What follows is a conversation between editor Amanda Glesmann and designer Miko McGinty on the process of designing a stunning catalogue for an important contemporary artist.

Amanda Glesmann: It’s very special to have the opportunity to work on books with living artists. You get to see up close all the ways these projects are significant at a particular moment in someone’s life and career.

Miko McGinty: The artist is still making work, still evolving, and you’re trying to capture something that isn’t always finished yet.

AG: Exactly. And Miko, you have so much experience working on all types of art books and connecting with living artists, interpreting and translating the spirit of their work, the character of it. With contemporary artists, it can be difficult to historicize or interpret the work in the moment, and there’s something about how you do that visually that really grounds an understanding of the art in a different way. You feel it.

MM: As a designer, that’s amazing to hear. I make art books because I love the art, the artists, and the storytelling so much.

AG: I’ve heard people say, “Oh, I don’t read art books, I look at the pictures.” I guess that’s a funny thing to say to an editor, but I strongly believe that if a book isn’t also communicating something important about the artist and their work through the design, image sequencing, and materials, then we haven’t done our job.

MM: Yes, the visuals are so important in these books – as a designer I want to make immediate the visual ideas present in the artworks.

AG: This is something your design approach is really sensitive to. Each book is unique and really reflects the particular artist’s work.

MM: That’s the goal. I love design, but over the course of my career, certain aspects of the design process have become second nature, so I’ve been able to really concentrate on thinking about the artist and the art, and how the book is going to communicate their story.

AG: And you came to this project with some history with Amy’s work already.

MM: I did. I already had a lot of emotion about her work from designing The Obama Portraits, working with that curatorial team, and reading Rick Powell’s essay about Sherald in that book. I went to an interview that he did with Amy in person at the book launch in Chicago — she was so impressive. So I already knew what an incredible thinker Amy is. Having that little bit of background brought me into the visual storytelling really quickly. And I knew this was going to be a great book—the book on Amy’s art and career.

AG: It was also important to understand how wide her audience is — she’s an artist who reaches effortlessly outside of the art world into other kinds of dialogue with people.

MM: Design-wise, we knew we were going to make a breakout book. There was never a question about that. The book had to be the right size, the right weight, and the right shape for the paintings so that they would be as vivid and clear as possible. The book itself had to communicate like the paintings do.

AG: Let’s talk about the cover, because that’s the first part of a book people see — and it’s what the widest possible group of stakeholders looks at, including our partners at Yale University Press and folks on the museum’s marketing team. Only a few of Amy’s paintings were really going to work well as a cover image, given the trim size and the need to incorporate type. Do you need to understand what the cover is before fully working out the interior, or does one inform the other?

MM: For me, the cover always bubbles up from the inside of the book. I know that readers see the cover first, and it has to work in that context. But looking at the overall story inside of the book helps make a great cover.

AG: We started talking about the cover after Amy came up with the title American Sublime.

MM: It’s a really strong title because it is suggestive. I like to have a cover that has one very clear visual idea, and Amy’s paintings have that quality as well. It’s an alchemical relationship between the title, the image, and the audience. The goal was to balance a strong title with a strong idea — trying to get them to a singularity. I do think when you hit the right one, everybody knows it.

AG: Honestly, it couldn’t have been anything else. And of course, the scale of Amy’s work is so much larger than the book’s. You really thoughtfully zeroed in on a trim size and a grid for the book that related to the dimensions of her work.

MM: She has two sizes of paintings: these incredibly large paintings that go way over your head, and a size that is still larger than life, but a bit smaller and displayed so the viewer’s eye level is roughly at the eye level of the figure. It’s hard to show scale difference in a book. Sometimes, if you’re really being a purist, you have to make things too small in order to explain that they’re smaller than the very large artworks.

AG: And you didn’t want to sacrifice the reader’s experience of the paintings themselves for the sake of making a point about scale.

MM: Exactly. We used two grid sizes — though they’re pretty similar to each other — to indicate that there are two different sizes. But really, we weren’t foregrounding the size of the paintings. What we were foregrounding was the reader’s experience of being able to look in the eyes of the figure and study the painting in front of them.

AG: And that’s how you experience them in person, too.

MM: Right. And we also started talking early about the sequence of the images, which is chronological — spanning from very early paintings to paintings that were being finished while we were designing the book. In the first meeting with Amy, we focused on what paintings within each year looked good together and identified others that needed a blank opposite so readers could concentrate on just that painting alone.

AG: You also identified a really perfect typeface for this project. Can you say a little bit about how you came to it?

MM: The typeface is called Empirica, drawn by Nina and Tobias at Frere-Jones Type, who are incredibly skilled type designers. We worked with unreleased versions of the font so that we could manage the weight and scale of the type. Empirica is interesting — it has a little bit of a serif. It’s hovering in this area between formality and the contemporary moment of Amy’s work.

AG: During your design presentation I remember everyone loving the type treatment immediately. Your use of color in this project is also so distinctive. There’s this idea that presenting modern and contemporary art is all about white space and wide margins, but this book is flooded with color—and such a strong color, navy blue.

MM: When you’re in Amy’s studio, her incredible sophistication and commitment to color is immediately evident. She keeps careful track of all the colors in the work. In her portraits, the skin tones are painted in black and white and yellow. She explains that this has to do with historic photos and family photos — she’s referencing the early photography of Black portraiture. We talked a lot with Amy about how she uses black and white, and how she uses yellow paint to show sunshine and sunlight on skin. That’s a very specific palette. Then in the subject’s surroundings — their clothes, the background — there’s a very intentional use of color. Sometimes she uses flat color around the subject, while her early works have a pattern of different colors.

AG: Not many artists would have wanted to frame their work with such strong color as part of the book design, but that really appealed to Amy. She was really interested in navy at that moment — her paintings had been hung on a navy wall in an exhibition in London, and dark wall colors were being considered for American Sublime as well.

MM: Yes, so we tried something similar in the book. There’s the blue fore-edge printing and the blue cloth on the back, and framed by all of that the cover painting almost seems to glow. That’s exactly the balance you’re always trying to strike. The book has to have its own integrity as an object, while still feeling completely true to the artist. In this case that really resonated, and there is something incredible about being part of making a book that reaches an audience the way this one has. I always hope that a book will travel far out into the world and find its passionate readers, and bring the artist’s work into more people’s homes. I hope that every reader who connects with these portraits and these stories through the catalogue can feel the commitment to Amy’s work that went into every detail of this project.

Amanda Glesmann, formerly managing editor at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, currently works for the Italian printer Verona Libri.

Miko McGinty is a graphic designer and owner of the award-winning firm Miko McGinty Inc.

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Robert Skidelsky–

To reintroduce Keynes into our contemporary world, we must begin where he would have begun: with philosophy. Keynes’s notion of economics as the efficient means to the good life implies that purposive economic activity should stop when people have sufficient resources to live well.

There are thus moral imperatives to both growth and de-growth; growth is required to lift people out of poverty, de-growth to enable them to “live wisely, agreeably, and well.” This second goal, Keynes thought, would grow in importance as the material struggle became less pressing. The weak points in Keynes’s utopia have already been touched on. It is not just that the idea of material sufficiency changes over time as more becomes possible—more comfortable homes, car ownership, and foreign travel, watching movies and live sports at home, ordering consumables online, better nutrition, greater freedom from disease, and better care for the old. It is also that the currently accepted material prerequisites of a good life remain beyond the reach of large fractions of the population in rich countries, and even larger fractions in poor countries. Given that redistribution of wealth and incomes is no longer on mainstream political agendas domestically, even less globally, economic growth remains the economic goal by default. In this framework, the only recognized moral limit to growth is our responsibility to future generations: if economic growth continues unchecked, the planet will run out of food or heat up uncontrollably. But even such extinctive possibilities may be postponed by switching from dirty to clean growth.

This is about as far as official policymaking has gotten. With the Western, and much of the non-Western, world measurably closer to material sufficiency than in the 1930s, we need to return to some basic questions: What is economic growth for? How much is enough? And what economic system is best suited to bring about the required sufficiency? On each of these questions, Keynes had something important to say.

