Michael Scott—

In the run-up to the 2024 UK General Election, a UK university poll found that half of young people surveyed were dissatisfied with how democracy works in the UK.¹ In a 2025 UK Youth Poll (for those aged 16-29) the results again underlined young people’s concern about the state of democracy.² This is not a UK-specific response, but one that can be paralleled in many countries for a variety of political, economic and historical reasons. The nuance of these polls is that most young people are not calling for the rejection of democracy in favor of more authoritarian styles of government, but instead for a better system of democracy that can deliver meaningful change.

Such findings might make us reflect on the origins of democracy as a political system in ancient Athens and what we might take from it as we seek to reinvigorate and perhaps reinvent democracy in the 21^st century. Modern politicians often talk about the link between ancient and modern democracy as if it was an unbroken chain. But the reality is of course that, for most of the centuries between the invention of democracy in ancient Athens and its wide adoption in the modern world, the reaction to ancient Athens’s political system has been one of revulsion. Even in the debates of the Founding Fathers in America, as the Papers of James Madison show, ancient Athenian democracy was rejected as an exemplar for the new American Constitution, with participants famously stating that “had every Athenian been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”³

I have recently written a biography of the Athenian statesman Themistocles, who grew up in the early heady days of Athenian democracy. He was just sixteen when Athens threw off its final version of tyrannical rule and instead embraced a system of “equality before the law,” that would evolve into a system of “demokratia” or  “people-power” over the following thirty years. Themistocles came from a family of no special consequence, and it was in large part only because of this changing political system around him that he was able to break through to play a major political role, serving, for example, as its chief magistrate just after his thirtieth birthday.

But what Themistocles also bore witness to was an extraordinary surge in aggressive political people-power in the decade after he was chief magistrate. During the 480s BCE, the sources bear witness to the first use of “ostracism” in ancient Athens. We are not sure whether the process of ostracism had been in existence since the adoption of the new “equality before the law” system twenty-plus years previously, whether it had technically existed even before that, or whether it was brought into being for the first time during the 480s. But what’s clear is that the Athenians embraced it in the 480s with gusto. Of all the attested ostracisms during the whole of the fifth century BCE, half of them take place in the 480s. This was the ostracism decade.

But what was it? Ostracism involved the Athenian people coming together to agree first on whether an ostracism vote was required. If they agreed that it was, then everyone wrote the name of one person they would like to see ostracized from Athenian politics. They wrote that name on small, discarded fragments of pottery known in ancient Greek as “ostraca” (from where the name of the vote—and our word ostracism—comes). The votes were counted and the person with the most votes was banished from Athens for 10 years. It’s not difficult to see why the Founding Fathers characterized ancient Athenian democracy as mob rule.

Early votes in the 480s show the Athenians were mostly focused on expelling those still associated with tyranny; later in the decade, they targeted those associated with Athens’s enemies. But increasingly, this mechanism was used to expel those who had simply become too big for their boots —those who thought the system was about them rather than them serving the system, and its people. Themistocles’ name during the 480s appears on these ostraca —but never quite in high enough number to top the table.

What prompted the sudden take-up of ostracism in the 480s in Athens? Some point to the increased need for security occasioned by the Persian invasion at Marathon in 490 BCE and the incursions of other local foes. No doubt there is something in that. But perhaps it was also occasioned by a feeling of disillusionment in the system—now more than two decades old—and its ability to deliver on its promises and effect real change. Ostracism has been categorized as enabling the Athenian political system to let off steam, to signal its key grievances and problems; and at a basic level, to let everyone just formally say what—or rather whom—was bothering them.

Many have suggested that ostracism could provide an inspiration for the kind of reforms the young would like to see today, as a lightning rod to reinvigorate democracy and enable it to deliver on its ideals. For ancient Athens, the turbulent politics of the 480s, combined with Athens’ survival—and indeed glorious victories—against the Persians in 480 and 479 BCE, set in train the emergence of a triumphal era of democracy across the following decades. Perhaps something similar might result again today, hopefully from political reform alone, without the need for major conflict alongside it. But politicians beware: Themistocles did eventually top the ostracism vote and found himself out of Athens in the late 470s BCE. He, for all his experience of Athenian politics, had seemingly forgotten the single most important rule of Athenian politics: it’s not about you, it’s about the people.

