four hundred colleges and univer­sities, in some cases for the remainder of the school year.

Strike radicalism of that sort faded over the next several de­cades. Giant demonstrations, including the 1982 nuclear freeze march in New York City and the worldwide protests against the impending invasion of Iraq early in 2003, were held on Saturdays, as were marches defending women’s rights and those seeking full equality for gays and lesbians. Even labor conformed to the pat­tern. When the AFL-CIO brought hundreds of thousands of members to Washington in 1981 and 1991 for “Solidarity Day” rallies, they chose a late-summer Saturday for the two National Mall assemblies. Indeed, for aging leftists the periodic trek to the nation’s capital had begun to take on a ritualistic flavor. They were morally compelling and politically necessary, but they seemed to leave but a light impression on the social politics of the day.

The protest movement against the nation’s increasingly xeno­phobic immigration policies has been the great exception. On May Day 2006, a Wednesday, hundreds of thousands of people, mainly Latino, stopped work and took to the streets in a series of marches in Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Washington, and scores of smaller cities. They were seeking to forestall congressional pas­sage of a highly restrictive immigration bill. This first “Day with­out Immigrants” proved a stupendous success. Latino pride and power took a giant leap forward. Thousands of workplaces shut down and even some of the most viciously exploitative employers of Latino labor, like Perdue, Cargill, and Tyson Foods, closed their factories to avoid an open conflict with an energized and determined workforce. Immigrant truckers at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach demonstrated their crucial strategic power by stopping the flow of thousands of containers worth bil­lions of dollars.⁵ And this show of force paid off: within a month the Senate rejected punitive immigration reform, and in Novem­ber the Democrats captured control of both legislative chambers, a prologue to Barack Obama’s presidential victory in 2008.

Almost twenty years later another set of protests took the form of a general strike in Minneapolis, where the Trump administra­tion’s deployment of nearly three thousand highly militarized Im­migration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel generated outrage, conflict, and the shooting death of two U.S. citizens, who were themselves participants in the citizen patrols and wit­ness groups seeking to observe and thwart the roundup of thou­sands of fearful immigrants, many legally in the country. On January 23, 2026, a Friday, more than fifty thousand people braved sub-zero temperatures to march through downtown Minneapolis demanding “ICE out of Minnesota.” Like other recent protest walkouts, from the 2006 “Day without Immigrants” to the 2018 red state teacher strikes, the initiating call for the strike came not from existing trade union leadership but from clergy, students, rank-and-file radicals, and even some civic leaders, who called for “no work, no shopping, no school.” But once the idea was put in play, Minnesota’s large cohort of progressive unions quickly en­dorsed the day of action, giving it even more momentum and le­gitimacy. Although the city’s largest companies did not cease operations, hundreds of shops, restaurants, and smaller enterprises closed, often on the insistence of their employees, unionized or not. The Minneapolis mobilization was a genuinely cross-class social movement whose vigils, patrols, and food deliveries to shut-in immigrants built a powerful sense of resistance and solidarity.⁶

In subsequent weeks the Minneapolis movement inspired school walkouts and protest meetings across the country and made opposition to ICE and Border Patrol “occupation” of American urban areas a political flashpoint in Congress and else­where. Faced with such a national outcry, the Trump administra­tion retreated in mid-February 2026, announcing the rapid withdrawal from Minnesota of its militarized street personnel. But when threatened with a suspension of funding to the Depart­ment of Homeland Security, in charge of ICE and the Border Patrol, the government agreed to just a few curbs on how those agencies deployed their heretofore freewheeling and often violent policing power.

Winning the Working Class

The big problem with even the most successful of these popular manifestations is that they leave no organizational legacy. Unlike a union that goes on strike, when the next crisis comes along, a new group of activists must start all over again. However, these glimpses into what an energized working class can accomplish offer a marker by which to measure the distance trade unionism in the United States must travel to revive itself and, in the pro­cess, transform the country. The difficulty is not just a consti­pated labor law or the hostility of MAGA Republicanism, because even when liberal Democrats are in office the union movement has barely grown, either in numbers or in power. One reason is that firm-centered collective bargaining of the sort envisioned by the framers of the Wagner Act is a poor fit for the kind of econ­omy in which most workers find themselves. Capitalism is trans­national and transmutable, creating a bewildering array of organizational forms under which work takes place. Given the globalized supply chains and the shapeshifting character of so many business enterprises, even a legally certified trade union en­joying the active support of its members may not have the eco­nomic or political leverage to win from some distant multinational a contract that creates a true measure of employee well-being and security.

