Jennifer Schuessler

But a few days before the anniversary of that epochal moment, a crowd gathered in a Greenwich Village gallery to celebrate the opening of the latest iteration of the Museum of Capitalism, a roving exhibition dedicated to looking back on the system that triumphed in 1989 from some imagined future when it, too, has disappeared.

There were “edible artifacts” of capitalism like cheeseburgers and energy bars, passed on trays bearing museum-like labels. Lines formed around the more interactive pieces, including a hand-cranked “minimum-wage machine” and a disassembly line where visitors, armed with hammers and pliers, were subjecting discarded shoes and cellphone chargers to enthusiastic creative destruction.

“We want to encourage people to talk about it, to figure out what this thing is that is too close for us to see,” Timothy Furstnau, who, with Andrea Steves, works as the curatorial collective Fictilis, said, elaborating on the project’s goal of “making capitalism strange.”

“We’re taught about how to survive in it, and win at it,” he said, “but not what it is.”

The museum began life in 2017 in Oakland, California, where it filled a nearly 13,000-square-foot space in a stalled retail development in a gentrifying warehouse district. (Yes, there was a gift shop, with tote bags and other hip branded merchandise, as well as an exact replica, with empty shelves, created by artist Evan Desmond Yee.)

The museum’s latest incarnation, on view through Dec. 10 at the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, at Parsons School of Design, is in a more conventional white-cube setting. Still, passersby might find themselves puzzling over the barbed wire strung across the gallery’s plate-glass windows.

Barbed wire may be visual shorthand for a totalitarian gulag. It’s also, a wall label inside notes, a capitalist product par excellence: It played a pivotal role in the westward expansion of the United States, as well as in an 1892 Supreme Court patent case that helped create ideas about intellectual property that still undergird capitalism today.

The mock-fencing across the windows also sharply underlines a question raised by the exhibit: Is the real museum of capitalism inside the gallery, or outside on the streets of New York?

“If people are walking by right now, do they see us as held inside looking out?,” Julia Ott, an associate professor of history at the New School and a founder of its Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies, said at the opening. “Or do they feel like they are looking in at partying and affluence?”

The 29 pieces in the exhibition touch on big-picture topics like labor, gentrification, immigration and fossil fuels, which are elaborated in deadpan, retrofuturist labels. “The FDIC was a corporation of the United States government whose role was to provide deposit insurance,” reads one accompanying the artist Michael Mandiberg’s “FDIC Insured,” an array of remaindered business books stamped with the logos of some of the hundreds of banks that failed after the 2008 financial crisis.

Don’t come here expecting any tributes to the exuberant billboards of Times Square, or even ironic images of shelves overflowing with 1,001 kinds of toothpaste. The museum’s palette runs to muted, even depressive tones, with the few deceptively cheery bursts of color coming from works like Sharon Daniel’s “Undoing Time,” which features American flags made by prison labor, or a selection drawn from what a label calls the world’s largest collection of pharmaceutical marketing pens.

Today, a growing number of Americans say they support some form of socialism. But that hardly means the project’s critical view of capitalism has always enjoyed a friendly reception.

“Sometimes, people would leave in a huff, asking, ‘Where’s the Museum of Communism?’” Furstnau said of reactions to the exhibition, which was also installed at Tufts University, outside Boston. “One answer is, there are several. That story is being told.”

For something so omnipresent, capitalism is hard to define exactly. The project’s companion book opens with a playful riff on a dictionary definition that basically omits all the nouns.

Ott, who last spring taught a “history lab” at the New School with Furstnau and Steves, took a firmer swing, differentiating capitalism from mere buying and selling.

“A capitalist society is one that is shaped by the quest for, the impulse toward, an accumulation of capital,” she said. “And in a capitalist society, capital itself can change its forms.”

Capitalism also generates an almost infinite variety of potential relics. While the museum is a non-collecting institution, it has held drives where people bring in objects that speak to the lived experience of capitalism. (At one recent event, a student brought an empty Adderall bottle.)

“For some people, it’s a cathartic thing, but it’s also part of the conceptualizing we’re doing,” Furstnau said. “By answering the question of what belongs in a museum of capitalism, you have to get at what the boundaries of what the thing is.”

The show offers hands-on opportunities to transform labor into something else. After a turn at the minimum wage machine, by Blake Fall-Conroy, which dispenses a penny every 4 seconds (in keeping with a wage of $9 an hour), you can take your earnings to Igor Vamos’ “Anti-Capitalist Coin Crusher,” which creates souvenir pennies stamped with slogans like “Property is Theft.”

“Reckoning,” by Jennifer Dalton, calls for more abstract accounting. Visitors fill out a brief survey on areas of life where they feel they have either given or taken more than their share. They can then put the form in a plastic box marked “Surplus” or “Debt,” and take a button labeling them “taker,” “jerk,” “chump” and so on.

The exhibition presents the end of capitalism not just as a premise, but as an aspiration. “Until capitalism is over,” Steves said, “the Museum of Capitalism will still have work to do.”