1. Royal Holloway, University of London, “Survey Finds That Nearly Half of Young People Are Unhappy with UK Democracy,” July 4, 2024, https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/about-us/news/survey-finds-that-nearly-half-of-young-people-are-unhappy-with-uk-democracy/ ︎
2. “University of Glasgow – Glasgow Social Sciences Hub – Young People Believe in Democracy but Fear for Its Future, Finds Survey of Youth.” n.d. https://www.gla.ac.uk/explore/glasgowsocialscienceshub/resources/all/headline_1167843_en.html. ︎
3. “The Avalon Project : Federalist No 55.” n.d. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed55.asp. ︎

Michael Scott is professor of classics and ancient history and pro-vice-chancellor for international affairs at the University of Warwick, UK. He is the author of several books, including Delphi: A History of the Center of the Ancient World; Ancient Worlds: A Global History of Antiquity; and X Marks the Spot: An Adventurous History of Archaeology, as well as writer and presenter of multiple documentaries for BBC, ITV, National Geographic, and SBS. www.michaelscottweb.com 

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This year marks the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. This semiquincentennial of the establishment of the United States of America is being celebrated throughout the country by a slew of exhibitions, reenactments, documentaries and publications that focus on the Revolutionary War as well as many other chapters of American history. But the 250^th anniversary is also being marked by controversy, as the Trump administration has been working to censor accounts of US history in Smithsonian museums, at national historical sites, and on government websites; to defund revisionist scholarship and cultural projects; and to promote its own slate of official commemorations. In one of many such controversies, the US National Park Service removed wall texts about slavery that had been hanging in the President’s House, part of the Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. The removal of these wall panels created national news coverage, grassroots resistance from local activists, and a lawsuit filed by the city of Philadelphia.

Episodes like this one illustrate how significantly histories of early America have been reenvisioned over time as well as the importance of race in the public’s understanding of those histories. In the 1930s, Colonial Williamsburg similarly helped reshape popular perceptions of the Revolutionary War, in part through its depiction of racial hierarchy. Often considered the first living history museum in the United States, Colonial Williamsburg restored the town of Williamsburg, Virginia to its appearance during the eighteenth century, when it had served as the capital of the Virginia colony. While Massachusetts had long occupied pride of place in histories of the American Revolution, Colonial Williamsburg recentered Virginia and the South more generally as crucial theaters of US independence. This recentering aligned with Lost Cause ideologies of the period, which sought to reconcile North and South by repositioning southern history as national history. Colonial Williamsburg, like other cultural artifacts of the Lost Cause, encouraged White Americans from outside the South to identify with historic White southerners as their own cultural ancestors and to understand southern history as part of the larger collective national heritage. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the financier and philanthropist who funded Colonial Williamsburg, even received an award from the New York Southern Society, an organization devoted to commemorating “Southern social life manners, and character,” for showing how the “history and traditions of the Southern States are inspirations for a better national life.”

What enabled White Americans from all over the United States to identify with Virginia’s eighteenth-century past was the immersive, uncanny experience of visiting Colonial Williamsburg. The organization reconstructed and restored hundreds of historic buildings; moved unsightly electrical and telegraph lines underground; pushed modern highways, businesses and utilities outside the historic area; and replaced eleven thousand linear feet of modern sidewalks with those of “authentic” materials like brick and oyster shell. Through this marshalling of twentieth-century technologies and industrial capital, Colonial Williamsburg gave visitors the novel experience of strolling down eighteenth-century streets and looking out of eighteenth-century windows onto eighteenth-century views. One tourist even described walking around the site all day until his feet began to feel “authentic 18^th century.” At Colonial Williamsburg, visitors drew on their own bodily senses to feel history all around them as an immersive experience, in which the past truly seemed as if it had been revived or brought back to life in the present. This created an uncanny slippage between past and present, between representation and reality, but one that enabled twentieth century tourists to take on the subject positions of historical figures—to imagine themselves as “founding fathers” or their “ladies” as they strolled the streets of Colonial Williamsburg.