We therefore need new tools. The NLRB, even under its most progressive leadership, has been neutered by the courts and gamed out by a phalanx of diabolically clever union avoidance law firms. For more than sixty years Congress has failed, when the Democrats were in control, to pass labor law reform, and it is increasingly apparent that even if they did, a more effective NLRB would have but marginal impact. We therefore need more powerful policies—both inducements and penalties—to alter corporate behavior, and that means a pro-union, pro-worker reg­ulation of the core investment strategies of the most powerful, technologically advanced corporations. As we saw in the case of Microsoft’s $68 billion merger with Activision Blizzard, the Fed­eral Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division of the Depart­ment of Justice have at their command regulatory instruments far more powerful and costly than anything in the NLRB’s antique arsenal. Likewise, if and when an industrial policy is once again put on the national agenda, offering billions in loans, grants, and tax breaks to corporations aligning their expansion program with that of “the plan,” a progressive government, at either the state or federal level, might well make corporate neutrality toward any union-organizing effort a prerequisite to opening the money spigot. If big firms find that their billion-dollar investment plans are at stake when the union impulse raises its head, then an ac­commodation with their workers will seem a very small price to pay.

1. Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), 69–84, 145–73. ︎
2. Nelson Lichtenstein, Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 80, 262. ︎
3. William Jones, The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (New York: Norton, 2013), 178. ︎
4. Robert Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America’s First Mass Student Movement, 1929–1941 (New York: Ox­ford University Press, 1993), 91–94. ︎
5. Randal Archibold, “Immigrants Take to U.S. Streets in Show of Strength,” New York Times, May 2, 2006, A1. ︎
6. Luis Feliz Leon, “In the Twin Cities, A Massive Strike against ICE,” Labor Notes, January 27, 2026; Christina Morales, “Protesters Rally across the U.S. in Solidarity with Minneapolis,” New York Times, January 31, 2026; Sabrina Tavernise, “Tested by ICE Turmoil, Many in Twin Cities Feel Sense of Power,” New York Times, February 12, 2026, A12. ︎

Nelson Lichtenstein is research professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The author or editor of more than twenty books on labor, business, and economic policy, he lives in Santa Barbara, CA.

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What drew you to Jean Toomer as a subject? What was the research process like?

George Hutchinson: Much of my work has been related to the Harlem Renaissance and American racial culture, and Toomer is a fascinating subject in relation to both. His book Cane was and is considered a breakthrough in African American literature. Some writers of the time even dated the “renaissance” to the publication of that book. And yet, Toomer refused to be labeled a “Negro.” He considered himself the first conscious member of a new “race”—the American race—to which he believed all Americans unconsciously belonged or at least were destined to belong. I had written about Toomer often in the past and had recently edited a Penguin Classics edition of Cane, the introduction of which was published in the New York Review of Books Daily. Henry Louis Gates Jr. asked if I would consider writing a book for the Black Lives Series and suggested Toomer. During COVID, a book I had started on Herman Melville was stalled because of travel limitations. I thought Toomer would make a great subject, and I already knew the archive, mostly at Yale’s Beinecke Library, very well. Also, the library had digitized much of that archive, so I could do much of the early research from home during the pandemic. Toomer’s correspondence with his mentor, Waldo Frank, had been published. The papers of others who were close to Toomer, like Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, are also at the Beinecke, and much of O’Keeffe’s correspondence has been published. Later, of course, I visited the Beinecke as well as other manuscript libraries. The part of Toomer’s life I didn’t know as much about (from the late 1920s on) required learning a lot about the cult leader, G. I. Gurdjieff. I hadn’t realized how many brilliant artists across all media had become his followers, and I had to come to an understanding of how his practice worked to grasp how Toomer used it. The later periods of Toomer’s life such as his travels in India seeking spiritual enlightenment, and his late years on a farm in Bucks County, opened new, intimate dimensions of his character by way of intimate interviews with and memoirs by people who knew him, including his second wife. Every step was fascinating.

Toomer’s play, Natalie Mann, is inspired by George Bernard Shaw’s play, Man and Superman. It’s said that Toomer can relate to the social pressures shown in the play. Do you believe Toomer is a “superman”?