The first question, “What is economic growth for?,” is the easiest of the three to answer. The only purpose of economic growth is to create enough resources to make possible a decent life for all. This implies that at some point in the future, work as an economic activity (as opposed to a moral or spiritual calling) should shrink toward zero. Keynes himself suggested that over time machines would be able to produce most of what we needed to live well.

Most people would accept his view that economic growth should not be an end in itself. The trouble is, we don’t know what to replace it with. Attempts to transform ideas like “sufficiency” or “well-being” or “wellness” into value standards founder on our inability to turn them into measurable targets like GNP.¹ Keynes himself was never challenged to develop environmental, ecological, or conservationist arguments, because he never had to face the planetary problems we face today. But he would surely have wanted to buttress his argument for “sufficiency” with one of “sustainability,” emphasizing the extinctive possibilities of uncontrolled population growth and human-made climate change, and the neglected costs of extraction, and destruction of the natural environment.²

Keynes would have demanded that we engage much more critically than we do now with the ethical implications of accelerating technical progress. He thought of technology as the means to freedom from drudgery and suffering and supposed that, like other economic means, the need for further technical innovation would drop away with the spread of abundance and leisure. He would have treated the argument that because more advanced technology is possible, we should continue to develop it as a blatant example of the “naturalistic fallacy.” He would have welcomed the call for better regulation, but would have rightly seen it as an inadequate effort to mitigate harms that we lack the courage or insight to face openly. He would surely have demolished today’s most baleful justification for increased investment in artificial intelligence: the need to “keep ahead” of “malign” competitors like China in the race for technological supremacy. He would have asked: A race for what and to what end? And with what dangers? He would certainly have been behind the call by resigning computer physicist and Nobel Laureate Geoffrey Hinton and others for a “pause” in AI research to reflect on its potential dangers.³

Behind the current faith in an AI-enabled future lies a much greater optimism than Keynes felt about the predictability of human behavior. In the technological utopia the reign of “unexpected consequences” is over; the economist’s dream of the perfectly efficient market realized. With their enormous data sets and lightning calculating power, these economists muse, computers will be able to discern patterns of behavior invisible to human intelligence, and so will dissolve uncertainties into probabilities, probabilities into frequencies. Keynes would surely have wanted to remind these shallow thinkers that the perfect hindsight promised by artificial intelligence does not guarantee perfect foresight, and that for humans to play at being God is a form of hubris which inevitably leads to nemesis. Nor would he have regarded the evidence that AI can (or will soon be able to) outperform humans in most tasks as an argument for setting it free to do these tasks as they pleased. The question always needing to be answered is: How far, at what speed, and in what ways will the further development of AI be good for humans?

In his 1930 essay Keynes suggested that de-growth would come about naturally as more and more people won freedom from economic necessity—a majoritarian version of the aristocratic ideal, with the dirty work being done by robots. Recent trends in many Western societies, however, suggest that something quite different is happening: wealth and income are being concentrated in the hands of the top 1 percent, the middle class is becoming relatively impoverished, and large segments of the working class are being degraded—all at odds with the coming of a leisured civilization. Keynes believed that capital should be increasingly redistributed as the need for its accumulation declines. He would have scorned the argument that rich Western societies need to accumulate ever more capital for themselves, while accepting that they should remain “economically purposive” on behalf of the world’s poor. True enough, economic growth has slowed down in the West, but it would be reckless to attribute this to rising satisfaction with what exists: in particular, the level of dissatisfaction among young people has risen markedly in the United States and Western Europe. In the absence of policies to reduce dissatisfaction, economic growth remains the only way of keeping the capitalist show on the road.

1.  For a discussion of the difficulties in defining “sufficiency,” see Gough, “Sufficiency as a Value Standard.” ︎
2. On attempts to construct an index of value based on the increasing real cost of living, see Galbraith and Chen, Entropy Economics. ︎
3. Hinton was one of the signatories of a statement issued on May 30, 2023, warning that preventing the risk of human extinction by AI should be a global priority. ︎

Robert Skidelsky (1939–2026) was a British economic historian. He was emeritus professor of political economy at the University of Warwick, a member of the House of Lords, and the author of numerous books, including an acclaimed three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes; Money and Government; and What’s Wrong with Economics?

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Caitlin C Gillespie—

I have recently written a biography of Livia, in which I consider what the wife of the Roman emperor might have done with her leisure time (otium). I focus on her private villa at Prima Porta, about 15 km away from Rome. Livia’s estate, called the Villa ad Gallinas Albas (Villa of the White Hens) had extensive gardens, including a private plot where Livia grew medicinal herbs. Here, she cultivated a healthy lifestyle, nourished in part by the fruits of her own garden. 

Numerous sources suggest that Livia had a “green thumb,” as well as an interest in developing and publicizing her own health tips. Her aptitude for horticulture is apparent in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. For example, after receiving an omen, Livia planted a certain type of laurel at her villa, which thrived miraculously and provided the laurel leaves that crowned the heads of triumphing emperors for generations to come. Pliny also mentions a single vine in the Portico of Livia in Rome that produced glorious shade and twelve amphorae of juice each year. She even had a species of fig named after her.¹

Pliny offers a few details of Livia’s preferred diet. First, in a book on wine, Pliny informs his reader that Livia credited her eighty-six years of life to the wine of Pucinum, and that this wine is considered most suitable for medicinal purposes. Second, in a section on vegetable gardening, Pliny describes the best way to eat elecampane, a plant in the sunflower family whose roots are beneficial for digestion but too bitter and undigestible alone. In order to make it agreeable to the stomach it can be dried; ground into a flour and sweetened with juice; boiled in vinegar and water; steeped in various ways; be mixed with grape-juice; flavored with honey, raisins, or dates. It may also be flavored with quinces, sorbs, plums, thyme, or pepper and made into a tonic. He continues: “[Elecampane] has become especially renowned from having been the daily diet of Julia Augusta (Livia).”² By consuming elecampane as a daily digestive, Livia leant it celebrity status and increased its popularity. Both red wine and elecampane continue to be used today. When consumed in moderation, red wine can be a powerful antioxidant that may improve heart health,³ and elecampane is employed as an anti-inflammatory and as a treatment for respiratory diseases.⁴ Two thousand years ago, Livia promoted both. 

Livia’s attention to her diet was part of an overall interest in the health of her household. She had a large medical staff that included at least five doctors, a medical superintendent, and two midwives. Her interest in developing remedies herself is suggested by two surviving recipes found in a book on medicine written in the fifth century by Marcellus Empiricus. One recipe is for the inflammation of the throat; the other is a recipe for chills, tiredness, nervous pain, and tension that requires marjoram, rosemary, fenugreek, Falernian wine, and oil made into a salve with wax. The fact that these recipes were recorded almost four centuries after Livia’s lifetime suggests a lasting interest, although we do not know how well they worked.⁵ 

Not everyone found Livia’s interest in natural remedies honorable. In the wrong hands, medicine could become poison: the stereotypical weapon of women in the ancient Mediterranean. Throughout her adult life, Livia was accused of poisoning individuals who threatened her path to greatness. The accusations were largely unfounded, and one anecdote proves the point. In his Roman History, Cassius Dio reports that Augustus got sick and died, and that Livia incurred suspicion in connection with his death. According to rumor, Livia was afraid that Augustus would appoint his grandson Agrippa Postumus as his heir instead of Livia’s son, Tiberius. So, Livia smeared some of her prized figs with poison, ate the safe ones, and offered Augustus the poisoned ones.⁶ The episode transforms a peaceful scene of spouses sharing figs in a garden into a violation of expectations. Dio relies upon his audience’s knowledge of Livia’s famous figs, as well as stereotypes about women as poisoners, and converts the fruit from a healthy antioxidant into an absurd murder weapon.  

Dio reveals an ancient Roman bias against powerful women with specialized knowledge. During her lifetime, Livia was able to experiment by using the fruits and herbs of her own garden. I do not envy anyone who tried one of Livia’s recipes before they were perfected, and there will always be a contingent that disparages natural remedies. The truth is that Livia lived for eighty-six years in a culture where the average life expectancy was around thirty-five. She attributed her health and longevity to her chosen vintage and natural remedies. When it comes to lifestyle choices, sometimes it is less about verifiable truth than what an individual believes. 