One of the reasons why White visitors could slip into the past so easily at Colonial Williamsburg  was because it presented early America as recognizably familiar. Colonial Williamsburg’s designers catered to the public’s preconceived notions about the aristocratic elegance and gracious living of the colonial era, and they employed racial hierarchy to create a particularly convincing illusion of the past. Black costumed interpreters worked at Colonial Williamsburg as coachmen and kitchen staff to portray the enslaved workers of the antebellum period and to reinforce the elite status of the White costumed interpreters who represented the “planter gentry” or “southern belles.” As tourists’ accounts and marketing images of Colonial Williamsburg make clear, the presence of such Black workers was celebrated by White visitors and furthered the impression of a complete historical ecosystem. But the contrast between Black and White costumed interpreters also reinforced inequalities that 1930s Americans were used to, strengthening the sense that Colonial Williamsburg was recognizably true and authentic. In this way, Colonial Williamsburg legitimized racial inequality as historically long-standing and naturalized it as a conventional norm.

Colonial Williamsburg’s commitment to aligning with White visitors’ expectations of the past made history feel recognizably familiar and convincingly authentic. The recent events at the President’s House in Philadelphia show what can happen when historic sites do not align with visitors’ expectations. Jeffrey Anderson, a member of the first Trump administration who visited the site in 2025, was so appalled by its emphasis on slavery that he published a censorious article that year called “Hijacking America’s Story,” which he said he’d “like to think” influenced Trump officials to target the site for scrutiny. But removing the site’s acknowledgement of slavery led local historical groups and residents to their own acts of protest, including posting alternate signage, leaving flowers to mourn the loss, writing reactions on the empty placards, and signing on to open letters. Similar activism has had dramatic impacts on the racial politics of Colonial Williamsburg, from the Civil Rights leaders who pressured the organization to desegregate its facilities in the 1950s to the staff members who staged a controversial reenactment of a slave auction in the 1990s. As we commemorate the semiquincentennial of the United States, we can remember not just the history of the nation but also its history of historical revision, and the ways in which its citizens have worked repeatedly to center their own stories. 

K. L. H. Wells is associate professor of American art and architecture in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

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Almost immediately after arriving at Black Mountain, Anni began to write. Her essays, some of them specific to weaving and some on aesthetics in general, would have great importance to her. Most would be published initially in design magazines, and eventually they would go into two different books, On Weaving and On Designing; since her lifetime, these books have been republished as well as translated, with increased interest in her narrative voice.

She would sometimes spend as much as a day on a single sentence, formulating her ideas in the clearest possible language with rhythm and balance in her cadence. Then she would take the individual typewritten pages and tape them from the bottom of one to the top of the next so that she could read the text continuously without a break between pages; she felt that this arrangement, “which resembled a scroll,” was the only way she could maintain the flow of her thinking. The method exemplified her attention to nuance in whatever she did. Aside from a short essay on weaving, the first result of her writing at Black Mountain, and her use of English, was “Work with Material.” She would finish it in 1937, but it began to assume form in 1934. Within its four-page text, which is written ostensibly as a guide to what she considers essential in teaching, she eloquently voices her own inner workings and the experience she had from the start at Black Mountain College. She opens by writing, “Life today is very bewildering. . . . We have to make a choice between concepts of great diversity. . . . We must find our way back to simplicity of conception in order to find ourselves.”

Anni in effect acknowledges her own fortitude (“Independence presumes a spirit of adventurousness—a faith in one’s own strength”) and makes it the goal of teaching: “It is this which should be promoted.” And she celebrates her own realization that by embracing the process of textile making she found a sense of equilibrium: “We are overgrown with information. . . useless in any constructive sense. We . . . have neglected our own formative impulse. . . . We must come down to earth from the clouds where we live in vagueness, and experience the most real thing there is: material.”

Anni exults in the wonder of simple physical substances:

If we want to get from materials the sense of directness, the adventure of being close to the stuff the world is made of, we have to go back to the material itself, to its original state, and from there on partake in its stages of change.