GH: No, I certainly don’t think Toomer was a superman. He was a very flawed person, like most of us. Yet, what emerged in my research was how deeply he yearned, from his late teens on, to be a superman. This helped explain his turn to Gurdjieff and his discomfort with racial labels. It seems to be a compensatory aspiration for a young man of proud background in vulnerable circumstances. He was born into the heights of the “colored aristocracy” of Washington, DC, yet had lost his father virtually at birth and his mother as he neared puberty, to then be raised by his grandmother and his famous grandfather, a great Race Man, while the family was declining into poverty. In early childhood, all his friends were white, and throughout his life into adulthood, he moved easily between the black and white worlds, although he did not look white to most people. The “superman” aspiration was also connected to his desire to be neither white nor black but something “higher,” and of the future. This merged into a search for Cosmic Consciousness. First, Shaw’s play inspired him; later he discovered Walt Whitman, along with the current studies of him that presented Whitman as the very apogee of Cosmic Consciousness. Whitman had presented Americans metaphorically as a “new race”––not in Toomer’s sense, yet nonetheless mixing many past traditions into a new Democratic mode of being, promising to bring humanity back into harmony with nature and the cosmos. Toomer thought he could be a successor of sorts. Toward the end of his life, as a Quaker, he realized that it was a flawed dream. He had “put on too much of an act.”¹ He embraced Christian humility.

By researching Jean Toomer, how do you feel racial oppression shaped his relationships with his mom, grandparents, and uncle. Do you believe his inner feelings had a subconscious effect on his romantic relationships?

All of Toomer’s early childhood friends were white, children of recent German immigrants and the like. He felt fully accepted by them and their families. But then he had to attend a “colored” school rather than the one they attended. (Later in life, he admitted he must have repressed how this affected him). Then he fell very ill. When he returned to full health, he no longer “fit in.” I suspect that one reason for this was that the white children had grown into the color line, so to speak. So early on, I think Toomer suffered a deep wound from institutional racism. Again, after his mother remarried and they moved to New Rochelle, New York, he lived in a white neighborhood but attended an integrated school with almost all white children. Here again, he came to feel accepted and happy. Then his mother died, and his grandparents took him back to Washington. For the first time, he really became part of the black community. Yet the ground was being hollowed out beneath his generation as Woodrow Wilson segregated the civil service and middle-class occupations for black people in the capital withered. Some of Toomer’s friends began passing as white. He took a different route, leaving for college in the Midwest and deciding that he would let people take him for whatever “race” they might. Some people took him for Native American, others for South Asian. Some knew he was black in American terminology. He considered himself “American,” and tried to be independent of all such labels. That remained his position through life, but of course most people who learned of his black ancestry considered him a Negro. When he married his first, white wife and newspapers made much of the “interracial” marriage, he proclaimed that it was the marriage of two “Americans,” and publicly broadcast his prophetic vision.

What similarities can you pull from the racial oppression Jean Toomer faced to the racial injustices the world experiences today?

GH: I should first mention that Toomer, his widow and closest friends, would object to people interpreting all of his life’s work through the lens of racial oppression. They felt he was seeking enlightenment like a Buddhist or Christian seeker of any race, and his failure to achieve cosmic consciousness vexed him more than his “racial” struggle. Anti-blackness is still, of course, widespread in the U.S. and much of the world. But the most significant relevant comparison seems to be between what a black writer or artist in any mode was expected to create at the time and related expectations today. This also pertains to how whatever a black writer or artist creates is interpreted through a “racial” lens, which drove Toomer crazy. As soon as someone learns an artist is black, they automatically filter their perceptions of the work through that lens, which also affects marketability.

The Harlem Renaissance was an artistic and social movement for the African American culture to challenge racist stereotypes. How did Jean Toomer use the movement to enlighten Americans on a “new” American race? What do you think a modern-day Harlem Renaissance would look like? What would it achieve?

GH: The explosion of African American and black diasporic arts today vastly exceeds that of the Harlem Renaissance and is much more broadly honored with prestigious exhibitions and sales. The Harlem Renaissance opened important doors and established a cultural field with competing positions on aesthetics and cultural philosophy. It helped establish black authority over the “image” of the race. Toomer’s Cane substantially contributed to this, and he has remained a touchstone for many black writers and other artists, despite his own intentions. Yet, I don’t know anyone who accepts Toomer’s idea of the “American race.” Americans define themselves, above all, by the very racial identities that Toomer thought were being subsumed into the new one. You can change your nationality, your class, your religion, your sexual orientation, even your gender to some extent, but you can’t choose your race. It’s the great contradiction to the liberal ideology at the heart of American culture. The family was recruited early on to the reproduction of “race,” to ensure people grew up with a thoroughly internalized sense of which “race” they belonged to, affecting their innermost feelings, their relationships with others, how they moved and spoke with whom. Toomer noted that Americans of all races shared this sort of embodied racial “common sense” no matter what side they were assigned to. He thought that was a major obstacle to true self-realization. That his “American race” seemed delusional to others only confirmed his singular, prophetic calling. White supremacy remains powerful, and black Americans have developed a strong sense of being a “people” with an inspiring history. Toomer’s vision still seems delusional; and yet today more and more people with parents of different “races” resent questions about “what they are.” Some feel a disconnect between their external social identity and their primary relationships, the more intimate sense of who they “belong” to or with.

