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.

The post An Excerpt: Fugitive Religion appeared first on Yale University Press.

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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Trust in democratic institutions is declining around the world. In Reboot, you argue that democracy is facing a crisis, but that it can be improved. What do you see as the root cause of today’s democratic dysfunction?

Beth Noveck: The crises facing democracy today is a many-headed hydra, striking simultaneously at elections, truth, representation, participation, and institutional effectiveness. But if I had to identify a single root cause, it would be this: We are trying to govern a world of unprecedented complexity using institutions designed for scarcity.

I learned this firsthand in 2008 when I launched the Citizen’s Briefing Book for the incoming Obama administration. 125,000 people submitted 44,000 ideas about what the new president should do. We had no system, no process, no institutional capacity to make sense of it. We all but threw it in the trash. Not because we didn’t care what people thought, but because we had no way to listen at scale.

Today we generate more information, more expertise, and more complexity than at any point in human history. Yet our institutions are still organized around the assumption of scarcity.

But the institutional design problem is only part of the story. Politics itself has become a spectator sport. Average people have been systematically pushed out of meaningful participation and turned into consumers of political content rather than active participants in self-governance. Money in politics is a central driver, creating powerful disincentives to fix our institutions for those who benefit from the status quo.

The result is predictable. Governments struggle to solve problems effectively. Citizens feel unheard. And when people repeatedly watch as institutions fail to address the problems from climate change to declining life expectancy to rising healthcare costs, they do not simply lose faith in politicians. They lose faith in democracy itself.

In the book, you state we should treat democratic dysfunction not merely as a predicament but as a solvable design challenge. What would it mean to approach democracy as a problem-solving system rather than simply an electoral system?

BN: Democracy is supposed to help us make collective decisions, solve shared problems, and govern ourselves effectively. By that measure, most democratic institutions are failing. The design of our institutions does not let us realize this goal.

Proposed solutions tend to focus on politics, namely changing political parties and their policies, or not-in-my-lifetime reforms such as constitutional amendments. While we must fight for both, there is much we can redesign right now with the tools we already have from our electoral systems to our systems of governance.

We designed representative and bureaucratic institutions around a hard constraint: it was physically and logistically impossible to tap into greater collective intelligence. Far from improving the situation, the Web made things worse. With everyone speaking, institutions have had less ability to listen and learn.

I saw this firsthand with the Citizen’s Briefing Book, but it plays out every day at every level of government. Agencies open comment periods and receive thousands of responses they cannot process. City councils hold public hearings where residents speak into a void. School boards collect survey data that sits in a folder. The failure is not that people are not speaking. The failure is that no one has built the infrastructure to listen.

That is no longer true.

Hamburg used AI to turn 3,000 resident comments on cycling infrastructure into mapped, actionable intelligence that staff could actually use. That kind of public input process is now the standard way of operating there. Brazil’s Senate platform lets millions of people participate in shaping live legislation. In New Jersey, we used AI to develop workforce policy drawing on thousands of insights from workers, combined with better research we were able to conduct using AI agents.

The possibilities are there. The question is whether we want to change how things work.

You cite democracy is an “information-processing system.” What information failures are most dangerous to us now and in our future integrity of participating in democracy—is it misinformation, overload, fragmentation, or something else?

BN: We can use AI as a corrosive force or as an empowering one.

On the corrosive side, deepfakes get all the attention. But there is no documented case of a deepfake changing an electoral outcome. What deepfakes do instead is something subtler and more dangerous. They contribute to what researchers call the “liar’s dividend.” When everything can be fake, the truth becomes easier to dismiss. A public primed to believe that everything is a deepfake can be readily exploited. That erosion of shared reality, not any single piece of synthetic media, is the real threat. Using AI to manufacture and spread lies is far more corrosive because it builds a climate of hostility in which we depict our political opponents as enemies and contributes to the rising tide of political violence and hyper-partisanship.

On the empowering side, we can use AI to process information at unprecedented scale.

Taiwan uses AI-powered civic tools to help citizens identify and flag disinformation in real time.

ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center, uses data matching across state motor vehicle and voter registration records to keep voter rolls accurate and complete, reducing both errors and the opportunity for bad-faith challenges.

Meedan’s platform Check operates through WhatsApp in 65 countries, letting people submit questions about rumors and get verified responses in dozens of languages. In Brazil’s 2022 election, working with the national electoral authority, they handled hundreds of thousands of individual fact-check responses in a few weeks.

The choice between these two futures is not technological. It is a question of who builds these tools, for whom, and toward what end.

Public debates about AI often focus on risks. Between election security, disinformation, data centers, and infrastructure, what are the most significant opportunities and dangers AI presents for democracy?

BN:  Let’s focus on data centers, which are a good example of both the risks and the opportunities.

The bipartisan opposition has become one of the most revealing windows into how people feel about AI and democracy. Seven out of ten Americans oppose having a data center built near them, with half strongly opposing it. The opposition is so intense that more Americans say they would rather live near a nuclear power plant than a data center.

Concerns about data centers are a proxy for deeper anxieties about concentration of power, corporate control, environmental costs, and the question of who actually benefits.

The deeper danger from AI is not the far-off robot apocalypse. The danger is that AI becomes a tool for concentrating power in the hands of a small number of companies and governments, accelerating surveillance, automating unaccountable decision-making, and further distancing citizens from the institutions that are supposed to serve them. This loss of transparency, control, and accountability is why people in both red and blue states are so angry about the growth of data centers.

That bipartisan anger is also an opportunity. It is causing people to ask hard questions: What are we building AI for? Why are we investing the water and power to create these data centers? Why do we have so little say over them?

We need to use our collective purchasing power in the public sector to push back on data center development and demand that companies invest in developing smaller, more energy efficient models that do not pollute the environment or drive up energy costs.

You distinguish between AI that simply automates decision-making and what you call “Democratic AI.”  How can these tools strengthen democratic capacity rather than weaken it?

BN: Democratic AI is AI designed for public purpose, built with the participation of the people it affects, and measured by whether it makes democracy more responsive and effective.

Most AI is built to extract value from people. Democratic AI is built to return power to them. It asks not what can this technology do, but what problems do people need solved, and how can these tools help solve them? That reorientation changes everything about how you build, deploy, and evaluate AI systems.

It also changes who is in the room. Democratic AI means building systems with communities rather than imposing them on communities. This is not just an ethical principle. It produces better outcomes. When our AI for Impact Fellows built a free, open-source tool with families to help parents of children with disabilities understand, translate, and summarize their Individualized Education Program in a process we call community-centered AI development. Community-centered AI development takes account of the know how of those people living the problem.

Democratic AI is also judged by a different standard. Not whether it saved minutes or dollars, but whether it expanded access to justice, improved public services, strengthened participation, or helped institutions make better decisions. Those are harder things to measure than processing speed, but they are the things that actually determine whether democracy is working.

Many people today feel powerless, distrustful of institutions, and pessimistic about democracy’s future. What gives you reason for optimism?

In the course of writing this book I traveled to more than a dozen countries and spent time with public servants, civic technologists, community organizers, and ordinary citizens who are quietly building the infrastructure of democratic renewal.

They are not waiting for Washington or Brussels or Silicon Valley to solve this.

Especially at the state and local level, they are solving it themselves, with the tools available to them, for the communities they know.

The web gave us thirty years of talking. What gives me optimism is that we now have tools that make listening possible at scale for the first time in history. That is not a small thing. Good governments have always wanted to know what people think. They have never before had the practical means to find out, synthesize it, and act on people’s opinons in real time. That changes what democracy can be.

I am not naively optimistic. The threats are real and the window is not unlimited. But the question has never been whether AI will reshape democracy. It will, whether we want it to or not. The only question is whether that happens by design or by default. I choose design. And I think enough people around the world are making the same choice to give us a genuine reason for hope.

