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Barbara Kruger really hit the nail on the head there didn’t she #barbarakruger #venicebiennale #venicebiennale2022 #themilkofdreams #ipledgeallegiance #art #contemporaryart #fyp #arthistory #artteacher #artist #politicalart

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@isa.b.art
Barbara Kruger really hit the nail on the head there didn’t she #barbarakruger #venicebiennale #venicebiennale2022 #themilkofdreams #ipledgeallegiance #art #contemporaryart #fyp #arthistory #artteacher #artist #politicalart
♬ original sound - IsaB

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Savoring the joyful parts of life is an essential skill that we (I) often neglect.

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Sorrows have a way of finding us, no matter how hard we try to avoid them. Joys, on the other hand, are often harder to notice and appreciate. This week, we continue our conversation with psychologist Fred Bryant about the science of savoring, and how to make the most of the good things in our lives.

Additional Resources

Book:

Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience, by Fred B. Bryant and Joseph Veroff, 2017.

Research:

Savoring the Moment: A Link Between Affectivity and Depression, by Ian J. Kahrilas et al., International Journal of Wellbeing, 2020.

The Benefits of Savoring Life: Savoring as a Moderator of the Relationship Between Health and Life Satisfaction in Older Adults, by Jennifer L. Smith and Fred B. Bryant, The International Journal of Aging and Human Development, 2016.

Give It Up: A Strategy for Combating Hedonic Adaptation, by Jordi Quoidbach and Elizabeth W. Dunn, Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2013.

Does Savoring Increase Happiness? A Daily Diary Study, by Paul E. Jose, Bee T. Lima, and Fred B. Bryant, The Journal of Positive Psychology, 2012.

Happiness is the Frequency, Not the Intensity, of Positive Versus Negative Affect, by Ed Diener, Ed Sandvik, and William Pavot, in Assessing Well-Being: The Collected Works of Ed Diener, 2009.

The Pleasures of Uncertainty: Prolonging Positive Moods in Ways People Do Not Anticipate, by Timothy D. Wilson et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2005.

Temporal Adjustments in the Evaluation of Events: The "Rosy View," by Terence R. Mitchell et al., Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1997.

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You 2.0: Make the Good Times Last | Hidden Brain Media

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Sorrows have a way of finding us, no matter how hard we try to avoid them. Joys, on the other hand, are often harder to notice and appreciate. This week, we continue our conversation with psychologist Fred Bryant about the science of savoring, and how to make the most of the good things in our lives.

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A tale of survival, of moving beyond seemingly insurmountable devastation toward, if not hope itself, then the road to hope.

In the second installment of the Grievers trilogy, adrienne maree brown brings to bear her background as an activist rooted in Detroit. The pandemic of Syndrome H-8 continues to ravage the city of Detroit and everyone in Dune’s life. In Maroons, she must learn what community and connection mean in the lonely wake of a fatal virus. Emerging from grief to follow a subtle path of small pleasures through an abandoned urban landscape, she begins finding other unlikely survivors with little in common but the will to live. Together they begin to piece together the puzzle of their survival, and that of the city itself.

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Published by AK Press
A tale of survival, of moving beyond seemingly insurmountable devastation toward, if not hope itself, then the road to hope.
In the second installment of the trilogy, adrienne maree brown brings to bear her background as an activist rooted in Detroit. The pandemic of Syndrome H-8 continues to ravage the city of Detroit and everyone in Dune's life. In Maroons, she must learn what community and connection mean in the lonely wake of a fatal virus. Emerging from grief to follow a subtle path of small pleasures through an abandoned urban landscape, she begins finding other unlikely survivors with little in common but the will to live. Together they begin to piece together the puzzle of their survival, and that of the city itself.

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Published by AK Press A tale of survival, of moving beyond seemingly insurmountable devastation toward, if not hope itself, then the road to hope. In the second installment of the trilogy, adrienne maree brown brings to bear her background as an activist rooted in Detroit.

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Solnit explores the transformative power of hope in times of crisis, highlighting how collective action can bring about change.

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Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

Bestselling author Rebecca Solnit reminds us that activism has changed the world in remarkable ways.

"One of the Best Books of the 21st Century."
-The Guardian

"No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that's marked this new millennium."
-Bill McKibben

"An elegant reminder that activist victories are easily forgotten, and that they often come in extremely unexpected, roundabout ways."
-The New Yorker

A book as powerful and influential as Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me, her Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of radicals at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them-and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argued that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next. Now, with a moving new introduction explaining how the book came about and a new afterword that helps teach us how to hope and act in our unnerving world, she brings a new illumination to the darkness of 2016 in an unforgettable new edition of this classic book.