Can you provide a brief synopsis of Cane for someone who may not have read it yet? How did it show the difference between rural South and urban North during the Jim Crow era? How did it transform Black Literature as we know it today?

GH: Cane is an elegy for black folk culture during the period when it was being transformed by migration and modernity, and a meditation on the chaotic state of modern American culture more generally after World War I, as the migrants brought their culture to the urban North and transformed it. It is also a prelude, in Toomer’s view, to the emergence of his “new race,” a new America struggling to be born.

The book is a collage of lyrical prose, sketch, poetry, short stories, and quasi-dramatic narratives. It comes in three parts focused on varieties of contemporary black life—first, set in a rural southern town, then in more northern urban neighborhoods, and finally, back south in the rural town again. The first section of Cane evokes Southern black “soul” and rootedness in nature—the beauty, pain, and spiritual depth of the black “folk” and folk expression, which responds to Christian faith, the heritage of slavery, and racial oppression. But Cane is an elegy to that folk spirit, which Toomer thought was being subsumed by modernity and absorbed into a new American identity. 

In the second section, he sets his poems and stories in Washington, D.C. and Chicago. The rhythms of both the prose and the poems become rapid, staccato, in tune with the urban environment. The black migrants are “blackening” the cities, infiltrating them with black soul and erotic energies, but being absorbed into the urban market economy and social order. Class relations become more complicated within the race. Within this environment, Toomer inserts several frustrated, potentially prophetic figures who chafe against class lines, color lines, and Victorian sexual mores.

The third section is a longer, quasi-dramatic narrative, focused on a Toomer-like figure struggling ineffectually to synthesize all the contradictory forces in his life—black and white, rural and urban, soul and body, rootedness and mobility. In this attempt at synthesis, he struggles for a new language. Or rather, that new language struggles to be born through him. The book, Toomer says in the epigraph, is “oracular.”

Toomer thought the book was prophetic of his “new race,” but it has been almost universally understood as pointing the way toward a modern black aesthetic, which is a plausible interpretation even though he disagreed with it. (As a result, he has often been considered a traitor for not continuing to write “black literature.”) After all, in terms of current American racial discourse and the “one-drop rule,” Toomer’s American race would be considered black. In its contradictory relationship to racial discourse, Cane tells us something of the structures that still delimit, shape, and sustain American identities.

1. Gorham B. Munson, interview with India M. Watterson 27-28 June 1969, tape 1, side 1, p. 8, transcript in Amistad Research Center, New Orleans., ︎
2. Adeline P. Saffold to P.B.S Pinchback, 30 April 1863, in Jean Toomer Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. ︎
3. Mathew Benjamin Brady, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. ︎

George Hutchinson is the Newton C. Farr Professor of American Culture and the George Reed Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Cornell University. He is the award-winning author of several books, including In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line and the Pulitzer Prize–nominated The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. He is editor of the Penguin Classics edition of Jean Toomer’s Cane. Hutchinson lives in Trumansburg, NY.

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“A tour de force. Violaine Sebillotte Cuchet uses the brief account of Artemisia in Herodotus as a fulcrum to advance our understanding of the authority ancient Greek women could legitimately wield.”—Lillian Doherty, University of Maryland

Violaine Sebillotte Cuchet examines the unique story of Artemisia to reveal how the residents of Greek city-states viewed women in power, how power relations defined social relations, and how notions of masculinity, femininity, and otherness were construed. The life of Artemisia, long considered an exceptional case, sheds light on aspects of other women’s lives in Greek antiquity and counters the stereotypes developed over the centuries.

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“Beauvoir does a masterful job of showing how quickly even the most expertly tuned strings can slip into dissonance.”—Hilary Ilkay, Asymptote

The Image of Her, the 1966 final novel by Simone de Beauvoir, freshly translated here by Lauren Elkin, is rooted in the feminist revolutions of its era, yet it remains a strikingly relevant confrontation with the limits that society places on women and their power.