But some of the pieces may also stir wistful emotions. “Wanted,” a installation by Nina Katchadourian and Julia Meltzer created in 1996, lets visitors stand inside a white cube measuring 6 by 9 by 7 feet — the size of a typical American prison cell — and listen to the 117 messages left in response to a Village Voice ad listing a fictional apartment by those dimensions. (Apparently, $612 a month for a cell-like space in “the heart of the Village” was cheap even in 1996.)

It’s a comment on displacement and inequality. “But for me, it’s also a nostalgic thing about voicemail machines almost as much as anything else,” Furstnau said. “There was a whole culture of these messages that’s gone now.”

The Museum of Capitalism

Through Dec. 10 at the Kellen Gallery at Parsons School of Design, Manhattan; newschool.edu.

This article originally appeared in

Cheeseburgers, Oil and Minimum Wage: Building a Museum of Capitalism

NEW YORK — Thirty years ago last week, the Berlin Wall came down, a surprise event that soon brought the rest of Soviet-style communism down with it.

But “Dickinson,” a half-hour series that premieres Friday on Apple’s new streaming service, aims to banish any idea of the poet as the emotionally crippled cat-lady of American literature.

Forget baking bread and making friends with flowers. This is a Dickinson, played by Hailee Steinfeld, who takes midnight carriage rides with Death (rapper Wiz Khalifa) and denounces the patriarchy as — to use a genteel paraphrase — bunk. It’s also one who throws raging parties (complete with a hip-hop playlist and twerking), experiments with opium, makes out with her bestie (and future sister-in-law) and gets her period.

Alena Smith, the show’s creator, describes it as “a coming-of-age story about a radical young female artist who was ahead of her time.” It’s also one whose anachronisms and other liberties are intended to underline a serious point.

“She wrote nearly 2,000 poems which are one of the greatest bodies of work ever written in English, almost none of it published and recognized in the way we think of as being recognized in the time she lived,” said Smith, a Yale School of Drama graduate who has written for “The Affair” and “The Newsroom.”

“I use that as my excuse,” she said. “If she wasn’t that well understood in her time, can we understand her better in ours?”

“Dickinson” arrives on the heels of two recent feature films about the poet. But if Apple’s loosened-up, and sexed-up, young Emily takes things way over the top, scholars say they are here for it.

“I really love seeing pop culture waking up to a spunky, strong, bold, funny Emily Dickinson,” Martha Nell Smith, a Dickinson scholar at the University of Maryland, said. “That character is not made up.”

Christopher Benfey, a professor of English at Mount Holyoke who has written frequently on Dickinson, said that the cultural role of “the bad-girl of 19th-century American literature” had been waiting to be cast. And the new show — which Apple has aggressively marketed — is just the latest sign that Dickinson has claimed it.

“I don’t think there’s a hotter American poet right now,” Benfey said. “In a way, having a billboard of her in Times Square makes perfect sense.”

While the life of a woman who spent her last two decades confined to the family home may seem to lack obvious outward incident, Dickinson’s was hardly without worldly drama or luridly gothic — if not downright soap-opera-ish — elements.

For example: The first collection of Dickinson’s poetry, published in 1890, four years after her death, was coedited by her brother’s mistress, who took over the task from Dickinson’s sister-in-law, Susan, who was also, scholars argue, the object of her nearly lifelong erotic passion.

And yes, she did a lot of baking. But according to family lore, she was also known to have drowned “superfluous” kittens in a vat of pickle brine, a slice of 19th-century vérité it’s hard to imagine the Apple show touching.

The effort to create a more presentable, understandable Dickinson began almost immediately after her death in 1886, when her sister, Lavinia, found almost 1,100 of her poems in a trunk, carefully copied out on folded sheets, and mostly bound into hand-sewn books known as fascicles. (Today, scholars count about 700 more, some written on envelopes and scraps of paper, or embedded in the thousands of letters she wrote.)

The first published collection of her poems, from 1890, cleaned up her eccentric punctuation and spelling, cut stanzas and created titles, presenting her as a more conventional poet than she was.

Her physical image was also manipulated. In the late 1890s, her sister hired an artist to alter the now-famous daguerreotype of a teenage Dickinson (still the only authenticated photograph of her), softening her severely pulled-back hair and simple black dress by adding curls and a lacy collar.

Over the course of the 20th century scholars have scraped away the Victorian overlay and restored the radically original poet underneath. But on the biographical front, the popular image of Dickinson as a fragile, fey, romantically disappointed recluse has been harder to shake.

The idea was given sturdy legs by “The Belle of Amherst,” William Luce’s 1976 play (later made into a TV movie starring Julie Harris, who originated the role on Broadway).

But that same year, in her influential essay “Vesuvius at Home,” poet Adrienne Rich argued against the (mostly male) critics who had reduced her to “quaintness and spinsterish oddity,” burying her “unorthodox, subversive, sometimes volcanic propensities.”

Instead of the Dickinson of “little-girl” poems like “I’m Nobody! Who are You?,” Rich put forward the ruthless, dangerous, philosophical Dickinson of “My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun.”