Beth Simone Noveck is a professor and director of the Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University. She leads The Governance Lab and its InnovateUS initiative. Former U.S. deputy chief technology officer and the first state chief AI strategist, she founded AI for Impact, which builds democratic AI with communities. She is the author of Solving Public Problems: A Practical Guide to Fix Our Government and Change Our World and writes on AI and democracy at rebootdemocracy.ai.

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David Bentley Hart—

There is no way of characterizing the chief import of the Tao Te Ching (or Daodejing) that will not excite some emphatic disagreement or another from someone who believes he or she has a better grasp of the text. This is perfectly fair, in part, because the book is genuinely mysterious in the understanding it offers of its two guiding concepts: the Way and the Power (or Virtue); both are invoked again and again but are defined in terms largely pictorial and practical rather than conceptual or metaphysical. Then there is the vexed question of the purpose of the text, which is made all but impossible to answer with certainty by virtue of the obvious heterogeneity of its contents; it may be ascribed by tradition to Laozi, but it is clearly a compilation and, in all likelihood, redaction and revision of aphoristic or oracular sources emanating from various places and times in Chinese antiquity. More to the point, there is an old tension between those who read the text principally as a spiritual and even mystical work and those who read it as a manual of statecraft whose recommendations of such things as humble self-effacement and a willingness to yield are just counsels of policy and strategic cunning.

The truth is that it is almost certainly both of these things: a philosophy of nature and the soul and a program of judicious governance. It is only a prejudice that tells us that a political treatise can employ a spiritual grammar only cynically and dissemblingly, or that a book of spiritual wisdom cannot venture political principles without corrupting its own moral message. That the mystical and the pragmatic are not at odds with one another is one of the chief lessons of the book, inasmuch as the Way and the Power are commended to us in its pages not only as the static structures of reality, but as the vital spiritual principles by which anything and everything—from a river seeking the ocean to a nation seeking peace—achieves its intrinsic end. There is one Way that is the proper course of all that lives and from which all things flow and one Power that animates and perfects all things, and they together are at one and the same time the dynamisms of nature, of practical endeavor, of social and political life, and of spiritual truth.

The essential question of the text, perhaps, is whether it identifies a single principle (at once metaphysical, cosmological, moral, spiritual, practical, and political) in which all the spheres of conduct and philosophy we might be in the habit of keeping separate in fact coincide. And the answer is that there most certainly is: the principle of the refusal of mastery, whether of nature or of other persons or even of one’s own self and possessions. This is the one recurrent and plangent leitmotif sounded again and again throughout the eighty-one chapters of the text. It makes even the most calculating of the book’s political and martial axioms subordinate to an ethos of selflessness, humility, and even love. The book often portrays this ethos as “feminine” and “maternal,” and even urges princes—in a time and place when all coercive power lay in the hands of men—to renounce the “masculine” and patriarchal habits of mastery in order to adopt instead attitudes of nurture, gentleness, suppression of the ego, and patient concern. At one point, it obliquely likens the wise prince to a mother bird sheltering her nest.

However one characterizes it, the virtue that the Tao Te Ching unremittingly promotes as the essential truth at once giving rise to and sustaining Heaven and Earth, suffusing all living things with Vital Spirit (chi, xi), and guiding every wisely governed society and state is that of “giving way”: “not striving,” “not contending,” accepting rather than imposing, allowing things to unfold out of their true natures rather than attempting to force them into alien and factitious shapes. I find it hard not to see an analogy to “the Way and its Power” in, say, Meister Eckhart’s principle of Gelassenheit—“letting be” or “letting go.” This is not, either in the Tao Te Ching or in Eckhart’s theology, some counsel of blessed indolence or simple withdrawal from human affairs. Rather it is a moral and spiritual imperative to allow what is at once other than oneself and yet the deepest truth within oneself to come forth into the light of being, arising from the Earth (di) and under the canopy of Heaven (tian), rather than attempting violently to craft reality according to one’s own ambitions, or even according to one’s own inflexible sense of how things ought to be. That is not a moral maxim in the sense of a single law to which one must remain obedient, or even a maxim in the more universal and abstract sense of Kant’s categorical imperative. It is instead, again, an attitude, a disposition of the soul toward all of reality whose practical working out in the course of one’s life — private or shared —will reveal itself only as one continues to adopt it in every situation. This is as it should be, given that the text announces in its very first lines that the Way that is the source of everything is in itself nameless and so beyond rigid conceptualization. Simply enough, it is indeed a way, not an abstract table of laws or taxonomy of substances, and a way is only truly understood in being followed. For what it is worth, to me this is a moral and spiritual truth that becomes more precious and luminous the more one seeks to live it out. To those who prefer a strict set of rules, it might seem infuriatingly vague. But I can attest, to the contrary, that this is not so. I undertook the translation of the Tao Te Ching during a period of considerable personal darkness, and the labor proved to be itself a path—a Way—out of that darkness and toward the light.