1. Pliny the Elder. Natural History. 10 vols. Trans. H. Rackham, W. H. S. Jones, D. E. Eichholz. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938-1962. Specific references are from Pliny, Natural History 15.137-137, 14.11, 15.70. ︎
2. Pliny, Natural History 14.60, 19.91-92. ︎
3. Mayo Clinic Staff, “Red wine and resveratrol: Good for your heart?” Jan. 21, 2026, https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/heart-disease/in-depth/red-wine/art-20048281. ︎
4. EBSCO CAM Review Board, “Elecampane’s therapeutic uses,” 2023, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/health-and-medicine/elecampanes-therapeutic-uses. ︎
5. Marcellus Empiricus. De Medicinamentis Liber. Ed. Georg Helmreich. Leipzig: Teubner, 1889. Recipes are found at the following book and section numbers: 15.6, 35.6. Full recipes can be found on pages 111-112 of Anthony A. Barrett, Livia: First Lady of Imperial Rome. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. ︎
6. Dio Cassius, Roman History. 9 vols. Trans. Earnest Cary. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1914-1927. Specific reference is at Roman History 56.30.1. ︎

Caitlin C. Gillespie is the Helaine and Alvin Allen Chair in Literature and Associate professor in the Department of Classical Studies at Brandeis University. She is the author of Boudica: Warrior Woman of Roman Britain. She lives in Cambridge, MA.

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Curtis Dozier—

When I finished writing The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate, I didn’t realize, as a first-time author, how long it would take to produce the book. In the case of The White Pedestal, I completed the manuscript in October 2024. I then spent the first part of 2025 working with the copy editors, compiling the index, and completing marketing materials, before we began the production process for a publication date of January 6, 2026 (that was the press’s idea, and a great one). All that post-writing work—both by me and everyone at the press—improved the book tremendously, but current events don’t stop throughout the production process. This was certainly the case with The White Pedestal. Just a month after we finalized the manuscript, Donald Trump was elected president a second time.

At that stage, the only part of the book that could be updated was the Acknowledgements, so the most I could do was add a note that read: “The manuscript of this book was finalized shortly after the election of Donald Trump to a second term as president of the United States, when it was too early to tell whether, or how, his administration’s priorities might resonate with the ideologies I describe.” In 2026, we know the answer to that question.

The second Trump administration has eliminated many civil rights era protections, suppressed information about the legacies of slavery in the United States, imitated the rhetoric of historical white supremacist movements, and promoted false claims of ongoing white genocide in South Africa, a claim I first encountered in white nationalist publications. It has repeatedly engaged in what a UN committee describes as “racist hate speech” and has unleashed armed and masked federal agents who have terrorized immigrant communities, brutalized detainees, and defied court orders limiting their activities. And this is before we talk about other tactics drawn from the playbook of authoritarian regimes, including intimidation and persecution of political opponents, voter suppression, and run of the mill corruption.

So how does The White Pedestal hold up now that many of the political ideas it profiles have taken hold in the political mainstream? In some respects, not well. In my chapter on narratives of decline, for example, I surveyed the ancient Roman sources that white nationalists cite to argue that twenty-first century America is teetering on the brink of catastrophic collapse. It’s the fundamental lie of fascism, since it justifies the rise of authoritarian strong men who promise to arrest this decline. White nationalists love to cite these sources because the ancient Romans themselves made all the same arguments that they do, particularly that moral decay from within and the influence of foreigners from without are to blame for civilizational decline: the emperor Augustus himself, Suetonius wrote, tried to “keep the people pure and unsullied by any taint of foreign or enslaved blood.”¹

Writing about this sometime in 2022, I pointed out how this similarity between contemporary white nationalists and the Romans can reveal the self-interested biases of the ancient sources who have too often been treated as reliable eyewitnesses. But I cringe now at how I developed that comparison, suggesting that white nationalist narratives of decline emerge from the same aggrieved sense that they are “losing political and social power in a world where white supremacist racial hierarchies are being questioned and, ever so slowly and with tremendous resistance from entrenched power, abolished.” The naïveté of this assessment — loss of political power? Abolition of racial hierarchies? — would be laughable if the impact of Trump’s policies on Black Americans hadn’t been so devastating and even deadly. At least I had the foresight to refer to “tremendous resistance from entrenched power.”

But in other respects, the White Pedestal speaks even more directly to the current moment than when it was written. The Trump administration has, if anything, made “the Classical” more central to its political program. The president revived his 2020 executive order mandating Classical architecture for federal buildings, demolished one third of the White House in order to make way for a ballroom whose exterior will resemble a Greek temple, and is pushing hard to build a triumphal arch modeled on those of the Roman emperors. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has publicly praised “classical education” and Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense has mandated that the nation’s military academies accept scores from the “Classic Learning Test” for admission, a test whose founder openly describes as “a lever that shapes education.” And Stephen Miller, widely seen as the architect of the administration’s harsh and deadly campaign against immigrants, boasted to guests at Charlie Kirk’s funeral that “our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens [and] to Rome.”

One major theme of The White Pedestal is that white nationalist intellectuals see ancient Greece and Rome—periods of history that are widely admired as sophisticated and enlightened—as sources of prestige for their politics. If they can find a Classical model for their political theories—and it’s surprisingly easy for them to do so—they can proclaim that those theories are time-honored, respectable, and worth taking seriously. While writing The White Pedestal, I confess that I sometimes wondered whether such appeals really accomplished what the white nationalists wanted them to. But in 2024, seventy-seven million Americans (more than the total populations of all but nineteen countries in the world) voted for Donald Trump and the most authoritarian and openly racist administration in living memory. Trump’s embrace of the Classical is only one part of this story, but it nevertheless seems clear that the overall project of making violent and oppressive politics seem respectable and desirable—whether by appeals to ancient Greece and Rome or by other means—works.

[1] Suetonius, Life of Augustus, 2.40

Curtis Dozier is associate professor of Greek and Roman studies at Vassar College. He is the director of the internationally recognized website Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics, which documents appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity by hate groups. He lives in Poughkeepsie, NY.

The post When in Rome: White Nationalists, Ancient History, and the White House appeared first on Yale University Press.

Margiana Petersen-Rockney—

Sitting at the kitchen table this June, home on my family farm, my mother told me about the news coverage she’d seen about farmers in France protesting the rising costs of agricultural inputs like fertilizer and fuel. “The farmers didn’t just drive their tractors into Paris,” my mom told me with a grin, “They took their manure spreaders too!”

This growing season, farmers in many parts of the world are facing overwhelming costs to grow food for the rest of us. Many farmers are reliant on expensive, often proprietary, inputs like seeds and pesticides that have become more expensive over the past century as fewer firms control a greater share of the market. 

The same corporate concentration has also happened among the firms that buy and distribute the crops and livestock farmers produce. (Just four firms control 85% of global beef processing, meaning farmers who raise beef cattle must accept whatever price those companies offer.)¹ This summer, with tariffs, fewer immigrant farmworkers, and the US war with Iran raising global fossil fuel prices, farmers’ costs have jumped to new heights, squeezing those who were already often operating on thin margins. 

Amidst this economic crisis, related and profound climate change is already here, and farmers are on the front lines of its impacts. This summer, farmers in the American West are facing escalating of drought conditions. Heat waves in Europe are decimating crops and stressing livestock. Farmers all over the world are bracing for severe storms that are becoming more intense and frequent.  

But most farmers aren’t taking to the streets to protest climate change. Many, especially in wealthy countries like the US, aren’t even talking about it openly. My new book with Yale University Press, Farmers and Climate Change: Agricultural Adaptation in an Age of Rural Polarization, explores how US farmers are navigating the impacts of climate change even though many remain unconvinced by climate change science. After spending seven years interviewing farmers in Northern California, I have a sense of how they perceive climate change and why many resist the idea of its anthropogenic origins. 