The Apple series tips its hat to the Vesuvian Dickinson in its second episode, “I’ve Never Seen ‘Volcanoes,’” which ends with an exuberant carnal eruption. (All 10 episodes of the first season, each named for the first line of a Dickinson poem, will be available at once.) But popular versions of Dickinson have continued to vacillate between the sedate and the riotous, while also offering different takes on the long-debated question of her sexuality.

Terence Davies’ sober biopic “A Quiet Passion” (2017), starring Cynthia Nixon, got strong reviews from critics. But Dickinson scholars gave the film mixed marks, with some saying it missed her humor and wildness, and all but erased her passionate attachments to women while emphasizing her unrequited love for a married minister.

There was a warmer response among some scholars to “Wild Nights With Emily,” Madeleine Olnek’s irreverent, romantic comedy take, starring Molly Shannon. Based on the scholarship of Martha Smith, it features a committed, lifelong, lesbian relationship between Emily and Susan (as well as a rendition of the poem “Because I could not stop for Death” sung to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas”).

Today, the idea that Dickinson had an erotic passion for her sister-in-law is broadly, if not universally, accepted among scholars, even as some caution about applying contemporary labels for sexual orientation to the 19th century. Dickinson, they note, also wrote passionate letters to men, and in her 40s, may have had a romance with a judge 40 years her senior.

“Dickinson” takes a less definitive line, offering a Dickinson who’s queer in the broadest sense. She declares in the first episode that she will never marry, and dedicates herself to winning the undying love of Susan, whom she kisses passionately (and unself-consciously), but also kisses a male suitor.

Alena Smith said she expected some would criticize the depiction as “not gay enough,” but wanted to lean into her idea of a “millennial Dickinson,” comfortable with sexual fluidity.

It’s an idea very much of our moment. And so, in our age of oversharing, is the central Dickinson mystery: Why didn’t she publish more than a handful of poems in her lifetime?

The show’s first season gives one answer: the patriarchy. Smith said the show could go on to explore alternate hypotheses, but she said it was not her intention to offer definitive answers, about that or anything else.

“People feel very possessive about Emily Dickinson, for a good reason,” she said. “Because nobody understands her, everybody feels like their little keyhole into her is the right one.”

A Very Modern Emily Dickinson (Twerking Included)

Hear the name Emily Dickinson, and you’ll probably think of the virginal woman in white, the reclusive Belle of Amherst who died with her “letter to the world” — as she wrote in one of her enigmatic poems — unsent.

Ginsburg has been named the recipient of the 2019 Berggruen Prize, which is given annually to a thinker whose ideas “have profoundly shaped human self-understanding and advancement in a rapidly changing world.”

The previous winners of the prize, which was first awarded in 2016, have all been philosophers. Ginsburg, 86, who was chosen from a pool of more than 500 nominees, will direct the prize money to a charitable or nonprofit organization. She was hailed by the prize committee as “a lifelong trailblazer for human rights and gender equality,” and “a constant voice in favor of equality, the rights of workers and the separation of church and state.”

“Few in our era have done more to bring vital philosophical ideas to fruition in practical affairs than Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, chairman of the prize committee and a professor at New York University, said in a news release. “She has been both a visionary and a strategic leader in securing equality, fairness, and the rule of law not only in the realm of theory, but in social institutions and the lives of individuals.”

The prize comes amid increased public recognition for Ginsburg, a stalwart liberal voice on the court who underwent treatment for a tumor on her pancreas in August.

She was the subject of two movies released last year: the biopic “On the Basis of Sex,” which focused on her early years as a pioneering sex-discrimination litigator at the American Civil Liberties Union, and the more irreverent documentary “RBG,” which included footage of a petite, steely-eyed Ginsburg lifting hand weights while wearing a sweatshirt reading “Super Diva!”

In the prize announcement, jurors paid tribute to her jurisprudence and the power of her personal story.

“By grit and determination, brains, courage, compassion and a fiery commitment to justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg rose from unadorned beginnings to become one of the most respected, and most beloved, jurists of our time,” Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania, said. “She inspires women and men of all ages to realize that a democracy thrives to the extent that it provides every citizen equal footing to achieve their dreams.”

The prize is awarded by the Berggruen Institute, a research organization in Los Angeles dedicated to improving governance and cross-cultural understanding. The three previous winners are Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, British philosopher Onora O’Neill and American philosopher and classicist Martha Nussbaum. Ginsburg, who prize officials said was not available for comment, will accept the award in December at a private event in New York.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Wins $1M Berggruen Prize

She’s already a Supreme Court justice and a pop-culture action hero. And now, Ruth Bader Ginsburg can claim another outsize distinction: winner of a $1 million prize.

Shortly before the opening last week of “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” — his new play about a group of conservative Roman Catholic millennials arguing all night in a Wyoming backyard about God, love and Donald Trump — Will Arbery sent the script to Rod Dreher, the prominent Orthodox Christian blogger.

And Dreher responded with an exuberant 5,000-word blog post, praising the play’s “depth of moral vision” and declaring, “I don’t know how anyone — progressive, conservative, anyone — walks out of ‘Heroes of the Fourth Turning’ without the conviction that somehow, they have to change their life.”