David Bentley Hart is a philosopher, scholar of religion, writer, and cultural commentator. His books include All Things Are Full of Gods; The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss; and Roland in Moonlight. He is a collaborative researcher at the University of Notre Dame.

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Brian Fagan—

Looking forward half a century: it is a day in fall. A hunter and his college-age daughter sit watchfully in a red deer hide, sweating in the humid, still air. Both have semi-automatic repeater rifles with telescopic sights at the ready. The woodland is hushed. Even the birds are quiet, waiting for chillier air. Father and daughter scan the trees 1,000 meters ahead of them: a small sign reveals the distance from the hide. The deer known to frequent the woods are quiet, also waiting for the cool. A soft rustle, the gentle flutter of a hoof pawing a dry leaf. The hunters glance at one another, then stare intently ahead, peering closely through their sights. Barely visible movement—a large antlered deer moves slowly across their scopes. Fingers quickly flick off safeties, but the prey spots the movement and vanishes nimbly into the undergrowth. Rifles drop, safety catches are engaged, and the wait resumes. Minutes pass glacially slowly; sweat drops down stationary faces. Another soft rustling. Weapons are softly raised, telescopic sights refocused, safeties released. A second deer appears in the gloaming. The daughter tightens her finger on the trigger and fires. Her prey drops with two shots to the head and lies still. The hunters neutralize their weapons, make sure the deer is dead, then pose triumphantly with the kill.

No close-quarters chase, this, no hour-long stalk with spears or other primitive weaponry. This is managed hunting, conducted on private land, where ranges are known, and high-technology repeater rifles annihilate distance. Successful kills are virtually guaranteed. If you prefer you can still, of course, engage in stalking and embrace the old-fashioned skills of the hunters of yesteryear, even hunting with flintlock muskets, bows and arrows, or spears. But this, in the final analysis, is the part of hunting that is slowly vanishing, as we gradually turn our backs on the cherished skills of thousands of years.

The question we posed at the start—why do people hunt?—presents more of a mystery than ever as we move through the twenty-first century. We certainly know that hunting no longer plays a dominant role in human behavior. Do we do it for pleasure? In many instances, this is certainly the case. Hunting requires complex abilities, much respected in many ancient hunting societies, and the successful application of a difficult skill like stalking yields obvious and profound satisfaction. In ancient times, a kill in the wild provided nourishment that, when salted and dried, could sustain a group for weeks. As more than one researcher has remarked, hunting was the pursuit of a mobile larder, but even in the prehistoric world, it was not a full-time way of acquiring food. It provided irregular subsistence that might be punctuated by weeks or months in which people had to rely on less exciting but more dependable fare such as plant foods and mollusks.

But why do we hunt? An analogy can be found in avian behavior. Why do birds sing? They do so when the impulse grabs them, not for a specific cause. I suspect that hunting is a similar kind of behavior, an instinct that takes hold of one, a matter of feeling like doing it. Do we hunt for the same reason birds sing—a combination of utility and deeply evolved satisfaction? Is it simply wired into us genetically? We don’t know.