Farmers are often lumped together as a monolithic group, but what and how they farm varies a lot. Some farming practices build soil health and foster biodiversity, sequestering carbon and producing other climate benefits. 

Yet many farmers describe feeling blamed for climate change causing emissions. There’s a sense of disconnect in which urban-based decision makers don’t understand farming. We all rely on agriculture to survive, yet farms are also where we can most readily appreciate the environmental impact of those managing natural resources, like land and water. “We have an address where you can find me on a map,” a farmer I interviewed said.  

Another issue is the way that climate action is often framed, asking people to make personal sacrifices like driving less or eating less red meat. Many farming families, like mine, have seen their incomes from agriculture dwindle as they pay more to buy what they need to farm, and are paid less for what they produce. They’ve also seen the prosperity of their rural communities decline as local businesses have been replaced by big chains that siphon profits to distant corporate headquarters. Climate action that asks people to sacrifice even more doesn’t land well. 

Many large-scale climate solutions look to rural communities to site renewable energy infrastructure, to develop carbon capture and storage, and to take land out of agricultural production in “re-wilding” and afforestation projects. It’s perhaps not surprising that farmers often express resistance to these projects and the climate crisis discourse that drives them. Luckily, when it comes to agriculture, there are many opportunities to move away from blame-the-farmer narratives, to implement local solutions that build rural prosperity, and to celebrate, rather than demonize, those who are among the most directly affected by climate change. 

Many farmers are already changing what and how they farm. When weather disasters become routine, there’s little choice but to respond and adapt. In my book, I share stories that highlight the diversity of adaptation already happening in farming communities, even by people who don’t acknowledge anthropogenic climate change, or say they don’t believe in it. There are a lot of benefits beyond climate resilience that farmers can realize by diversifying their farms such as accessing new markets, or building soil health to hold more water and reduce water pumping costs. 

My own family is also changing how they farm in response to climate extremes and unpredictability. My mom is raising more types of livestock and rotating them more quickly to enrich the soil and encourage a greater diversity of plants to grow in her pastures so that if some die off in a flood or heatwave, there will still be forage. My brother stopped tilling his vegetable fields, leaving cover crop roots in place to hold the soil together if there’s a flood or severe storm. These are the kinds of farming practices that create a broad and nimble ability to adapt in the future and survive. When witnessed by other farmers, these are also political acts. 

While farmers in the US may not be taking to the streets en masse, they are navigating the politics of climate change every day—a quiet protest that Farmers and Climate Change makes visible.

1. Dumas, Carol Ryan. “Economies of Scale Drove Meatpacking Concentration.” Capital Press. July 18, 2023. https://capitalpress.com/2023/07/18/economies-of-scale-drove-meatpacking-concentration/#google_vignette. ︎

Margiana Petersen-Rockney is assistant professor in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Montana. She grew up on a farm in rural Massachusetts and lives in Missoula, MT.

The post A Quiet Protest: Farmers Respond to Climate Change appeared first on Yale University Press.

Alexander Noyes and Richard Bennet—

On June 30, Ukraine’s Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov called for one last surge of Western military assistance to force Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table: “We need the next level of aid to be able to finish the job.” President Donald Trump infamously said on the campaign trail that he would end the Russia-Ukraine war in one day. With battlefield momentum now shifting in Ukraine’s favor, Trump finally has a real opportunity to end the war.

Our book, War at Arm’s Length, shows why Ukraine has been an all-too-rare U.S. military assistance success story. In the months before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, decision-makers in Washington faced a strategic dilemma. Moscow’s actions threatened European security and U.S. interests in the region. The unprovoked invasion clearly merited a forceful response. Direct American intervention, however, would have quickly escalated the situation.

For the first time since the Cold War, the cataclysmic prospect of nuclear war was back on the table. Sanctions and diplomatic isolation would not be enough to change President Vladimir Putin’s calculus nor to help Ukraine defend itself from occupation. The United States wanted to support Ukraine but was reluctant to take actions that could lead to American boots on the ground. In response, Washington turned to a familiar although often misunderstood approach: waging war at arm’s length through the use of military assistance.

Over the months that followed, the United States would work indirectly to counter Russia’s advance, arming the Ukrainians at an unprecedented speed and scale to degrade the Russians and help Ukraine fight for its very survival. This approach paid off. The world watched the undermanned and underestimated Ukrainian military valiantly resist Russia in the spring of 2022, displaying impressive strategic and operational prowess and deftly combining conventional and irregular tactics.

For many U.S. citizens, military assistance is inextricably tied to the unsuccessful experiences of Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. In these far-flung places, U.S.-led failures rightly captured headlines and shaped public thinking on whether America should be spending blood and treasure supporting weak militaries in faraway wars. Yet the case of Ukraine offers a glimpse of the powerful potential of military support when done right.

Understanding the dynamics of working with and through partner militaries is critical for America’s strategic interests. Previously a relatively niche topic, military assistance is now at the forefront of America’s grand strategy and defense policy, playing a leading role in competing with and confronting U.S. strategic rivals like China and Russia. Tens of thousands of participants attend American-led military training activities each year, and Washington has offered some form of security assistance to an astonishing 179 countries since the year 2000, amounting to an eye-watering over $200 billion annually when including foreign military sales. While the Trump administration has drastically cut much of U.S. foreign assistance over the past year, particularly to Ukraine, many types of military assistance have actually increased.

In our book, we argue that two main factors explain success or failure: interest alignment between Washington and its partner, and the often-overlooked institutional capacity of the partner’s defense sector.

The national security interests of two states never agree completely, but during episodes of relative alignment, the assisting country can have more confidence that resources or training will be employed toward mutually-desired ends. This interest alignment will vary over time and requires careful monitoring, incentivization, conditionality, and diplomacy in order for military assistance to succeed. In recent history, Washington has not expended enough effort in any of these activities.

The second factor, institutional capacity, is less studied but equally critical for success. Large outlays of equipment and training programs will fail if the receiving military lacks the defense institutions to absorb them. The mundane, yet indispensable, backbone of effective militaries include areas like personnel management, logistics, acquisition and resource management, command and control, and strategic assessment. Many failures in the past can be hung on the weak institutional capacity of the partner force. In most cases, Washington takes a weapons-first approach, with defense sector governance tools and advising seen as an add-on to broader military assistance packages instead of a foundational element of success.

These two key ingredients to success were on full display in Ukraine. In the weeks leading up to the invasion, the United States had tried to make Ukraine as indigestible as possible. A strategy to prepare the population for armed resistance drove efforts to recruit territorial defense forces and prepare Ukrainian special operations forces for guerrilla warfare. With the Russian attack imminent, the United States had rushed additional Javelins into Ukraine—weapons sent to support a potential insurgency, not wage a protracted conventional war. Ukraine’s performance in the war’s first days prompted a quickly revised approach: Marshaling contributions from a coalition of dozens of allies, Washington would use massive amounts of military assistance and support to make sure Russia could not fully subjugate Ukraine.

Though Ukrainians themselves deserve the credit for battlefield successes against a far larger opponent, Western military assistance and support helped build competencies in the preceding years and dramatically increased the costs the Ukrainians would inflict on Russian forces.  Interest alignment and institutional capacity help explain this remarkable and unexpected success.

Interest alignment during the onset of the war was clear —both Washington and Kyiv were determined to help Ukraine survive. In April 2022, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Kyiv. Austin made a bold statement of U.S. interests. “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” he said.

During Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Kyiv was able to mobilize only a fraction of its forces. The procurement system was corrupt, logistics were poor, and troops lacked basic supplies. But 2014 served as a watershed moment for officials in Kyiv. Ukraine’s leaders appealed to the West for assistance and received ample non-lethal support in return. The Ukrainians asked for weapons, but the Obama administration had little appetite for any risk of escalation with Moscow. Non-lethal assistance would be all the Ukrainians would receive in 2014. The Joint Multinational Training Group-Ukraine provided extensive training explicitly to build institutional capacity and not as pre-deployment training for the ongoing fight in the east.