There was also praise in the Catholic Herald and the conservative journal First Things, neither normally quoted on theater marquees. All of which left Arbery feeling both happy amazement at, as he put it, “writing a play that Catholics like,” along with wariness of any purely celebratory embrace.

“I would never want this play to breed any complacency on either side,” he said over lunch at a cafe in Park Slope, Brooklyn. “This was a play that was meant to trouble.”

“Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” directed by Danya Taymor and extended through Nov. 10 at Playwrights Horizons, is hardly the first play to be hailed as illuminating our polarized political moment. (Jesse Green, in The New York Times, called it “astonishing” and “riveting.”)

But where most works of theater seen as “explaining Trump” have explored the economic anxieties of the Rust Belt white working-class, “Heroes” focuses on the distinctive, heady and what Arbery calls the “secretive” world of conservative Catholic intellectuals.

It’s a world Arbery, who recently turned 30, knows well. His father, a literary scholar, is currently the president of Wyoming Catholic College, a tiny conservative institution whose mixture of Outward Bound-style wilderness training and Great Books curriculum inspired the play’s fictional Transfiguration College. His mother, a political philosopher, also teaches there.

Arbery, the only boy in a family of seven sisters, describes his parents as supportive of all their children following their passions. Which doesn’t mean he wasn’t so nervous before showing them the script for the first time that he had to go into therapy.

“It ended up being great, but I was really scared,” he said. “I am a sort of quiet and affable presence in my family, and this felt like such a declaration of how much I’d been listening and absorbing.”

He grew up in Texas, where his parents ran a cultural organization connected with the University of Dallas, a Catholic institution. It was a home full of art and argument, he recalls, where dinner-table conversation was likely to include discussion of Machiavelli, Shakespeare and St. Augustine.

He wrote and acted in plays at an all-boys school run by Hungarian monks, and also devoured every movie he could find at the public library.

“I always felt a tension between the very rich, complex, nuanced, passionate hive of ideas and faith that was my household, and all the beauty of everything else and everyone else,” Arbery said. “I was always pulled between those two, and endlessly curious about everyone else.”

He began the process of “uncoiling,” as he puts it, at the secular Kenyon College, where he majored in English and drama, and attended Mass regularly until about halfway through his junior year.

Today, Arbery — who wears hipster-nerd glasses and described his plays as partly about “unpacking whiteness” — might blend in with any number of self-questioning, progressive-minded young artists in Brooklyn. Asked about his current relationship to Catholicism, Arbery, already given to thoughtful pauses, paused even longer.

“I struggle with it,” he said. “I don’t know how to even put it into words.”

He paused again. “I feel called to investigate that rather than deny it.” And then again. “It was hard for me to admit this, but to deny myself my own particularity was not what the world was asking of me.”

Arbery, who received an MFA at Northwestern University, drew on his family obliquely in “Plano,” a surreal comedy about three Catholic sisters haunted by the men in their lives (and, seemingly, an actual ghost) that was staged last spring at the Connelly Theater in the East Village.

“Heroes,” with its more frontal turn toward the world of his parents, grew out of a short piece presented at Ensemble Studio Theater the Sunday before the 2016 election. Set in the imagined aftermath, it featured early versions of some of the same characters bemoaning what Arbery presumed would be a Hillary Clinton victory.

Instead, of course, Donald Trump won, sending Arbery, along with most of the predominantly progressive New York theater world, into disoriented shock, and convincing him that he needed to write a full play.

“I personally felt a lot of anger, and perceived a lot of anger, at the people who could’ve made that happen,” he recalled. “I just felt like I had a responsibility to write about five of those people.”

Running two intermission-less hours, “Heroes” unfurls in big sweeps of intense, rapid-fire political and theological debate intertwined with revelations of its characters’ complicated histories with each other. Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger and “The Benedict Option” (Dreher’s manifesto arguing that Christians, having lost the culture war, should build their own counterculture) are invoked. So are “Portlandia,” “BoJack Horseman” and Townes Van Zandt.

The play takes its title from “The Fourth Turning,” a 1997 pop-history treatise on the supposed cycles of American history by William Strauss and Neil Howe that has been embraced by Steve Bannon, and by the character Teresa, an ambitious, Bannon-loving writer living in Brooklyn, who enthusiastically warns, “There’s a war coming, dude.”

As it happens, Teresa’s hunger for culture war, and the skeptical reaction from some other characters, echoes a recent ideological clash among real-life conservatives. And some of the combatants have stopped by to see Arbery’s take on it.

At one preview, R.R. Reno, the editor of First Things, sat with Sohrab Ahmari, the op-ed editor at The New York Post and author of a recent manifesto in the journal calling on conservatives to stop being “nice” and fight back against drag-queen story hours at public libraries and other weapons of progressive “mono-thought.” It touched off months of fierce debate on the right.

Both men, like much of the audience, could be seen doubling over in laughter at some of the play’s comic high points, including a scene where a recitation of the rosary is interrupted by a spectacularly messy bit of bodily stage business.