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“These are powerful, compact poems that resonate particularly strongly in the United States in early 2026—but sadly also in far too many other places.”—M. A. Orthofer, Complete Review

Longlisted for the 2026 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, Stolen Flower is Irma Pineda’s powerful sequence of poems memorializing the devastating crimes against Ernestina Ascencio Rosario and their ramifications. The poems, which appear here in the original Didxazá (Isthmus Zapotec), Spanish, and English, are a chorus of fictionalized voices: Ascencio herself, the land, and the community grapple with the terror. It is a lament and a call to action, refashioning the testimonial into a tribute to Mexico’s Indigenous peoples and their lands, cultures, and languages.

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“Ega is a talented chronicler of the behavior of the people around her. . . . [Notes to a Black Woman] is every bit as essential now as it was when it was first published.”—Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders

In the 1960s, hundreds of women traveled from French colonies in the West Indies to become domestic workers for white families in France. Lured by the French government with the false promise of economic opportunity, these women instead found themselves subjected to racial discrimination, deplorable living conditions, overwork, and no pay until they “earned back” the cost of the trip to France. Notes to a Black Woman is a piercing denunciation of the legacies of colonialism and slavery, a wholesale rejection of alienation, and an intimate archive of friendship, joy, solidarity, motherhood, and hope.

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“A manifesto on an individual’s social standing and its effect on what is said as well as what is heard. Those seeking a way to decolonize discussions of gender equality will find this slim volume rewarding.”—Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times

In a society shaped by the legacies of enslavement, white supremacy, and sexism, who has the right to a voice? In this elegant essay, Djamila Ribeiro offers a compelling intervention into contemporary discussions of power and identity: the concept of “speaking place.” A crucial component of conversations on race and gender in Brazil, speaking place is the idea that everyone has a social position in the world and that what we are able to say, and how it is received by others, depends on it. Ribeiro traces the history of Black feminist thought through several centuries, examining the ways that Black women have been silenced, ignored, and punished for speaking.

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“A complex and illuminating portrait of a group of healers in China . . . [that] offers profound insights about what it means to pursue and live a fulfilling life.”—Publishers Weekly

Named by the New Yorker as a Best Book of 2022. In rural Yun Village, herbalist Mrs. Yi lives with her husband in a cottage at the foot of Niulan Mountain, where she gathers herbs to treat the ailments of the villagers by day and studies medicine by night. Sickness and herbs are lovers, she tells her patients, rejoicing when they recover, comforting them when they do not. All the while, she hopes to find a worthy successor to take up her mantle. As curious younger villagers observe Mrs. Yi and begin imitating her work—planting gardens and studying the art of healing—they soon discover that the line dividing life from death is porous, and the mountain is more mysterious than they ever knew.

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“The surface of [Jelinek’s] prose cracks and bursts . . . fissured by phantasmagorical description, gallows humor, multilingual puns, and scouring sarcasm. . . . Jelinek’s novel is finally . . . a furious accumulation of lost moments and possible outcomes, an enormous, spectral kaleidoscope erected before the unfathomable.”—Dustin Illingworth, Washington Post

The Alpenrose is a mountain resort nestled in Austria’s scenic landscape among historic churches and castles. It is a vacation idyll that attracts tourists from all over Europe. It is also a mass burial site. Scrupulously rendered for the first time in English by Gitta Honegger, The Children of the Dead takes readers on a mind-bending ride through time, space, and memory. Concocted from experimental theater, splatter film, Gothic literature, philosophy, religion, and more, Jelinek’s phantasmagorical masterwork is a fierce confrontation with our fraught legacies in the name of the innocent dead.

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“Translated from the French with great intelligence and sensitivity by Alison Strayer. . . . Ernaux’s diary is a provocation: to accept these life scenes as worthy of our time and attention.”—Kate Briggs, Washington Post

A revelatory meditation on class and consumer culture, from 2022 Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux. For half a century, the French writer Annie Ernaux has transgressed the boundaries of what stories are considered worth telling, what subjects worth exploring. In this probing meditation, Ernaux turns her attention to the phenomenon of the big-box superstore, a ubiquitous feature of modern life that has received scant attention in literature.