With policy restrictions on lethal assistance still in place, the Pentagon sent advisers to sit within the Ministry of Defense and ramped up a broad institutional capacity building effort. NATO and the United States also offered programs to improve Ukrainian logistics, building on the alliance’s efforts to reform the military education system that dated back to 2013. Gradual reforms to acquisition and resource management significantly boosted the institutional capacity of the Ukrainian defense sector. When U.S. lethal assistance eventually increased, Kyiv had the governance structures in place to receive and employ new capabilities.

These two broad-based conditions for U.S. military assistance to succeed in Ukraine endure despite sharp disagreements between the two countries over tactics, especially on how and when certain weapons should be employed. To finally end the war and keep Trump’s campaign promise, his administration would be wise to double down on past military assistance successes and drastically ramp up support in the short term. This could be done using the presidential drawdown authority, which rapidly gets weapons out the door. Washington should also lift nearly all remaining restrictions on U.S.-provided weapons, tighten sanctions, and deploy U.S. military advisors directly to Ukraine. A final surge of U.S. military assistance could tip the balance. But the window to act is closing.

Alexander Noyes is a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Washington. Richard Bennet is a senior research associate at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland. They are the co-authors of War at Arm’s Length: How America Can Build Effective Partners Through Military Assistance, published by Yale University Press in May 2026.

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Part of etching’s appeal for Homer may be related to its chemical nature: instead of carving lines directly into a hard surface, as in drypoint or engraving, etching involves metal plates (usually copper or zinc) that are covered with an acid-resistant varnish or wax (known as the “ground”). This grounded surface is smooth and enables the etcher’s needle to draw lines more fluidly, meeting with little to no resistance. The plate is then bathed in acid, which eats only into the metal exposed by the incised lines, creating grooves in the substrate that hold ink. Homer began exhibiting his efforts in this new medium in 1884, shortly after an eighteen-month residence in Northern England. As art historian David Tatham has characterized this moment: “Thirty. years after his apprenticeship [with Bufford], he found in etching a printmaking process that pleased him.”

It’s no coincidence that Homer’s resolution to pursue etching in earnest occurred close on the heels of this influential experience across the Atlantic, where, from 1881 to 1882, he had lived in Cullercoats, a small fishing community in Northumberland. His work there exhibits a fascination with the daily rhythms, resilience, and quiet heroism of the hamlet’s inhabitants, whose lives depended on the sea. The flurry of watercolors and oils arising from that sojourn also marked a thematic and stylistic transformation in Homer’s painting that likewise informed many of the etchings. Though mainly installed at Cullercoats, Homer on at least one occasion visited London, where the revitalization of etching as a fine art had been in effect for decades, spurred by the writings of Sir Francis Seymour Haden and Philip Gilbert Hamerton, both champions of the medium. As Tatham and other scholars have surmised, Homer would not have missed the elevated presence and esteem that etching held in British culture.

In fact, when Homer returned to the United States in November 1882, it was just prior to a series of lectures on etching that Haden would deliver to New York and Boston audiences that winter. With this platform, Haden espoused the ideas that had helped fuel the British Etching Revival, celebrating the etched line for its “suppleness, liberty, rapidity, and directness of utterance,” and its obedience “to every movement of the sentient hand.” This promotion of etching as personally expressive, rather than reproductive, lies behind the appellation “painter-etchers,” which served to underscore the alignment between etching and “original” art. The American Painter-Etcher Movement, also known as the Etching Revival, had been underway since the Civil War and gained further traction with the formation of the New York Etching Club in 1877; Haden’s public lectures helped usher the intaglio technique into even greater prominence.

Though Homer was never formally affiliated with the New York Etching Club, he debuted several of his etchings at their annual exhibitions and knew some members, including James David Smillie and Julian Alden Weir. Indeed, Homer eventually permitted Smillie to make a reproductive etching after his celebrated 1883 watercolor, A Voice from the Cliffs. Smillie’s facsimile had been commissioned by critic and etching advocate Sylvester Rosa Koehler for his 1886 volume American Art. Though Koehler heralded Smillie’s “powers of adaptation… indispensable to the reproductive etcher,” Homer was less enthused with the results and opted to produce his own etched version two years later.

Most notable among Homer’s etcher contacts was undoubtedly George Wistar Hodge Ritchie, the son of the mezzotint engraver Alexander Hay Ritchie and a talented, Brooklyn-based printer who played an integral role in realizing Homer’s artistic vision for his grand etchings. Homer learned a great deal about the medium from Ritchie, going so far as to self-identify. as his student in a letter dated October 29, 1888: “I am at work now and will finish in about two weeks an etching which I will bite here and send to you for a proof. It promises to be worthy of your pupil which is more than I can say of some of my recent work.”

Homer and Ritchie’s first collaboration yielded The Life Line, the earliest of the six published etchings, while the artist was in New York in 1884—but the remainder of these print projects were undertaken after he had permanently relocated to Prouts Neck, Maine, later that year. The two engaged in close correspondence from that point on, wherein Ritchie would prepare and send grounded copper plates to Homer, who worked on the designs from his studio home. Existing letters (such as the one quoted above) even indicate that Homer “bit” the plates himself, etching the lines into the surface with the aid of acid. Since Homer did not have access to a printing press locally, he would send the plates to Ritchie with instructions for further refinement. Ritchie then conveyed the plates back with proofs for Homer’s review. This exchange continued until the artist deemed the works complete, with Homer making periodic trips to New York to oversee the final printing at Ritchie’s shop.

…

Despite the logistical complexity of his long-distance arrangement with Ritchie and the somewhat rustic setting of his studio, Homer’s etchings from this period transcend any related challenges, with the elaborate, large-scale, and ambitious designs evincing an irrepressible captivation with the medium. The size of his plates is impressive compared to prints typical of the Etching Revival, with the dimensions of Saved—one of Homer’s last and most technically experimental prints—representing the largest, at 22 7/8 x 32 3/4 inches. Certainly, Homer’s motives were partly financial, as indicated by the savvy timing of his etching venture with the apogee of the medium’s revival in US markets as well as the

business agreement he struck with his eventual publisher, Christian Klackner, in 1887–88. The profit outcomes from this partnership were ultimately disappointing, however. Klackner’s quarterly accountings, dated April 1892 and October 1893, enumerate sluggish sales. The first document shows only $13.33 total earned from Eight Bells, while the second notes just $40 total from two more impressions of Eight Bells and $13.33 from a single impression of Saved. Homer took home half of these earnings, with the other half owed to Klackner for his publishing services. Dishearteningly, the photogravure reproductions of Hark! The Lark (1882) and The Signal of Distress (1890–96; Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza) that Klackner also offered far outpaced the etchings, netting Homer $114. Klackner would continue to market all six etchings and two photogravures past the point of Homer’s death, as indicated in an illustrated brochure advertising “Artist Proofs, Limited Edition”.

The disappointment of these commercial ambitions notwithstanding, Homer’s pursuit of etching was clearly met with a reward of a different kind: profound creative focus and satisfaction.

Ramey Mize is the Susan G. Detweiler Associate Curator of American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The post An excerpt from Winslow Homer: Painter, Etcher appeared first on Yale University Press.

Richard Brookhiser—

Time changes the dead as well as the living. The past speaks differently to each new present as it appears.

In 2026, Lafayette (b. 1757, d. 1834) is an antidote to post-liberalism. He believed, as he told Congress when he addressed it at the conclusion of his fourteen-month tour of America two centuries ago, that republican institutions were founded on the plain rights of man. He thought men had rights. He thought they were plain, easy to formulate, and understand. And he thought republican institutions expressed men’s political rights and were adequate to uphold and defend them.

Lafayette’s shorthand terms for the systems that combatted his views were despotism and anarchy. In his youth, most of the nations of Europe were ruled by absolute monarchs; some professed to be enlightened, but they remained despots all the same. As Lafayette aged, despotism acquired a romantic veneer, whether borrowed from Promethean deeds, as in the case of Napoleon, or applied by backward-looking writers and poets, like Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand.

Anarchy was Lafayette’s epithet for those who took the French Revolution out of his hands, such as Girondins and Jacobins who confiscated his property, guillotining his wife’s sister, mother and grandmother.