Reno, who is friendly with Arbery’s parents, said that even just presenting anti-abortion and anti-LGBT views onstage without signposting those airing them as villains, or satirizing them, was “huge.”

“They disagree among themselves in profound ways,” Reno said of the characters, not all of whom admire Trump. “But there’s no liberal reassuring the audience by correcting them.”

The lack of any overt liberal counterpoint, Arbery said, had been a stumbling block for some theaters that considered staging the play. And it has been a point of criticism for some theatergoers on Show Score, an audience rating site, which Arbery sheepishly confessed to checking “because I’m a masochist.”

The goal, he said, wasn’t to convince anyone or to stir empathy — a concept both he, and the play’s characters, question — but to ask audiences to sit with the characters’ ideas, which he calls “a radical act.” Still, he confessed to having his own doubts as he was writing the play, at one point even “thinking it was evil.”

“There was the worry that it was just giving a platform to hateful speech,” he said. “And there was the worry that I was exploiting people I love, using their story and their pain for my benefit.”

One person he drew on was his younger sister Monica, whose ordeal with chronic Lyme disease and experiences working in a home for underprivileged pregnant women inspired the character of Emily. (She opposes abortion, but her belief — hotly contested by Teresa — that someone who works for Planned Parenthood can still be a good person makes Emily the play’s closest thing to a liberal foil.)

And the character of Gina, Emily’s mother and the newly installed president of Transfiguration, is based on Arbery’s mother, Virginia, down to the Barry Goldwater poster in her office.

In a joint telephone interview, both parents bubbled over with pride, along with a bewildered wariness at drawing attention to themselves or the school, which forgoes federal funding to avoid regulations that might compromise its Catholic principles.

“I told Will, couldn’t you have made the school in Montana or something?” his father, Glenn, said with a laugh.

Arbery said his parents had questioned the play’s ending. But they said they would reserve judgment about that until they saw the production later this month — the first time they will have seen one of his plays since freshman year in college.

“If it’s a really good play, it shouldn’t just send you out with your opinions confirmed,” Glenn Arbery said. “It should shake you.”

A Play 'Meant to Trouble' From a Writer Raised in Conservatism

NEW YORK — For a young playwright in New York, it’s one thing to draw buzz from critics and theater fans. It’s quite another to have your dense and boundary-pushing off-Broadway play become a talking point among religious conservatives — and not because they hate it.

Susan B. Anthony’s red silk shawl and the table on which Elizabeth Cady Stanton had drafted the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848 were among the donated items. A year later, after the amendment was ratified by the states and became part of the Constitution, they were put on view along with some documents, teacups, brooches and other objects in a modest display bearing the offhand title “An Important Epoch in American History.”

Today, there’s a bit more excitement. The yearlong centennial of the 19th Amendment is being commemorated with exhibitions, parades, conferences and new historical markers across the country, many timed to various states’ ratifications of the amendment. And in Washington, three major exhibitions are now open at the National Portrait Gallery, the Library of Congress and the National Archives.

Together, these shows — all curated by women — make up one of the richest explorations of women’s history yet assembled in the capital, or anywhere else. But they also offer a lesson in the messiness, complexities and compromises involved in any movement for social change — and the fraught politics of historical memory itself.

A More Complex Struggle

For years, the drive for women’s suffrage was presented mainly as the story of middle-class white women and iconic national leaders like Anthony and Stanton. That story began with the Seneca Falls Convention in upstate New York in 1848 and ended with the triumphant adoption of the amendment on Aug. 26, 1920, which resulted in the single largest extension of democratic voting rights in American history.

But in recent decades scholars have taken a less top-down view, emphasizing the movement’s multiple starting points and patchwork progress through hundreds of state and local campaigns. They have also excavated the role of African American women, who were largely excluded from the major, white-led suffrage organizations and marginalized in the early histories of the movement, if they were mentioned at all.

Even before the centennial year began, there have been tensions over who and what to celebrate — or even how to sum up the amendment’s significance.

Did it grant the vote to women? Not exactly. Before 1920, 15 states, mainly in the West, already had full female suffrage, while others granted women partial voting rights.

And after the amendment, which declared only that states could not discriminate in voting based on sex, millions of women of color were still barred from the polls. Most African American women in the South, like African American men, were blocked by poll taxes, literacy tests and other racial barriers, while Native Americans and Asian immigrants were largely excluded from citizenship entirely.

“It’s important to remember how piecemeal a struggle it was,” said Robyn Muncy, a historian at the University of Maryland, and one of the curators of the National Archives exhibition. “Seeing change as coming in one fell swoop undermines us as citizens, and gives us a false idea about the way change happens.”

A Dogged Fight for the Vote

The three exhibitions each aim to cover the whole story, but with subtly different emphases and timelines.

“Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote,” at the Library of Congress through September 2020, emphasizes the movement’s core narrative, from its beginnings in abolitionism to the campaigns of the 1910s, when suffragists became the first Americans to regularly protest outside the White House.