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“Spare and deep, Voices of the Lost captivates. Hoda Barakat is one of Lebanon’s greatest gifts to literature, and Booth allows her English audience to explore this painful and irresistible present.”—Amy Bloom, author of White Houses

Profound, troubling, and deeply human, Voices of the Lost tells the moving story of characters living on the periphery, battling with displacement, devastating poverty, and the demons within themselves. From one of today’s most talented Arabic writers, Voices of the Lost is an urgent story of lives intimately woven together in a society that is tearing itself apart. Winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, this novel weaves together a series of devastating confessions about life in contemporary Arab society.

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Steven B. Smith–

An important theme of my new book, On Statesmanship, is the role of the statesman as an educator. If Percy Shelley was right—I think he was—when he said that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” then statesmen are the educators of their nations. They provide the language by which people can imagine their collective lives together.

The question is, who educates the statesman? Or as Karl Marx once asked, “who can educate the educator?” Political leadership requires civic knowledge, the kind that can only be obtained through a deep immersion of a political tradition. Great leaders have always appealed to the deepest reservoirs of their nations’ civic cultures as embodied in their literature, theology, and philosophy.

No one can shape a national culture that isn’t possessed with a deep sense of civic literacy. When Lincoln appealed to, “the better angels of our nature,” or when FDR said, “fear not,” or when JFK said, “ask not,” or when Ronald Reagan appealed to the biblical image of a “city on a hill,” they were all speaking to America’s highest aspirations, and what we want to believe about ourselves.

The promotion of a civic culture is something the American founders took seriously. George Washington had ambitious plans for the creation of a national university intended for the education of a public-spirited elite. The idea of a national university—repeated by every president up to John Quincy Adams—obviously came to naught but is worth reconsidering. What might such a national education look like in the twenty-first century? 

Such a plan would require massive changes in our current system of education. The dominance of STEM and STEM-related fields pay little attention to anything that cannot be counted or measured, anything that is individual, idiosyncratic, or exceptional. These are regarded as statistical anomalies of no great importance. The result is to flatten and collectivize knowledge, to seek value-neutral truth in numbers and data. 

The study of statesmanship requires a very different set of premises. It accords attention to the importance of rhetoric or political speech, to the role of decision making in real time, to intangible factors like luck and contingency, and perhaps most important of all, an appreciation of the individual in history. But who, except for a few isolated individuals or programs, is prepared to take on this task?

There is some ground for hope. In the last few years, we have seen new programs in civic education created at some of our top public universities. Even some of our elite private universities have begun to join the fray, like Yale’s Center for Civic Thought and the Stanford Civic Initiative. Civic education should be conceived here in its broadest sense, as education in the art of judgment. Development in this art might begin with a study of the American political tradition but would soon bring in the broader Western tradition of which America is a part.  

No country, like no person, is an island. The greatest political scientists—Aristotle, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Tocqueville—have all been comparativists. The study of American civic institutions would point to the comparison of other experiments in popular government in ancient Greece and Rome, Renaissance Italy, and revolutionary France, as well as other contemporary examples from across the globe. These historical studies would be supplemented in the lives and works of history’s greatest statesmen, but also the great tyrants and evil doers in history.

The most important service that these new civic education programs might provide is an alternative path for young people who care deeply about their country, yet who currently find no support for their ambitions in the universities. Today’s elite colleges and universities are dominated by students who attended top prep schools, who early on figured out how to game the system, and who regard college as simply a stepping stone for soul crushing careers in consulting, finance, and corporate law.  

Many of these young people are lost. They are told to become critical thinkers but have no idea what to think about. Is it any surprise then, that they end up gravitating to fields like economics and computer science simply because that’s where they think the jobs are? Who can blame them? An alternate path would involve more courses that encourage the qualities of curiosity, a sense of adventure, and an appreciation for greatness. This would include more time for solitary reflection away from the classroom and peer pressure to encourage those qualities that can only be nurtured in silence.

Obstacles still remain. Can these programs resist the tendency to become propaganda mills? Will they become countercultures within the universities replacing one set of dogmas for another? There are reasons for concern. Such programs should remain devoted to teaching liberal education at its best. Only by learning the art of deep reading one’s political tradition is it possible to develop the qualities of moral seriousness and civic responsibility that distinguishes great leaders like Jefferson, Lincoln, and King from the ravings of a preening egotist.