The cast changes, but the impulses remain. For over a century, a metastasized left has used the rhetoric of class struggle to seize power and slaughter millions. Although Communism fell in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union between 1989-1991, Communist China, fueled by limited economic reforms, marches on. Meanwhile right-leaning rhetoric props the former KGB agent, Vladimir Putin, as a defender of an Orthodox Eurasian homeland.

Even Hitler enjoys a mini revival. A leftwing Senate candidate pretends not to know that he wore a Nazi tattoo for eighteen years. His supporters excuse it as a chapter in his recovery narrative. Meanwhile, some conservative intellectuals toy with the idea of Carl Schmitt, jurist during both the Weimar and the Nazi eras, whose alleged insight was that the distinction between friends and enemies is all that matters in politics. It is political theory as practiced in kindergarten—except when those with guns take it seriously.

Lafayette would reject tyrants and maniacs today as he rejected them two centuries ago.

One critique that post-liberals make of Lafayette must be taken seriously. Is his belief in the rights of man sufficiently grounded in reason, nature, or anything else?

His friend Thomas Jefferson, no traditional theist, wrote that men’s rights were endowed “by their Creator.” Lafayette’s creed seems to have been rather casually deist. The religion he cared most about was the 18^th century invention, masonry. Nowadays it is hard to understand how seriously early devotees of masonry took it, or how passionately their enemies attacked it. The chapters in War and Peace describing Pierre Bezuhov’s experiment with masonry capture the flavor, though they probably strike most contemporary readers as simply puzzling.

The most striking pre-liberal foundation of Lafayette’s character is not masonry, but courtesy. His never failed him, whether he was meeting his commander in chief, George Washington, during the American Revolution, or mollifying hostile crowds in France during its revolutions. On his farewell tour of America, he defined his courtesy in republican terms, saying repeatedly that the honors with which he was showered were due not to him alone, but to the soldiers he had commanded and the officers with whom he served. His respect for his comrades extended to everyone he met in his American tour, whether men or women, white, black or native American, rich or poor.

Yet the training of an aristocrat was also at work. At a small settlement of French squatters in Missouri, three men offered him gifts: a fawn, tame geese, and a collection of shells. At that point in his journey, Lafayette still had two thousand miles of steamboat and carriage travel ahead of him; these were the last things he needed. But he knew these gifts mattered to their givers. He accepted them graciously. No courtier at Versailles could have done better; Versailles had helped train him.

Lafayette’s answer to non- and post-liberals was republican institutions founded on the plain rights of man with a boost from the best of the past.

Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a fellow of the National Review Institute. His books include Glorious Lessons: John Trumbull, Painter of the American Revolution; Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington; and Founders’ Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln. He lives in New York City.

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Tiffany M. Hale– 

Fugitive religion was created by groups of Black and Native people who participated in giving testimony to their grief as well as to their antagonistic relationships to white supremacy after the Civil War. It therefore belongs to them. By the mid-twentieth century, however, fugitive religions had been usurped by public audiences as symbols of U.S. counterculture. It is hardly controversial to say that without the blues, rock and roll would not exist, and neither would most other forms of American popular music. Like blues men and women of the same generation, Ghost Dancers understood that their actions were being monitored by white settlers, politicians, and journalists. When directed at Native peoples, this interest was often rooted in colonial practices of surveillance, but it also stemmed from curiosity and anxiety amid the postwar era’s atmosphere of acute social and political change. Either way, the proliferation of relatively new technologies like cameras, kinetoscopes, and other recording equipment meant that audiences around the world were eager for access. In August 1891, the summer after the Wounded Knee Massacre, Wovoka reportedly told participants, “Do not tell the white people about this. Jesus is now upon the earth. He appears like a cloud. The dead are all alive again.”¹ Such a directive cannot be fully appreciated outside this context of spectacle and surveillance. Later chapters of this book examine how intrigue cultivated by journalists, poets, artists, and academic researchers helped to guarantee these practices’ fugitive status and further solidified race as an unavoidable facet of life for nineteenth-century Native people.

Fugitivity provides a way of thinking about the unruly subject of religion.² Scholars do not agree on a single definition of the term, and describing its meaning is even more difficult when we consider that many Indigenous languages lack an equivalent word.³ The difficulty of translating “religion” into Native languages results in part from the fact that the Western distinction between “sacred” and “profane” is not universal.⁴ It may be difficult or even impossible to parse out “religion” from experiences of Indigenous life, but that should not prevent scholars from asking questions about the category in light of the ample historical archives that exist. In fact, this querying is something the discipline of religious studies does best.⁵ As Suzan Shown Harjo explains, “It’s not that Native peoples have no word for religion, it’s that they have no one word for religion.”⁶ Michael McNally unpacks this to explain, “Native peoples have a rich vocabulary, not to mention grammar, syntax, and idiom, for what is reductively called ‘religion’ in the modern West.”⁷ This kind of translation helps to move beyond simplistic framings that reduce complex phenomena to simplistic categories.

Attempts to engage with Indigenous cosmologies and worldviews must grapple with the ahistorical tendency to view these traditions as premodern or antithetical to modernity. This inclination derives from Progressive Era anxieties about Native cultures “disappearing,” expressed systematically in the tradition of salvage anthropology. Salvage anthropologists operated under the assumption that they must capture and catalogue Indigenous traditions before they vanished in the future, disappearing forever. In response to this overzealous approach, Native nations have often chosen to protect their ceremonies—many of which are considered private—from strangers seeking to document them. This can include refusing to talk, making up information to deliberately lead scholars astray, restricting photography, and forbidding the presence of outsiders altogether.⁸ As McNally explains, “To say ‘we have no word for religion’ can amount to a form of resistance, an assertion of intellectual sovereignty.”⁹

Historians now agree that the Ghost Dance was a modern phenomenon.¹⁰ In line with these interpretations, I see fugitive religion as emerging from the processes of navigating the postwar era’s challenges and contradictions. We might think of this navigational process in terms of wayfinding: an Indigenous method of course-plotting that requires skilled observation, memorization, and use of the “best clues” to determine the right path.¹¹ Navigating a way for one’s self, family, and community amid these dangerous postwar conditions required clear thinking and prioritization. Maintaining access to land and resources was a central concern, but so too were ideas and emotions conveyed with nuance in the cherished tongues of ancestors as well as in new languages when the time and need arose. Put another way, fugitive religion was a means of managing the risks associated with simply being—and remaining—an Indigenous person in the postwar era.

This claim may appear straightforward, but the central paradox at the heart of modernity is not resolved by simply reclassifying the Ghost Dance as a modern phenomenon. Famed poet and historian Robert Penn Warren referred to the Civil War as “that mystic cloud from which emerged our modernity.”¹² Owing to the insights generated by historians of slavery, I have come to think of Warren’s “mystic cloud” more accurately as the everyday forms of resistance that enslaved people used to make their continued enslavement untenable.¹³ Even small acts of reclaiming a sense of self under dehumanizing conditions amounted to something powerful and potentially revolutionary.¹⁴ In this sense, fugitive religions belong to a world turned upside down by a war that exposed deep cracks in the foundation of the United States. Despite this revelation, Reconstruction’s “failure” saw white Americans renovate the basic institutions that protected their monopoly on power and resources. The rebirth of white supremacy after the war required the consolidation of hundreds of different ethnic groups into distinct governable entities. Though rooted in fiction, “race” was made real through campaigns of terror against Black and Native people in the form of lynching and massacres, as well as legal means such as Jim Crow laws and the confinement of Native peoples to prisons and reservations. Such conditions explain the necessity of the blues, which stepped in and made room in Black brains and hearts to countenance the absurd.