On view are items relating to key leaders, from Anthony’s annotated personal copy of Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” to the notebook in which Carrie Chapman Catt, Anthony’s successor as president of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association, tracked the amendment’s state-by-state ratification in 1919-1920.

But the show also traces how the fight for suffrage became a mass movement in the early 20th century, advocated and advertised via sheet music, tote bags, buttons, souvenir fans, even suffrage cookbooks.

“That was one of the more fun things to research,” Janice Ruth, the lead curator, said in an interview. “It revealed their cleverness, astuteness and doggedness, along with the desire and need to raise money.”

Stories of African American women and other women of color are woven into the narrative at the library. But the desire to tell a more inclusive story is front and center in “Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence,” at the National Portrait Gallery until Jan. 5.

The exhibition is a sprawling consideration of more than a century of history, but its core is an assemblage of portraits of nearly 60 named women’s rights activists, a third of whom are women of color. To assemble the group, the gallery had to reach beyond its own collections, which are disproportionately white and male. (It’s a bias the gallery is trying to counter with a policy requiring that half of all new acquisitions diversify the collection in some way.)

Small portraits of Anthony and Stanton are in a central case in the main gallery, along with a portrait of Sojourner Truth. Yet equal weight is given to the lesser-known women lining the walls, like African American poet and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who at an 1866 meeting of the National Women’s Rights Convention, rose to challenge Stanton and Anthony, who later opposed the 15th Amendment, which enfranchised black men but omitted women.

“I do not believe that giving the woman the ballot is immediately going to cure all the ills of life,” Harper declared.

This exhibition, part of the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Initiative, emphasizes that it took the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to make the promise of the 19th Amendment a reality for African American women.

That law “is the true conclusion,” said Kate Lemay, the exhibition’s curator. “You can’t think of women’s rights and say, ‘The 19th Amendment, the end!’”

Unequal Progress

The piecemeal, partial progress of women’s suffrage history is also emphasized in “Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote,” at the National Archives through Jan. 3, 2021. It’s embodied vividly in one of the odder items on view: 1910 patent drawings for a Rube Goldberg-like voting booth with separate entrances for men and women, which displayed different ballots according to which entrance was used, so that women in states with partial suffrage could vote only in certain contests.

The exhibition, which Muncy curated with Corinne Porter, makes clear how that earlier voting by women mattered politically, giving steam to the movement. As women gained votes in more states, support for the 19th Amendment grew in Congress.

But the show does not neglect fractures within the movement. A wall mural about the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade, sometimes called the first peaceful march on Washington, relates how journalist and suffrage advocate Ida B. Wells famously defied the organizers’ demand that black women march in the back.

And it also highlights figures like Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, a Chippewa law student who marched in the Washington parade, and Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, a Chinese immigrant who as a teenager helped lead a 1912 suffrage parade in New York on horseback, despite being ineligible for citizenship under the Chinese Exclusion Act. (The act was repealed in 1943.)

Like the others, the National Archive show covers some little-known chapters in suffrage history, such as the case of Puerto Rico, which, as a territory, was not covered by the 19th Amendment. Its government remained free to discriminate on the basis of sex, which it did, waiting until 1929 to enfranchise literate women — and until 1935 for all women.

An Unfinished Struggle?

Each show cites different starting points for the suffrage movement, which has been a source of debate among scholars. They also have different solutions to an even more fraught problem, given today’s polarized political climate: how to end?

The Library of Congress show concludes with a six-minute video showing clips of a carefully bipartisan selection of female political “firsts,” including Shirley Chisholm (the first African American woman in Congress), Geraldine Ferraro (first female vice-presidential candidate) and Sarah Palin (first female Republican vice-presidential nominee).

The portrait gallery takes a more citizen’s-eye view, ending with a portrait of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, opposite a QR code that lets visitors to connect via smartphone to online information about voter registration.

At the National Archives, the curators push the farthest into the present, touching on issues about access and equality that remain raw and unsettled today.

There is discussion of the 1975 amendment to the Voting Rights Act requiring that ballots be offered in languages other than English. And there’s a display highlighting Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s scathing dissent in the 2013 Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder, which invalidated central portions of the act.

Muncy said it was important to see the 19th Amendment not as a triumphant culmination, but one landmark in a struggle for equal rights for all citizens that isn’t over yet.

“Today, there are actions both to expand and to limit the franchise at the state level everywhere,” she said. “That is part of the story of women’s suffrage too.”

“Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote”

Through September 2020 at the Library of Congress, 101 Independence Ave. SE, Washington; 202-707-5000, loc.gov.

“Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence”

Through Jan. 5, at the National Portrait Gallery, Eighth and F streets NW, Washington; 202-633-8300, npg.si.edu.

“Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote”

Through Jan. 3, 2021, at the National Archives Museum, 701 Constitution Ave. NW, Washington; 202-357-5000, museum.archvies.gov.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/arts/design/womens-suffrage-movement.html" id="001a8c8b-3bef-36d4-a820-4ae408a97859">The New York Times</a>.