These new programs in civic thought may succeed or they may fail. Who knows? Much will depend on the viability of the West. As America loses its sense of purpose, such programs may simply cease to make sense. They may be viewed with the same sense of bemusement that we look at Yale President Ezra Stiles’s attempt to require Hebrew of all undergraduates because he thought it was the language necessary to get into heaven. But my experience as a teacher tells me that many of our best students—if not always their professors—understand the truth of what I am saying. It is for the political science of the future to which these remarks are dedicated.

Steven B. Smith is Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University and co-director of Yale’s Center for the Study of Representative Institutions. His books include Political Philosophy, Modernity and Its Discontents, and Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes. He splits his time between New Haven, CT, and Brooklyn, NY.

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When I first saw the sixteenth-century peasant scenes of Pieter Bruegel the Elder twenty-five years ago, I had recently become a photographer, and I felt a presumptuous pang of kinship with pictures like Children’s Games. Here was a great, old painter picturing the life of his present, just as I wanted to do with my camera. Most early modern European paintings are about the mythical past. Bruegel’s peasant pictures helped make everyday life a respectable subject for fine art.

But the more I looked at Children’s Games, the more complicated my feelings of kinship became. It sunk in that I could never take a picture with its magic, even if I were there. Bruegel’s viewpoint, though not very high up, did not seem to be within the children’s world. I could imagine seeing them playing from a window above the street and snapping pictures of them, but I could not imagine capturing the playful sense of infinite order that Children’s Games offers from what seems like a view from nowhere, like an audience enjoys above a stage. Photographers take pictures on the same “stage” of life that these children play on. They cannot get up to Bruegel’s divine balcony, the way a painter’s imagination can.

***

Bruegel’s Children’s Games, just over a meter and a half wide, was painted on wood panel in 1560. Today it lives in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna as a world-renowned masterpiece of Netherlandish art. Spooky Snapshots, on the other hand, was delivered to my house in the October 2022 issue of Highlights: Fun with a Purpose, a children’s magazine. The two images can be compared to exemplify this book’s historical framework. Both feature aloof views of children on the loose with their toys. We gaze upon life taking place as if from a balcony in the air. In this sense, Children’s Games is Spooky Snapshots’ ancestor. But Spooky Snapshots has a game unknown to Bruegel’s children: photography. Our detachment from the scene makes us privy to eight “snapshots” on the left that are being taken by eight “spooky” kids in the scene. The caption asks, “Can you find the photographer who took each photo below?” Importantly, Spooky Snapshots needs only three words to convey its game: “who,” “took,” and “them.” These words correspond to photographs’ embodiment, takenness, and immediacy. The Highlights reader must project these features onto crude drawings representing photographs in order to play the game. Spooky Snapshots thus makes a children’s game out of mechanical subjectivity.

Now imagine Bruegel’s early modern children turning their heads around toward you and asking to play Spooky Snapshots, too. You want to be inclusive. To help them understand our modern pictorial “game,” you have to explain the relationship between the “spooky snapshots” on the left and the things—the cameras—in some of the children’s hands. You need to explain that if you can imagine what they are seeing, you can figure out what they might be “taking” pictures of with their magic boxes, or magic nets. That will help them get started “playing” photography. This subjective, phenomenological explanation of photography is better than the objective, scientific explanation of it, which will sound like witchcraft. You may not share the concept of retinal perception with Bruegel’s children, but you can still communicate the immediacy, takenness, and embodiment of the eight scenes on the left together with the life they were taken from.

Spooky Snapshots shows that the framework of this prehistory of photography is no obscure theoretical construct, but a playful part of social reality. Moreover, it shows children know the difference between “severed” and “situated” perspectives, as well as the concept of mechanical subjectivity, so well that they can play “photography” using drawings that look nothing like photographs. Spooky Snapshots shows us that even kids know how to have fun with the basic analytical framework of this book. The present book shows when and how artists shifted from outside to inside that midst prior to photography. This polar historical framework might feel vaguely familiar to some readers. Art historians in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, like Heinrich Wölfflin and Erwin Panofsky, noticed similar polar changes in perspectival modeling. But their frameworks, being tailored toward religious and mythological art, were, I would suggest, too broad to capture the reasons for the changes they describe. Near the end of Perspective as Symbolic Form, Panofsky observed that the Renaissance-era “objective perspective” (our sub specie aeternitatis) yielded to a Baroque-era “subjective perspective” (our sub specie temporis), and he even tied it to differences in Northern and Italian art, as Svetlana Alpers later would as well. Indeed, for Panofsky, the reason Dutch artists in the mid-seventeenth century adopted “near space” models was that the centerless perspective drawing system of Girard Desargues had finally freed them to roam the centerless universal geometry of Cartesian natural philosophy. But as the pictorial record shows, perspective technology was never stopping artists from getting close to life. Instead, as we will see, the shift to a situated perspective in time required artists find self- evident value in the ungodly view of life from the ground level. By focusing on everyday life outside, rather than mythological life indoors, we can see when and why worldviews and pictorial views changed together to form photography’s backstory.