It is within the counterrevolutionary backlash to the Civil War that Ghost Dancing and blues traditions—defined here as fugitive religions—took their most potent forms in providing Native and Black people with a new perspective and language born of racial self-consciousness. Given its scientific legitimacy in the late nineteenth century, few whites anticipated that the discourse of “race” could be anything but a vehicle for the consolidation of their own power and influence. That groups of people believed to have no capacity for agency in history were mobilizing this category to organize themselves for a different set of goals was “unthinkable.”¹⁵

Stepping back from debates about truth or meaning to consider the wider continental picture, what we see is this: Europeans and their descendants had been colonizing the Americas for nearly four hundred years before formally banning Indigenous religious practices in the United States in 1883. That this legal injunction was implemented in the wake of Reconstruction is, I contend, no accident. Native people had long drawn upon religious practices to resist colonial intentions, but amid the ashes of the Civil War, these spiritual traditions took on new meaning.¹⁶ After 1864, the act of praying in one’s Native tongue or seeking guidance from spirits and ancestors through ceremony increasingly involved conscientious assertions of Indigenous racial identity in opposition to U.S. nationalism and whiteness. This tended to be true even if the rites in question hardly differed in form or content from those of previous generations. To the panic of many officials, these new assertions of faith flourished beyond the reach of military efforts to track and contain them. Fugitive religion, it seemed, had the power to scramble static anthropological definitions of Native identity and upend core presumptions about race. The practices themselves may have looked or sounded the same, but the implications they carried were new.

1.  This statement, attributed to Wovoka, was included in Mooney’s 1896 report, The Ghost Dance Religion, 780–81. ︎
2. Keguro Macharia, “Fugitivity,” Gukira with(out) Predicates, WordPress, July 2, 2013, https://gukira.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/fugitivity/^. ︎
3. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” 269–84. See also Gil Anidjar, “The Religion of Translation,” in The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Religion, ed. Hephzibah Israel (New York: Routledge, 2022), 81–99. See also Thomas Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 48–55. ︎
4. This distinction was articulated by Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959). George Rawick and others have refuted the idea that this framework applies to non-white peoples. See Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972), 32. See also Vine Deloria Jr., “Thinking in Time and Space,” in God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, 50th Anniversary Edition (1973; repr., Lakewood, CO: Fulcrum, 2023), 55–69. See also Tisa Wenger, We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 249. ︎
5. Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, 1–6; Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling, 48–53; Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1–16. ︎
6. Suzan Shown Harjo, cited in Michael D. McNally, Defend the Sacred: Native American Religious Freedom beyond the First Amendment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 8, 305. ︎
7. McNally, Defend the Sacred, 8. ︎
8. For an overview of the fraught relationships between Native communities and researchers, see Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 1–18. See also Thomas Biolsi and Larry J. Zimmerman, eds., Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria, Jr. and the Critique of Anthropology (Phoenix: University of Arizona Press, 1997); Audra Simpson, “Ethnographic Refusal: Anthropological Need,” in Mohawk Interruptus, 95–114. ︎
9. McNally, Defend the Sacred, 5. ︎
10. Warren, God’s Red Son, 8–9. ︎
11. Nainoa Thompson, “On Wayfinding,” Polynesian Voyaging Society, accessed May 13, 2022, https://archive.hokulea.com/ike/hookele/on_wayfinding.html. See also Josh Reid, The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 142–53. ︎
12. Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 41. ︎
13. The literature on slave resistance is vast, but works that have particularly influenced my interpretation here include Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup, 3–11, 28. See also Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues, 24–31; and Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). ︎
14. Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1930); James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980) and Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988). ︎
15. See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 70–107. ︎
16. I echo Woods’s language here in “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” 1008. ︎

Tiffany M. Hale is assistant professor in the Department of Religion at Barnard College of Columbia University.

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How did propaganda turn colonists into revolutionaries?
Did the Founders believe in government transparency? Can democracy survive without secrecy?
Was the Boston Tea Party really about tea?
What were women’s roles during the revolution?
What kind of government did the Founders want?
What did King George III misunderstand about America?
Was the Revolution born from imperial reform?
Was neutrality possible during the Revolution?
Was the American Revolution really about taxes?
How did history help create American identity?

How did propaganda turn colonists into revolutionaries?

Among the newspapers that transformed colonial opinion in the decade leading to the Declaration of Independence, the influence of one was unequalled. This was the Boston Gazette of Benjamin Edes and John Gill, and its historic importance can be captured in two quotes. The first, from an infuriated Francis Bernard, Governor of Massachusetts, when writing in 1769 that “the printers of the Boston Gazette, Edes and Gill…are the trumpeters of Sedition, and have been made the apparent instruments of raising that flame in America, which has given so much trouble and is still like to give more to Great Britain and her Colonies.” The second, by Isaiah Thomas, a fellow printer and the founder of the American Antiquarian Society, who judged in 1810, with the perspective of time, that “No publisher of a newspaper felt a greater interest in the establishment of the independence of the United States than Benjamin Edes; and no newspaper was more instrumental in bringing forward this important event than the Boston Gazette.” The propaganda power of the press was the great media phenomenon of the 18^th century and the Boston Gazette should deservedly be remembered as being at the forefront of political debate, as newspapers carried the views of men such as Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and even George Washington, as these and so many other Founders  inspired the creation of an independent America that was secured by ink as well as through blood.  

—George Goodwin, author of Propaganda Wars of the American Revolution

Did the Founders believe in government transparency? Can democracy survive without secrecy?

Many American revolutionaries suggested transparency was the key to self-government. But when the founders gathered in Philadelphia to write the Constitution in 1787, they closed their doors and nailed the windows shut. How could they think transparency was so essential and yet shut the public out of the founding of the republic? Turns out, many had deep reservations about how making government deliberations transparent would affect their quality; they feared it could lead to policies aimed at popularity instead of the true interest of the people. In order to best represent the people and determine the common good, James Madison argued, elected officials needed to be insulated from public pressure by working behind closed doors. Yet, Madison changed his mind as the new republic got off the ground in the 1790s, coming to believe that transparency was in fact necessary for representative government to function and ensure that the people’s will guided policy-making. Many politicians and citizens in the early republic insisted that democracy could not survive without transparency and that secrecy undermined self-government. Surely, they were right. But we can’t forget that many of the founders, even Madison himself at points, argued that democracy could also not survive without some secrecy. The questions, then as much as now, remain the same: what do we expected from elected officials and how can we trust them to act in the common interest? Transparency is vital in a democracy, but we would do well to remember that secrecy has its utility, too.

—Katlyn Carter, author of Democracy in Darkness

Was the Boston Tea Party really about tea?

Yes, and so much more. British American colonists craved tea: it was an addictive, delicious, affordable luxury; if you had the means, you could sample Bohea, Souchong, Congou, Hyson, and Singlo tea. People bought silver and ceramic teaware, and women played host at the tea table. It was an enormously important social ritual. In 1767, Parliament imposed taxes on a number of exports to the colonies, and then they repealed all of them in 1770 except the tax on tea. Many Americans smuggled what they needed. Then in 1773, Parliament gave the East India Company an opportunity to sell its tea more cheaply in the American colonies. Americans didn’t want to pay the tax on tea, and they didn’t want to be forced to do business with a monopoly company, but they still craved it. Samuel Adams and others warned the colonists that the new arrangement was meant to seduce them into giving up their rights. So the Bostonians couldn’t allow the tea to land, and they would have preferred to send it back to London, but the governor wouldn’t let them. Their only remaining choice was to destroy it. When the disguised Bostonians boarded the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver, they were careful not to damage anything except the tea; but they destroyed 46 tons of tea, worth enough to buy Paul Revere’s house 46 times. The Bostonians had dumped a bunch of leaves into the harbor, and they did so on principle. It was an act of civil disobedience that still inspires us today.

—Benjamin Carp, author of Defiance of the Patriots

What were women’s roles during the revolution?