We use materials to satisfy our practical needs and our spiritual ones as well.

On one of my early visits to her, Anni gave me a piece—some four by six inches—of what I would call “bark paper.” The paper-thin strip, essentially an earth brown, bears the patterns of wood grain in a darker brown. It is like a compressed cross-section of a richly grained piece of wood, possibly made from the underside of a piece of bark. It demonstrates Anni’s point that “material, that is to say unformed or unshaped matter, is . . . well fitted to become the training ground for invention and free speculation. It is here that even the shyest beginner can catch a glimpse of the exhilaration of creating, by being a creator while at the same time he is checked by irrevocable laws set by the nature of the material, not by man.”

Yet at the same time that Anni gives raw material a position of extreme importance in her declarations that we must listen to its voice, she thrills to the strength of human beings going their own way, proceeding from this receptivity to the nature of tree bark or animal hide or whatever the natural substance is to the act of artistic creation. In one magnificent paragraph, with her newly found use of the English language, patently modeled on the clear thinking and verbal eloquence of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, Anni not only articulates the essential trajectories of her own life as well as Josef’s but provides a template for what it is that can give meaning and beauty to human life: “But most important to one’s own growth is to see oneself leave the safe ground of accepted conventions and to find oneself alone and self-dependent. It is an adventure which can permeate one’s whole being. Self-confidence can grow. And a longing for excitement can be satisfied without external means, within oneself; for creating is the most intense excitement one can come to know.”

Reading this, we picture Anni’s courageous move from her childhood world to the Bauhaus; we see her at Black Mountain finding her way as a textile artist in spite of limited equipment and lean facilities. We understand the force that gave Anni and Josef Albers, together, when she was in her seventies and he in his eighties, a clarity of purpose. Their sheer joy in the riches of this world, of the gifts of nature and the power of creativity, made them exceptional.

Nicholas Fox Weber is the author of many books including Balthus: A Biography; Le Corbusier: A Life; The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism; and Mondrian: His Life, His Art, His Quest for the Absolute. He is executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.

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Michael O’Hanlon—

When did the United States join the ranks of the world’s top military powers—and why did it do so? Understanding the right answers to these questions is important because it can reveal something about who we are as a people, what truly motivates us, and how we think about national power and purpose even today. Maybe it will make President Trump’s recent frequent uses of military force, whether well-advised or not, a little less of a curiosity.

We are often taught that the United States really only became a world power after the Japanese surprise attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 left us little choice in the matter. By this account, we were—and perhaps still are—a reluctant superpower. I believe this narrative is mostly wrong.

It is true that, apart from the last 18 months of World War I, the United States tried to avoid ground wars in Europe for much of its history. But who wouldn’t have tried to avoid those bloody, often pointless struggles? It is also true that it chose isolationism, of sorts, in the 1920s and 1930s, partly as a backlash against World War I. But those years were the exception, not the rule.

In fact, America’s hankerings for military greatness go back at least a half a century earlier. They began in the last couple decades of the 19th century—shortly after the end of Reconstruction and occupation of the South following the Civil War, around the time of the “closing” of the American West (culminating in the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890), as well as the arrival of the United States as a world-class industrial power around this same time. Empowered by its new capabilities, and now unshackled by battles within the country’s boundaries as it had been before, the United States set out to become a major global military actor.

In the 1880s, the United States Congress authorized a burst of naval shipbuilding that would soon land the country in fourth place among the world’s major blue-water fleets, as measured in tonnage. It also created the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island and soon began wargaming there—imagining fights against unnamed foreign countries represented by colors (like orange for Japan). But everyone understood who the notional foes really were—with Spain and even Britain also among the presumed sparring partners. One of the war college’s leading lights of the day was Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose bestselling 1890 book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, gave further impetus to the new national infatuation with naval power in particular.

The 1890s witnessed more rounds of naval shipbuilding, including efforts led by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt. This buildup was followed by the very successful Spanish-American War in 1898, which seemed to vindicate the military buildups to date—and whet Americans’ appetite for more.