The Complex History of the Women's Suffrage Movement

WASHINGTON — In the summer of 1919, shortly after Congress passed the 19th Amendment, the Smithsonian acquired a few relics from the nearly century-long struggle for women’s suffrage.

He was a little-known assistant professor at the University of Florida. His book, “Stamped From the Beginning,” a sweeping history of nearly five centuries of racist thought in America, had received admiring but sparse reviews.

“Before we walked over to the dinner, my wife asked me if I had written a speech,” Kendi recalled in an interview last month. “I hadn’t, but I wrote out a few notes just in case. When they called my name, I was shocked.”

It was barely a week after the 2016 election, and Kendi — at 34, among the youngest ever to win the nonfiction award — made his way onstage to deliver an eloquent speech nodding at the man just elected president and paying tribute to “the human beauty in the resistance to racism.”

Since then, he has given a lot more speeches — 46 so far this year alone. He has become one of the country’s most in-demand commentators on racism and leads the new Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, which recruited him as a full professor after the award.

It’s been a wild and fast ride to the top of his profession, with one terrifying detour thrown in. Midway through writing his new book, “How to Be an Antiracist,” out Aug. 13, Kendi received a diagnosis of stage 4 colon cancer, which has a five-year survival rate of about 12%.

A recent scan, taken a year after he completed both chemotherapy and surgery, came back all clear. But Kendi — who turns 37 on publication day — isn’t taking anything for granted.

“I was pretty disciplined and determined before the diagnosis, but now I’ve taken it to a whole other level of seriousness,” he said. “Even though I’m young, I can’t imagine I have so much time. It forced me, compelled me, to take risks.”

One of those risks is the center, which is still in the ramping-up stage. On a recent visit, it was a pristine but sparsely decorated warren of cubicles, but Kendi envisions it as a place that will not just study racist ideas, but develop public programs aimed at dismantling them.

Another is “How to Be an Antiracist,” published by One World, an imprint of Random House. Part memoir, part social analysis, part polemic, it’s a book that, like its predecessor, seems to be arriving at exactly the right moment, as President Donald Trump’s verbal attacks on lawmakers of color and on the city of Baltimore have spurred both intense outrage and debate on how to respond.

But it’s also a book that directs some of its most unstinting criticism at the author himself and what he sees as his own racist ideas.

Kendi defines racist ideas expansively: any idea that there is something inherently better or worse about any racial group. There is no such thing as “not racist” ideas, policies or people, he argues, only racist and anti-racist ones.

Among the most painful personal episodes he revisited, he said, is the one that opens the book: a speech he gave in a high school oratory contest named for Martin Luther King Jr., in which he assailed African American youth for its supposed failures.

The thunderous applause from the mostly black audience gave him the confidence, he writes, that he could succeed in college, despite mediocre grades and test scores. The speech, which he listened to over and over, was also, in his view, deeply racist.

“Every time I listened I felt embarrassed and ashamed, both personally and because of the spectacle I created, with thousands of people cheering on these racist ideas,” he said. “To think back about how I gained confidence by stepping conceptually on the heads of black people is still jarring to me.”

Kendi might seem to have been anointed as the latest in a line of charismatic (and usually male) African American public intellectuals, stretching from W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke to Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West.

But he is also emblematic of a new generation of young black historians who are working collaboratively to create new institutions and find new ways of reaching the public.

His work “reflects the collective desire to produce innovative research that will not simply meet tenure requirements but transform the world,” said Keisha N. Blain, an associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and president of the African American Intellectual History Society, a 5-year-old group to which Kendi belongs.

Kendi was born Ibram Rogers in New York, to parents, both later ordained as ministers, who were deeply influenced by liberation theology and the Black Power movement. (He took the middle name Xolani, meaning “peace” in Zulu, and the shared surname Kendi, meaning “loved one” in Meru, in 2013, when he married Sadiqa Kendi, a pediatric emergency room physician.)

At Stonewall Jackson High School in Manassas, Virginia, where the family moved when he was 15, he felt stranded academically and lived down to the low expectations he thought his teachers and mainly white and Asian classmates had for him. “I was even saying I hate reading,” Kendi recalled. “I think I did read a few books on basketball, but for class I would typically get the CliffsNotes.”

He studied journalism at Florida A&amp;M; University, a historically black institution, and initially planned to be a sports writer. After a few internships at newspapers, he enrolled in the graduate program in African American studies at Temple University. His doctoral dissertation, published in 2012 as “The Black Campus Movement,” is a study of the 1960s student activism that led to the creation of the first black studies programs.

Temple’s department was, and still is, led by Molefi Kete Asante, a leading theorist of Afrocentricism. That influence, Kendi says, was crucial to his own work, which classifies what he calls “assimilationist” ideas — the belief that African American people and spaces should strive toward a standardized white norm — as inherently racist.

And he credits his dissertation adviser, Ama Mazama, a Guadeloupe-born scholar of African and Caribbean culture, with providing a model of what an “intellectual combatant” could be.

“She was just a master at being able to speak very softly while saying some of the most powerful things,” he said. “She loved intellectual struggle and never backed down.”