Women played many, critical roles in the Revolutionary era. The well-known boycotts against British policy in the 1760s and early 1770s depended on women’s participation. North Americans knew then, though we sometimes forget now, the impossibility of boycotting English goods without women. In the War for Independence, Black and White, free and enslaved, elite and poor women labored in the Patriot armies, providing the infrastructure and support essential for waging war. Women set up camps, provided munitions, cooked, laundered, gave spiritual and medical care, worked as couriers and spies, raised funds, built morale, and so on. George Washington called them “women of the Army” and understood that their work was necessary for the success of the Continental Army. The war raged for over eight years—another thing we sometimes forget—and turned into a multiple-front civil war. Combat often spiraled into communities and homes. In many locales, the home front and front lines blurred beyond distinction, as did the line between civilian and combatant. Whenever husbands and fathers joined the military, were taken prisoner of war, were injured, or died, women led their families. They took over businesses and farms, holding their households and communities together while living in war zones. Many continued that work for years and some for the rest of their lives. African American women also led in a different kind of revolution: against enslavement. Using the chaos of war and seeing opportunity in British emancipatory promises, enslaved women led their families in flights of freedom that turned into the greatest self-emancipatory movement in North America before the US Civil War. So, when we reflect on revolutionaries wagering their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor for independence, when we honor courageous Patriots sacrificing for freedom and building a new kind of nation, our perspective must include women!

—Lorri Glover, author of Eliza Lucas Pinckney

What kind of government did the Founders want?

By far the most substantial and longest part of the Declaration is an indictment of the misgovernment of George III.  By reading closely these criticisms and placing them in the context of the lively and robust partisan debates over how best to govern the Empire, it becomes clear that the Committee of Five wanted an activist government.  They not only argued against the oppressiveness of George III’s government, but they complained bitterly that George III had abandoned the beneficent policies of his predecessors. In particular the Founders complained that whereas the Patriot government of William Pitt the Elder and the Marquis of Rockingham had promoted the peopling of North America, George III and his Tory ministers had “endeavored the population of these states.” The Declaration was a pro-immigration document. Second, the Committee of Five were furious that instead of promoting the free and expansive commerce of the British North America as previous Patriot governments had done, George III used his admiralty courts, the Royal Navy, and high tariff barriers to cut “off our trade with all parts of the world.” The first constitutional document of the United States argued for global economic engagement and against obstructions to trade. Third, the Committee of Five were furious that instead of supporting popular self-government through Assemblies as his Patriot predecessors had done, George III had “kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies,” had stationed “large bodies of armed troops among us,” had “affected to render the military independent of and superior to the Civil power.” George III had promoted militarization rather than active popular self-government. In particular whereas his Patriot predecessors had fostered broad popular political participation among the colonists, George III had “refused to pass laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature.” America’s founding document prioritized broadly participatory government over militarization.   Finally, the Founders complained that George III had “refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary to the public good.” The Founders wanted government’s to be able to legislate to augment the popular welfare or happiness. In particular, it seems, Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues had in mind the many laws passed by colonial legislatures to prohibit or severely restrict the slave trade.

—Steven Pincus, author of The Heart of the Declaration

What did King George III misunderstand about America?

The King clearly did not appreciate the grievances of the colonies and their sense that their liberties were threatened in a political system in which they were not represented. Like many of the politicians, he assumed that the revolution was the work of a deluded minority and that most Americans supported Britain. Finally, he was wrong in believing that Britain would cease to be a major power in Europe if it lost America.

—Andrew O’Shaughnessy, author of The Men Who Lost America

Was the Revolution born from imperial reform?

Perhaps it would be correct to say that the American Revolution was an unintended consequence of imperial reform. In Patriots Before Revolution, I argue that the early Patriots—British politicians such as William Pulteney, James Oglethorpe, and William Pitt—were not revolutionaries in the least. These politicians were pro-monarchy imperialists who believed that America was the key to the British state’s future economic prosperity and geopolitical greatness. To achieve that future, however, they believed that Britain needed to better protect the constitutional rights of its subjects on both sides of the Atlantic—including free speech, trial by jury, habeas corpus, and of course, a legislative voice in taxation. In championing this vision of a British Empire that was both expansionist and free, the early Patriots stood directly opposed to another group of British reformers, whom I call the Authoritarian Reformers or Tories. To this second group, the British Empire’s problem was not too little freedom, but too much; they sought to create a stratified empire in which colonies served the economic interest of England above all else. It was this clash between two competing visions of reform that sparked the American Revolution. But to be clear, this clash did not make revolution inevitable. If Britain had followed a slightly different political course—elected more Patriot politicians, supported more Patriot imperial policies—this rupture could well have been avoided. What Americans revolted against was not the British political system itself, but a particular partisan idea of what the British Empire should be: disciplined, hierarchical, and unfree.

— Amy Watson, author of Patriots Before Revolution

Was neutrality possible during the Revolution?

Neutrality was possible during the American Revolution, but it was not easy. Much depended on who a person was, what they meant by neutrality, and how they behaved. A great deal also depended on the particularities of place and time. A publicly avowed and overtly political neutrality was rarely achievable for people who began the war as British subjects living in the thirteen colonies that became the United States of America. Neither the insurgent patriots nor the British and loyalist Americans would recognize such a stance as legitimate or legally binding. People caught up in the Revolution who could claim other forms of nationhood or subjecthood—sailors and merchants on the high seas, Euro-American settlers in trans-Appalachian imperial borderlands, Native nations like the Onondagas—might insist upon such public neutrality as individuals or in groups. This could sometimes work, but it also could be ignored or rejected, sometimes with devastating consequences, by warring parties. More common were quieter and diverse forms of what we might think of as “nobodyism” — attempts to distance oneself from both the Patriots and the British and their loyalist allies. Refusing to personally take up arms, declining to swear oaths or swearing conflicting oaths, trading with both sides, retiring to less turbulent places, staying silent, or fleeing when one army or another appeared on your farm or in your town, were all ways that people managed to retain a precarious, practical neutrality. Such nobodyism was motivated by a wide range of factors. Family and local loyalties, religious and moral beliefs, political principles, fear and other emotions. Many inclined to nobodyism confronted terribly difficult choices. Neutrality was possible during the American Revolution, but it was not necessarily the path of least resistance.

—Travis Glasson, author of Nobody Men

Was the American Revolution really about taxes?

Taxation was the wellspring of American independence, and for that reason, the American Revolution was about a great deal more than taxation. Taxation was the field on which Britain and its colonies fought out the question of what kind of empire—and what kind of society—the British world would become. Lord North, Britain’s Prime Minister, acknowledged as much when he told Parliament in 1778 that Britain was “not fighting for taxation,” but, rather for “supremacy.”  Supremacy was what authoritarian reformers like North demanded because an empire in which Parliament alone held the power to tax and legislate for the colonies, was also an empire in which the colonies subsidized Britain’s growing fiscal burdens while supplying Britain with raw materials and a captive market for its manufactures. Radical Whigs on both sides of the Atlantic rejected this vision of empire in favor of an empire on what Benjamin Franklin called “equal terms,” in which “the mutual benefits of commerce” supplied Britain’s manufactures with a growing market in North America. Both sides fought so fiercely over a tax burden that appeared small precisely because it represented contending futures for the British Empire. Two years after Americans declared their independence, Joseph Reed observed that the conflict had “irrecoverably changed from taxation to empire”—though, in truth, the struggle over taxation had always been a fight over the fate of the British world, a conflict that had revolutionary consequences for the republican empire Americans would eventually create.

—Justin du Rivage, author of Revolution Against Empire

How did history help create American identity?

History has been central to Americans’ civic identity since long before there was a nation. Colonists in the eighteenth century were proud British subjects and their civic identities were rooted in how they remembered England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, which they saw as the origin of the modern British empire. But as part of the American Revolution, Americans stopped thinking of the British past as their history and created what we think of as “American history” to replace it. By the early 19th century, the American Revolution had become central to civic identity because it served as the new nation’s “origin myth.” Origin myths explain how a society or people came to be and define their character and ideals. They are the stories that we tell about ourselves, where we came from, what we hold dear, and what we hope for in the future. And the memory of the Revolution, since the early 19c, has done the same for Americans. How we define the Revolution and its core ideals of liberty and equality have been central to how we have defined the nation and our national identities. The memory of the Revolution has given Americans a shared political language—terms like liberty, equality, tyranny, resistance—that we have used to express our political beliefs in the present and our visions of the future. And as with any language we have often defined those terms in different ways and their meanings have changed over time. But fundamentally we do mostly agree that those founding ideals and how we define them are important, that in fact they are central to how we view the nation and our relationship to it.

—Michael Hattem, author of Past and Prologue

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