In the early 1900s, then-President Roosevelt may not have always spoken softly, but he did wield an increasingly big stick, especially as measured in naval terms. Soon, in addition to issuing the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine and embarking on the building of the strategically crucial Panama Canal, he sent a chunk of the US Navy around the world on a “goodwill” mission. Everyone at home and abroad knew that the Great White Fleet could quickly be repainted and repurposed if circumstances so required.

Woodrow Wilson kept the United States out of World War I for almost three years, winning reelection in November 1916 on the slogan that “he kept us out of war.” But even so, the Big Navy Act of that same year set the country on a path to soon become the world’s number one naval power.

Even during the 1920s and 1930s when America pulled back from the world, military innovations in aircraft carrier operations, amphibious assault techniques, radar, longer-range airpower, and other modern weapons and methods prepared the American armed forces very well. Once in the war, fighting alongside Britain and the Soviet Union, they would reverse the initial German and Japanese battlefield momentum by early 1943 or so.

The history sends a clear message about our national strategic character. The United States aspired to be a world power virtually as soon as it could, as a modern industrial power, and built up its naval capabilities accordingly. We Americans never have been shrinking violets on the world stage. For the most part, though not always and not automatically, this has been a good thing for the course of world history. But whether one likes Mr. Trump or not, he should not completely surprise us in his willingness to wield America’s sword.

Michael O’Hanlon is Senior Fellow and Director of Research in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution. He holds the Philip. H. Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy and directs the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology. His research focuses on defense strategy, the use of military force, and American national security policy. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, The Art of War in an Age of Peace: U.S. Grand Strategy and Resolute Restraint (YUP, 2021). O’Hanlon has written pieces for the Los Angeles Times, the National Interest, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and other venues. He served on the Biden Administration’s Defense Policy Board.

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Chapter Five of Latino New York (called “Construction Projects”) includes a reference to a controversy regarding the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García, the subject of an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York that I saw as a 21-year-old in December 1970. I call the section of that chapter “Torres-García in New York: Debacle and Redemption.” The “debacle” in my subtitle refers to the critical reception, especially on the part of The New York Times who sent its principal art critic, John Canaday, to review the show. Canaday, who wielded considerable power in his time (not unusual for the main art critic of the country’s newspaper of record), produced an essay entitled “An Exhibition that Backfires.” It included sentences such as “…the opportunity to look at Torres-García from start to finish brings with it the disconcerting realization that except for a brief period… in the middle, this highly respected artist just wasn’t very good.” He described the artist as the creator of “[b]land, obvious semi-abstractions of the kind that, by then, had been mastered by every child in progressive kindergartens throughout the western hemisphere.” This review was published on December 12. But Canaday hadn’t yet had his last word on the subject. Eight days later, on December 20, he published another review of the show in the Times entitled “A Second Look, Not Too Happy, at Torres-García.” His wrath had evidently grown, and in his second review (that took on the characteristics of a screed) he accused the artist of creating “…the tritest of modernist clichés.” Discussing Torres’s use of “universal symbols” Canaday states that the artist’s mythic symbols (a form of iconography at the heart of the artist’s concept of ‘Constructive Universalism’) “…carry just about as much mythic force as the dangles on a teenager’s charm bracelet.”

One is moved to ask where exactly this venomous attack came from and what were its consequences. Canaday was radically conservative and, as I state in the book, reading his body of criticism today produces a “sensation of perplexity, if not shock, for the ferocity of its narrow-minded intolerance.”

Despite Canaday’s vituperative rhetoric, the consequences of Torres’s role in the New York art world had a life of its own. This was due, in part, to the influx into Manhattan of members of his legendary workshop in Montevideo, the Taller Torres-García. Many of them came to attend the opening of the Guggenheim show and remained in the city. Others had already established New York as home base in the 1960s, while others came later and forged their own niches within the complex constellations of the New York art scene. Gonzalo Fonseca’s monumental untitled glass mosaic mural of 1961 still graces the main lobby of The New School on West 12^th Street where it reminds all art historically savvy viewers of the impact of Torres-García (Fonseca’s teacher) and his idiosyncratic approach to constructivism. The use of segmented space bears a somewhat distant relationship to Torres’s own forms of pictorial structural division that was, in part, informed by his professional and personal relationships with the likes of Piet Mondrian and other De Stijl participants in Paris in the 1920s. A different approach to Torres’s iconographical vocabulary was developed by the Lithuanian-born, Uruguayan-trained artist José Gurvich, who lived on the Lower East Side from 1971 until his sudden death in 1974. The impact of the city on his art was definitive, and he succeeded in melding the grid-like arrangements of space into looser and often dream-like evocations of the metropolis.