Kendi — tall and trim, with long dreadlocks he wears pulled back and a fondness for West African cloth pocket squares — also speaks softly and carries enormous ambition.

After “The Black Campus Movement,” he planned to write a history of black studies. Instead, what was intended to be the first chapter, about the history of scientific racism, morphed into “Stamped From the Beginning.”

Writing a sprawling narrative history rather than a narrower monograph — and publishing it with a trade press, Nation Books, and not an academic one — was a risky move for a junior scholar without tenure.

Also risky was the subtitle, “The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” which was suggested by his publisher, to his initial resistance. “I thought it was arrogant,” Kendi said. (At least one scholarly reviewer agreed.)

But today, he embraces it as a way of boldly claiming space in a field — the intellectual history of race — that has been overwhelmingly dominated by white men.

“I was writing this history as someone critical of racist ideas,” he said. “And one of the more prevailing racist ideas within scholarship was this idea that black people do not write definitive texts.”

Some scholars have questioned Kendi’s broad definition of racist ideas, which seems to ensnare just about everyone in American history, including Frederick Douglass, Du Bois and Barack Obama. (Obama’s celebrated 2008 speech on race, Kendi writes, mixed anti-racist and assimilationist ideas).

But others have welcomed “Stamped” as a broad, accessible history that directly and unapologetically engages with the present.

“Once it existed, it was clear that we could use this kind of big-picture synthesis, which we haven’t had in a long time,” said Martha S. Jones, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. “I think of Ibram as someone who really gives us not only the big historical signposts, but the deep rationale for why we should call racism racism.”

In keeping with his activist approach to scholarship, Kendi organized the inaugural Antiracist Book Festival, held last April, which drew roughly 3,000 people to hear a mix of junior and senior scholars, along with activists, novelists, poets, young adult authors, educators and publishing professionals.

In the final chapter of “How to Be an Antiracist,” Kendi connects his own cancer with the “metastatic racism” afflicting America. To cure it, he says, we must actively combat it, rather than taking comfort in the false neutrality of being “not racist.”

“Racial inequalities are pervasive and persistent in every sector of society,” he said. “If a person does nothing in the face of racial inequities that are pervasive, if they don’t challenge them, what are they doing?”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/arts/ibram-x-kendi-antiracism.html" id="6761bf2d-b7b4-3cb2-afb1-10ed551041a4">The New York Times</a>.

WASHINGTON — Three years ago, when Ibram X. Kendi was up for the National Book Award, he thought he had no chance.

'Metastatic Racism' May Have a Cure

And earlier this week, at the first major gathering dedicated to wresting a coherent ideology out of the chaos of the Trumpist moment, the president was upending their efforts again.

On Sunday evening, some 500 policy thinkers, theorists, journalists and students gathered in a ballroom at the Ritz-Carlton here for the start of the National Conservatism Conference, a three-day event dedicated to charting a new path for conservatism under the banner of nationalism.

And not the kind associated with tiki torches and Nazi salutes, the conference was at pains to make clear.

“We are nationalists, not white nationalists,” David Brog, one of the organizers, said in his welcoming remarks, calling any equation of the two “a slander.” He then pointed to the door and invited anyone who “defines our American nation in terms of race” who had slipped through the conference’s careful screening to leave.

But inconveniently, just a few hours earlier, Trump had let loose with tweets calling for four freshman congresswomen of color to “go back” to the “broken and crime infested” countries they came from, throwing an awkward wrench into the messaging.

Not that Trump’s name was mentioned in the program or the mission statement for the event, which was organized by the Edmund Burke Foundation, a newly formed public affairs institute. It featured headlining speeches by Tucker Carlson, John Bolton and Peter Thiel, as well as some three dozen speakers on panels covering topics like immigration, foreign policy and economic nationalism. The names of Burke and Lincoln may have been uttered as much as the president’s.

Conservatives have always prided themselves on being driven by ideas, and the big idea here was that nationalism — shorn of its darker associations — could provide an intellectual banner now that the conservatism based on free trade, libertarian economics and military interventionism that held sway for decades has run out of gas.

“Today is our independence day,” Yoram Hazony, an Israeli political theorist, author of the recent book “The Virtue of Nationalism” and the conference’s intellectual prime mover, declared in his fiery opening remarks. “We declare independence from neoconservatism. We declare independence from neoliberalism, from libertarianism, from what they call classical liberalism.”

“There is something that unites everyone in this room,” he continued. “We are national conservatives.”

Those in attendance may not have all agreed. They included reform conservatives and religious traditionalists, ardent Trumpists and former Never-Trumpers, and more than a few unconverted free-marketeers and others who were keeping a skeptical eye on the proceedings.

Geoffrey Kabaservice, a historian of conservatism and director of political studies at the Niskanen Center, described the gathering as part of an ongoing effort by conservatives to unite “under an ideological banner that Trump himself doesn’t carry.”

WASHINGTON — Ever since Donald Trump laid waste to its ideological shibboleths with his victory at the polls, the conservative intellectual class has been scrambling to keep up with him.

Jennifer Schuessler

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