Brian Fagan (1936–2025) was an internationally recognized authority on global prehistory. He was emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of dozens of books, including Fishing: How the Sea Fed Civilization; A Little History of Archaeology; The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations; and The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History.

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To sit in conversation with Willie Birch (American, born 1942) is to submit to the very process that he has made visible throughout his long career. It is a deliberate process—you can expect to be there a while—and it is a personal process, with asides that will take you through time and across continents, touching on art, music, history, science, and more. It is, of course, the process of telling a story, and Willie Birch has a lot of stories to tell. Over the past sixty-plus years, Birch has produced sculptures (wooden, bronze, and papier-mâché, site-specific installations, immersive installations, paintings, drawings, prints, works made from found objects (sometimes only lightly adjusted, sometimes totally transformed), even a thirteen-foot-high wooden crucifix, which is still visible in situ in a church in Baltimore. While these works could not be more diverse in scale and execution, they all share one thing in common: each is designed to convey a narrative.

Even his most abstract works, the majority of which he made early in his career, are compilations of symbols, both borrowed and created, that communicate the very idea of communication, drawing attention to the ways in which languages can be both legible and inscrutable at the same time, depending on what the audience brings to them. These early works also signaled a layered approach to narrative that would persist throughout his career. There is always a narrative, which is to say that in each of his works, we can trace a particular story, ranging from the reverberations of African ancestry in America to the lived experiences of Black Americans before and after the Civil Rights Movement. And then there is the narrative, or rather Narrative: the idea that each story is part of a larger, interconnected web of storytelling. To put it another way, each of his works tells a specific story and is about storytelling more broadly. This wholistic approach to narrative makes the experience of looking at, walking through, and being confronted with Birch’s works very much like the experience of listening to him tell a story directly. What this catalog and the exhibition it accompanies offer, therefore, is an invitation to sit in conversation with Willie Birch—to look, to listen, to feel, and to experience the stories he has to tell.

Birch’s origins echoed the layered networks and personal narratives that he would later adopt as his artistic subjects. Born on November 26, 1942 (Thanksgiving night), Willie Melvin Birch emerged into a world surrounded by, and named for, the branches of his family. He was born in the back of his Aunt Tontee’s (Kate Dorsey) restaurant at 2133 Tchoupitoulas Street in New Orleans. The restaurant was directly across the street from the Mississippi River and a major train track route, both of which connected this location with much of the rest of the country, an auspicious location for an artist who would go on to explore networks, connections, lifelines, and linkages in his own work. He was named after two uncles: Kate Dorsey’s husband, Willie Dorsey, and Willie Birch Sr., his father’s brother. Birch’s mother, Anna Poindexter, and father, Wilson Birch, never married, thus he was closer to his mother’s family, in particular his grandmother, Kitty Poindexter. His early nickname was “Lil’ Poindexter.” Young Willie was clearly influenced by his immediate family, which informed his interest in the lives of his surrounding community. David S. Rubin’s excellent essay on Birch’s life traces these important connections, which are worth restating here: Wilson Birch was a longshoreman; Anna Poindexter was a cook and housekeeper for a wealthy white family in New Orleans; Willie Dorsey was a union organizer; Dan Poindexter Sr., his grandfather, was a farmer in rural Bertrandville, Louisiana; uncle Nathaniel Poindexter was a “preacher, school teacher, and community leader with whom Birch lived each summer”; another uncle, Dan Poindexter, owned a Black nightclub in Marrero, Louisiana, across the river from New Orleans; Nathaniel Dorsey, a cousin, was a community activist and assistant director of the New Orleans chapter of the Urban League.1