The resurgence of interest in the contributions of Torres-García and, indeed, in Latin American modern art in its wider spheres of influence, came about in the 1980s and 1990s with the efforts of a new generation of critics who were more informed and less insular than John Canaday. This group included Mari Carmen Ramírez (who in her later career has succeeded in turning the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston into a lively hub of collecting and exhibiting fine examples of Latin American visual arts of all descriptions). Cecilia Buzio de Torres was another pioneer in this field. She, together with Mari Carmen, curated a groundbreaking exhibition entitled “El Taller Torres-García: The School of the South and its Legacy” that was shown to great acclaim in Madrid, Austin, Monterrey (Mexico), New York and Mexico City.

I believe that the spirit of innovation as well as free experimentation with geometric or hard-edge abstraction that characterized the work of Torres-García and was diffused throughout the Americas by his example had its impact (if only at a distance) on later generations of artists throughout the Americas. Latino New York examines the phenomenon of what Johann von Goethe would call “elective affinities” that radiated outwards from the generative force of the Uruguayan artist’s work to the creative power of contemporary artists whose experiments in non-objective painting enriched the New York art scene.  The Colombian artist Fanny Sanín has lived in the city for over fifty years. Her work embraces geometric intersections and forms as well as concrete architectural structures. Freddy Rodríguez, who came from the Dominican Republic and settled in New York in 1963, enlivened his geometric abstract compositions with dynamic and often clashing lines that suggest, as the title of the work here makes clear, the rhythms and syncopations of dance. I would argue that they both owe a debt of gratitude to their artistic ancestor Joaquín Torres-García.

Since John Canaday’s desultory assessment of the contribution of Torres-García’s work in the 1970 Guggenheim show (which I distinctly remember liking a great deal), this seminal artist’s visual aesthetic has been reconsidered on multiple occasions in the art historical literature and in major exhibitions in New York and beyond. It is now firmly embedded within the historical evolution of multiple approaches to abstraction and geometric form that developed within the transnational landscape in the early twentieth century, having ongoing consequences for artists of our own era. This is the “redemption” of Torres to which I refer in my book.

Edward J. Sullivan is the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art at New York University.

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Jessica Trisko Darden—

We all imagine that we are immune to true evil. Few people will ever cross that line. But sometimes the conditions of daily life change, and the unthinkable transforms into the everyday.

Anna was born on her parents’ farm and, following her marriage, moved from her family’s farm to that of her husband. On their twenty acres in the German countryside, Anna raised a family and operated a small inn. Her daughter, Anna Margarete, had a similar bucolic childhood. Anna Margarete remained on her parents’ farm even after she married in 1944 and her husband went off to fight with the Wehrmacht.

Then, the only men left on the farm were Polish laborers.

Under the Polish Decrees (Polenerlasse) of 1940, Poles were considered racially inferior to Germans and suited only for basic manual labor. From 1939, when the Nazi occupation of Poland began, until 1945, at least one and a half million Polish citizens were deported to German territory for forced labor. Many were simply snatched from the streets.

In the absence of their husbands, Anna and Anna Margarete continued to operate the farm. They treated their Polish workers poorly, paying sporadic wages, serving little food, and subjecting them to constant beatings. Anna was known to beat a particular worker, Roman, repeatedly with a cane. During one potato harvest, Anna Margarete suspected Roman of stealing food. The women forced him to labor in the field until he collapsed, exhausted. Roman complained to his former employer about the horrible working and living conditions, sent complaints to the local employment office, and told neighbors that he would hang himself if the abuse continued. Days later, he committed suicide.