Andrew Moisey is assistant professor in the Department of History of Art & Visual Studies at Cornell University.

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Albert Sabin has never had a biography written about him despite his many contributions to science and vaccinology. Why do you think that is?

Karen Torghele: Sabin was known to have a “prickly” personality and to be a perfectionist, which made him difficult to work with. Several people started biographies when he was alive but did not get far with them—reportedly because of conflicts with the subject, Sabin.

What drew you to write Sabin’s biography?

KT: When I was interviewing CDC scientists for the Global Health Chronicles Oral History of Polio Project, Sabin’s name came up a lot as the developer of the oral polio vaccine and champion of the polio worldwide eradication effort. Anyone who worked with him or was associated with him also had stories related to his temper and reputation as being verbally abusive, but a great scientist and humanitarian. It seemed like an omission in the history of medicine and polio not to have a resource that provided details about his life and work. I could tell he was an interesting character, too, so thought it would be a great project!

From Sabin’s archives at the University of Cincinnati to personal interviews all over the country, your research seemed to take you everywhere. Between all the information you gathered, how did you decide what to include and exclude in your biography of Sabin?

KT: I focused on the elements that revealed who he was as a person and scientist rather than listing his numerous accomplishments and awards. Then it was a matter of narrowing the scope to include the most interesting of the stories about him. Not easy!

It is clear in your book Sabin’s abrasive nature and ego had a significant impact on his work and relationships. How do you address that subject in your book?

KT: Fortunately, I had candid accounts from coworkers and peers who had been on the receiving end of his “temper tantrums.” They shared what those experiences were like. One coworker reported that Sabin was known to throw things like his heavy glass cigarette ash tray or a chair when upset. The evidence of this behavior was displayed by the dents in his doorway frame. Family members were also forthcoming about their memories of Sabin and the consequences of being related to him. For example, when his oldest daughter, Debbe, earned a degree to work as a nurse practitioner, her father told her that only meant she “would be practicing medicine without a license.”

How did Sabin’s antagonistic relationship with Jonas Salk affect Sabin’s development of the oral polio vaccine?

KT: The small group of scientists working on developing polio vaccines in the 1950s met regularly so they could share information and resources. Salk and Sabin’s relationship was friendly in the early days of their encounters, but there was a point when it became more antagonistic when Salk conveyed that he wanted to be independent from the older, more experienced scientists like Sabin.  There was no obvious impact of their rift on Sabin’s oral polio vaccine since their methodologies were different.

What would Sabin have to say to currently appointed government officials (2025-6) who suggest that since there are few polio cases occurring now, that polio vaccine should be optional?

KT: An educated guess is that he would be freely displaying his incredulity that such irresponsible recommendations could be made and would let everyone in positions of power know that he disapproved of their uneducated instructions to the public about vaccines that are still needed to prevent a resurgence of the diseases they prevent.

People have a general grasp of how vaccines work. What can they learn from your book about what was unique about Sabin’s oral polio vaccine when it was introduced?

KT: Included in the book are descriptions of the extreme care he took in screening and testing enormous numbers of polio virus strains before he found the ones that were safest and most effective. The vaccine was given orally to mimic the way polio infection spreads to humans in nature. His vaccine works at the gut level, where the virus replicates, which makes it the best candidate for a vaccine to eventually eradicate polio from the planet. 

What perception of Sabin do you want readers to have after reading his biography?

KT: It is worth remembering what made Sabin unique as a researcher.  He insisted on excellence in scientific methodology and taught his trainees to have the same high standards. And he was not content to just turn over his vaccine to others after he developed it—he followed through by traveling the world and delivering his seed vaccine strains to those who needed them and gave them free of charge. Sabin oversaw the building of facilities in the USSR where his vaccine would be manufactured and provided guidance on the most effective way to administer it to stop their polio epidemics. Sabin remained an emissary for improving the health of children everywhere until his dying day. 

Karen Torghele is an epidemiologist and Global Health Chronicles oral historian who worked for more than twenty-five years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Task Force for Global Health. She lives in Atlanta, GA.

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