Dorseys, Poindexters, Birches, community organizers, farmers, food, preachers, educators, shipping and transportation, the Mississippi River, and New Orleans. This is the constellation of people, places, and things that converged to form the foundation for the young artist. It is no wonder that his career would be devoted to making connections between forces and phenomena around the world, tracing the influences and the movements of culture and humanity across time and space. Birch’s own migrations would eventually take him from the cultural nexus of New Orleans, and the small town of Bertrandville, to the metropolises of Baltimore, Amsterdam, New York, and finally back to New Orleans. Richard J. Powell has remarked on the influence of both historical African American migrations and Birch’s personal peregrinations in an essay on the work of the artist accompanying a 1995 exhibition titled From Bertrandville to Brooklyn. “As Birch’s . . . constructions attest, his various homes, travels, and experiences culminate in a body of work that, tellingly, invokes focus and wholeness, rather than schizophrenia.” Continuing on, Powell asserts that Birch’s ultimate return to the place of his birth is “confirmation of the adage that the more you see of the world, the more you are able to see and recognize yourself and your origins.”  Although Birch would go on to have a long and celebrated career in other places, his origins are rooted in New Orleans, as are the origins of the stories he wants to tell about African influence on Black American culture and history.

The exhibition Willie Birch: Stories to Tell is co-organized by the American Federation of Arts and the New Orleans Museum of Art, and curated by Russell Lord, Chief of Curatorial Affairs at the Norman Rockwell Museum.

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Ross Brooks—

Why has it taken so long for biologists and science communicators to embrace the boundless queerness of nature and our sexually heterogeneous evolution? The problem pre-dates Darwin. From its origins in the eighteenth century, evolutionary biology was deeply imbued with gendered, racial and classist prejudices derived from theology, law and murderous colonial ideologies and practices. The first evolutionists were mostly privileged white men who shaped their ideas in their own image, even as they conceived radical new ways of reasoning about human origins. The prolific ethnographic and natural history literature (‘the handmaidens of colonialist knowledge production’, as historian Greta LaFleur writes) and related texts of the era were thereby forged to reflect the interests of patriarchal European powers as they consolidated their brutal dominion of faraway lands.¹ In this deeply troubled ideological schema, Indigenous peoples were regarded as an evolutionary stage between monkeys and self-declared ‘civilised’ humans (epitomised by well-to-do Victorian men), while women and individuals with non-binary traits were similarly misrepresented as harking back to earlier evolutionary stages.

The problematics of early evolutionary theorising were exacerbated by the semantics of ‘hermaphroditism’. Age-old associations with monstrosity and pathology slipped unthinkingly into visions of biological degeneracy, even as intersexuality came to be considered a fundamental part of human ancestry and inheritance. The term ‘hermaphrodite’ was often used as an insult to accuse someone of gender or sexual impropriety. Physicians and anatomists applied it to all manner of mixed-sex and sex-transformative characteristics, not just unusual genitalia, even extending it to psychological and behavioural characteristics (‘moral’ or ‘mental’ hermaphroditism) including same-sex desires. Hermaphroditism, as far as most people were concerned, was a grave medical problem afflicting a minority of individuals and requiring the intervention of doctors and sometimes lawyers. The proposition that it was pervasive in the natural world and foundational to human evolution, let alone the suggestion that we all retain degrees of it, was even more inflammatory than notions of simian ancestry.

Darwin actively sought to mitigate the queer potentialities of his evolutionary thought by overlaying them with his manicured styling of his second major theory of evolutionary change – sexual selection – which was deeply embedded in Victorian gender and sexual stereotypes. Simply stated, he deployed sexual selection theory, set out at length in The Descent of Man, to explain the development of secondary sexual characteristics that seemed to offer little advantage to an individual’s survival and might even hinder it (the peacock’s striking, but cumbersome, tail being the classic example). He posited two mechanisms by which sexual selection worked: the competition of males as they vie for reproductive access to females either through physical combat or courtship displays, and the ability of females to choose their mates. The flamboyant peacock’s tail came to be, Darwin insisted, because peahens find it sexy.