After Roman’s death, another Polish worker, Siegfried, tried to escape from the farm. He succeeded, only to be arrested and returned to the farm. A beating from Anna awaited him.

Too often, we think of women who wield violence as exceptionally deviant or degenerate. But the truth of the Nazi era is that women such as the two Annas were given considerable power over the lives of others—power to which they otherwise would never have had access.

Neither Anna nor Anna Margarete were driven by ideology to treat their Polish workers with disdain and violence. There is no record of them having been members of any political party or organization before or after 1945. They were apolitical rural women with an elementary-level education. They nevertheless benefited from the Nazi system and its exploitation of forced laborers. Their behavior evolved to fit the novel circumstances they faced.

The same is true of Samanatha Elhassani, an American woman from Elkhart, Indiana, who came to live with her family in Islamic State–controlled Syria. In 2014, Samantha’s husband relocated the family to Raqqa, allegedly duping Samantha with the promise of a vacation. Once in Syria, Samantha and her husband adapted to their new circumstances and used their American dollars to purchase three Iraqi Yazidi children as slaves. First was a girl named Soad, who cost $10,000. Then, Bedrine, a girl younger than Soad, for $7,500. Last was Aham, a boy close in age to Samatha’s own son, for whom they paid a paltry $1,500. They were three of the more than six thousand Yazidis stolen by the Islamic State.

Much like the Third Reich, the Islamic State organized its society around religious, racial, and gender hierarchies. As a woman living under the Islamic State, Samatha led a highly constrained life. Yet her day-to-day existence in a country at war with itself was made comfortable through the children’s forced labor. They played with and cared for her children. They helped with cleaning and other tasks around the home. They were repeatedly raped by her husband.

The women accused of committing atrocity crimes during the Nazi era offer several lessons that bear remembering when we seek to understand women’s roles in atrocities today. Many of the women involved in Nazi atrocity crimes were not stalwart Nazis. While a notable number of women committed crimes with their husbands, married women often committed atrocity crimes when their husbands were absent—away at the front, injured, or missing. They were not compelled by men to engage in acts of violence. Some of the accused were what I call “entangled victims” who were imprisoned for their violation of Nazi laws or opposition to the regime. Yet, they, too, were implicated in Nazi-era crimes. 

In 1953, a court in East Germany convicted both of the Annas of crimes against humanity. Anna was sentenced to six and a half years in prison. Anna Margarete received a sentence of five years. The family farm was confiscated by the state. In 2020, Samantha reached a plea agreement with federal prosecutors in the United States. She pled guilty to a single count of financing terrorism and was sentenced to six and a half years in prison. She lost custody of her four children, two of whom were born in Syria. 

Even when women are not ideologues or enthusiastic participants in violent extremist groups, their very existence in environments shaped by persecution and atrocity can deeply influence the brutality that they accept as part of everyday life. That lesson remains as true today as it was in the Nazi era.

Jessica Trisko Darden is associate professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University and coauthor of Women as War Criminals: Gender, Agency, and Justice and Insurgent Women: Female Combatants in Civil Wars. She is a nonresident fellow with the Program on Extremism at George Washington University.

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In the early nineteenth century, something curious happened to European art. Clothing—long present but rarely theorized—suddenly became a problem. Fashion accelerated, silhouettes swung dramatically, tastes changed with disorienting speed. And the visual arts, especially painting, struggled to keep up. Some embraced the new energy. Others resisted it outright. What emerged was not harmony, but tension—and that tension, I argue, helped shape modern visual culture.

The New Taste explores this unsettled moment, roughly the 1820s and 1830s, when fashion became unmistakably modern and art was forced to confront what that modernity meant. Fashion was no longer simply decorative or descriptive. It became serial, commercial, speculative—defined by novelty rather than continuity. The problem was not that clothing changed, but that it changed too fast, too visibly, too insistently. For artists invested in permanence and aesthetic authority, fashion’s instability posed a direct challenge.