At least, that’s how the standard account of Darwin’s construal of sexual selection tends to go. However, as we’ll see in later chapters of this book, he struggled to maintain such a simplistic view of the theory and was prompted, not least by a host of queer creatures, to modify it. Still, his unyielding emphasis on male competitiveness and female capriciousness ever detracted from the nuances and variations that he necessarily, if sometimes partially, structured into his evolutionism. Extended to humans, he enshrined a chronic misogyny into his evolutionary schema, asserting, for example, that: ‘The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain – whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands.’²

It’s now generally recognised that Darwin’s selective and laboured descriptions of aggressive males and fussy females in Descent were made to order, reflecting hegemonic Victorian gender roles for an appreciative bourgeois readership (as Joan Roughgarden puts it, ‘Darwin’s theory of sexual selection is locker-room bravado projected onto animals and then retrieved as though a fact of nature’).³ In Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection, historian Evelleen Richards charts some key aspects of Darwin’s modelling of sexual selection which he pieced together from disparate ideological trends and selected observations of animals (especially birds) and people. His familial and cultural background informed his attitudes towards courtship and reproduction and these were reinforced by his marriage to his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, who maintained orthodox views about women’s domestic and social roles. As Richards puts it, there was ‘no inconsistency between Darwin’s personal experience and his theoretical argument’.⁴ The enduring image of Darwin as the epitome of the bearded Victorian paterfamilias, including his embodiment of an unassailable upper-middle-class masculinity, his long and happy marriage and numerous children, is one that fits, in all its banal simplicity, to a substantial, and unusual, degree. For all his piercing insights and conceptual innovations, Darwin’s evolutionism, especially as it took in humans, was, in so many ways, a science of himself.

Consequently, even as he worked to accommodate intersexualities and transformations of sex in animal bodies within his evolutionary thought in the most innovative ways, Darwin’s personal standpoint and mindset exerted a muting influence on how he structured and presented the queerer dimensions of his science, with deeply regrettable consequences. The union of a female animal with a male to produce offspring, preferably without the complication of promiscuity, comprised Darwin’s idealised vision of sexual evolution. In contrast, he often portrayed queer bodies, mental characteristics and behaviours as anomalous, empirically insignificant, developmental misfits, reproductive failures and evolutionary sexual throwbacks, even as dual-sexed and sex-transformative phenomena were useful to him. Extended to humans, he further deployed derisory terminology largely derived from medieval theology. Aside from ‘hermaphrodite’, terms he used include ‘aberrant off spring’, ‘utter licentiousness’, ‘evil habits’, ‘promiscuity’, ‘vice’, ‘unnatural crimes’, ‘immorality’ and ‘vitiated instincts’. Responding to his ideas and writings, others, including personal correspondents and critics, echoed his queerphobia, deploying terms such as ‘unnatural love’, ‘grosser copartneries’, ‘paiderastia’, ‘sodomy’, ‘profound moral corruption’, ‘nameless crimes’, ‘gross profligacy’ and ‘hideous sexual criminality’.

Greater awareness of queerness in the natural world did not, therefore, lead to a more enlightened view of queer people. Instead, mounting empirical evidence for intersexualities, transformations of sex, diverse courtship and reproductive repertoires, and nonreproductive sexual behaviours fuelled a backlash against the view that nature is inherently ordered and a suitable benchmark for what is ‘normal’, and emboldened the view that it is essentially chaotic and in need of domestication and shaping for human purposes. Such mercurial ideological maneuvering had devastating consequences.

1. Greta LaFleur, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 4. See also, for example, Rudi C. Bleys, The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-Male Sexual Behaviour outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination (Cassell, 1996); Sita Balani, Deadly and Slick: Sexual Modernity and the Making of Race (Verso, 2023); Banu Subramaniam, Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientifi c Legacies of Colonialism (University of Washington Press, 2024). ︎
2. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols (London, 1871), 2:327. ︎
3. Joan Roughgarden, ‘Challenging Darwin’s Th eory of Sexual Selection’, Daedalus 136, no. 2 (2007): 35. ︎
4. Evelleen Richards, Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection (University of Chicago Press, 2017), 61. ︎

Ross Brooks (he/him) is an independent historian of science and a foundational thinker in queer history and the history of sexology. He regularly speaks on the queer history of science at events across the UK, and he features in the pioneering documentary Queer Planet.

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