Art history has long been uneasy about clothing. Dress is everywhere in paintings, yet it has often been treated as incidental: a marker of period, status, or personality, but rarely as something capable of shaping artistic form. Fashion studies, by contrast, has taken clothing seriously as a cultural system—but often at the cost of treating artworks as little more than visual evidence. The New Taste begins from this double-blind spot. It asks what happens when fashion is understood not as background, but as a force that actively reshaped how art was made, seen, and judged.

The years I focus on are often skipped over in standard narratives. They fall between neoclassicism and the more recognizable story of modernity associated with realism or Impressionism. Yet the instability of the 1820s and 1830s is precisely what makes them illuminating. These are decades without a stable label, when revival and innovation coexist uneasily, when taste itself seems perpetually dissatisfied. Fashion thrives in this environment. Art hesitates.

That hesitation does not look the same everywhere. One of the book’s key claims is that there is no single relationship between art and fashion in this period. Instead, responses differ sharply across media. Commercial print culture—lithographs, caricatures, fashion imagery—embraces fashion’s ephemerality and speed. It thrives on repetition, circulation, and novelty. Painting and sculpture, by contrast, remain conflicted. Their traditional ideals—timelessness, originality, aesthetic hierarchy—sit uneasily alongside fashion’s built-in obsolescence.

This unevenness produces striking asymmetries. Fashion is everywhere in visual culture, but it is taken seriously only in certain forms. Portraiture becomes a particularly charged site. It cannot avoid contemporary dress, yet it struggles to reconcile fashion with the authority of fine art. Some artists contain or neutralize clothing’s excesses. Others allow fashion to disrupt their compositional habits in unexpected ways.

A revealing example comes from the work of Jean‑Auguste‑Dominique Ingres, a painter often associated with classical restraint rather than novelty. In his portrait of Madame Marcotte de Saint‑Marie (1826), contemporary fashion does not simply appear; it restructures the picture. The exaggerated sleeves and artificial silhouette of early nineteenth‑century dress do not distort the painting by accident. Ingres lets them do formal work. He exploits their asymmetry, allowing fashionable deformation to license a new kind of pictorial balance. Fashion here is not just recorded; it becomes generative. It gives painting permission to invent.

At the other end of the spectrum is printmaker Achille Devéria’s Le Goût nouveau (The New Taste), a series of large lithographs that gives the book its title. These images do not explain fashion or instruct viewers how to dress. They appear without captions or commentary. Instead, they present interiors, gestures, and moods—fashion as a way of inhabiting time. Circulating commercially rather than through elite art institutions, they blur the boundary between fine and popular art. They suggest that some of the most innovative images of modern life emerged outside the spaces art history has traditionally privileged.

Taken together, such examples reveal a fractured cultural landscape. Print moves quickly. Painting hesitates. Sculpture resists. These differences are not signs of artistic failure or belatedness. They are responses to competing pressures: market forces, institutional values, and long‑standing beliefs about what art is supposed to do. Rather than smoothing these tensions into a single story, The New Taste holds them open.

The book follows these negotiations across Paris and London, two cities bound by rivalry and exchange. Styles, garments, images, and ideas crossed the Channel with remarkable speed. Paris dominated women’s fashion; London set the standard for men’s dress, especially tailoring. Print culture made this mutual surveillance visible, creating a shared metropolitan visual language that was nonetheless internally divided.

By the 1830s, fashion’s cultural significance was no longer limited to images. Writers such as Thomas Carlyle and Honoré de Balzac began treating clothing as a key to understanding modern society itself. Fashion became thinkable as culture—not frivolous detail, but diagnostic symptom. Notably, this new seriousness often unfolded outside the discourse of fine art. Fashion claimed legitimacy even as art kept its distance.

That unresolved relationship is the subject of The New Taste. Rather than telling a story of reconciliation between art and fashion, the book shows how modern visual culture emerged through friction. Fashion’s ephemerality did not disqualify it from aesthetic relevance; it forced art to confront its own assumptions. The result was not consensus, but transformation—uneven, contested, and still with us today.

Susan L. Siegfried is Denise Riley Collegiate Professor Emerita of the History of Art and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan.

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