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of eighteen or so books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including the books Men Explain Things to Me and Hope in the Dark, both also with Haymarket; a trilogy of atlases of American cities; The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper's and a regular contributor to the Guardian.

"An elegant reminder that activist victories are easily forgotten, and that they often come in extremely unexpected, roundabout ways."
—The New Yorker

"No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that's marked this new millennium. Rebecca Solnit writes as independently as Orwell; she's a great muralist, a Diego Rivera of words. Literary and progressive America is in a Solnit moment, which given her endless talent should last a very long time."
—Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and author of Deep Economy

" Hope In the Dark changed my life. During a period of pervasive cynicism and political despair, the first edition of this book provided me with a model for activist engagement that I have held dear ever since. Today, as movements for climate, racial, and economic justice sweep the globe, its message is more relevant than ever. In her inimitable and inspiring way, Solnit reminds us that social change follows an unpredictable path. Despite all the obstacles, we must not lose sight of the fact that profound transformation is possible. This book's compact size belies its true power. It provides succor and sustenance, fuel and fire, for those fighting for a more just world."
—Astra Taylor, author, The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

"Rebecca Solnit is a national literary treasure: a passionate, close-to-the-ground reporter with the soul and voice of a philosopher-poet. And, unlike so many who write about the great injustices of this world, she is an optimist, whose faith is deeply grounded in a knowledge of history. This is a book to give you not just hope but zest for the battles ahead."
—Adam Hochschild, author, King Leopold's Ghost

"Time and again she comes running towards you with a bunch of hopes she has found and picked in the undergrowth of the times we are living. And you remember that hope is not a guarantee for tomorrow, but a detonator of energy for action today."
—John Berger, author, Ways of Seeing

"A slim, potent book penned in the wake of the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq; a book that has grown only more relevant and poignant in the decade since."
—Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

Praise for earlier editions:

"Seemingly lost in the woods of deceit and banality, bereft of hope, we are confronted by Rebecca Solnit and her astonishing flashlight. In a jewel of a book that is poetic in substance as well as style, she reveals where we were, where we are and the step-by-step advances that have been made in human rights, as we stubbornly stumble out of the darkness."
—Studs Terkel

"In this inspired meditation on the very nature of action and the reasons one thing leads to another, Rebecca Solnit, with her customary intellectual penetration, freshness of expression, and high elegance, finds new springs of hope in dark times."
—Jonathan Schell

"In this extraordinary book, Rebecca Solnit's prose grows poetic wings that enable her to soar to a visionary height. The good news that she brings back is that our struggles—with persistence and courage—are indeed the seeds of kindness."
—Mike Davis

"Move over Joan Didion...Solnit is who Susan Sontag might have become if Sontag had never forsaken California for Manhattan."
—San Francisco Chronicle

"Can you imagine a cross between Joan Rivers and Simone de Beauvoir? I didn't think so, but no likelier hybrid comes to mind.... Solnit is the real activist deal: the type who gets arrested at nuclear test sites and mans the barricades at the World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle. She's also the real freelance intellectual deal: the much rarer type who earns her living generating reams of thoughtful, wide-ranging nonfiction."
—Newsday

"This is the ultimate 'feel-good' book for exhausted campaigners and activists . . . an intensely personal account, a meditation on activism and hope."
—The Guardian

"An inspired observer and passionate historian, [Solnit] is one of the most creative, penetrating, and eloquent cultural critics writing today. In her most personal critique to date, she reflects on the crucial, often underrated accomplishments of grassroots activists. Solnit contemplates such well-studied revolutions as the American civil rights movement and the fall of the Berlin Wall, but more significantly she reflects on such recent events as successful protests against nuclear testing in Nevada, the Zapatista uprising, the anti-corporate globalization movement, the "unprecedented global wave of protest" against the war in Iraq, and such hopeful ecological successes as the return of wolves to Yellowstone and the restoration of the Los Angeles River. Solnit's rousing celebration of people who work tirelessly behind the scenes and courageously on the streets for justice and environmental health harmonizes beautifully with Studs Terkel's Hope Dies Last, and helps readers understand more clearly where we stand as individuals, as Americans, and as citizens of the world."
—Donna Seaman, Booklist

"This slim volume, to quote the author's own reflections on the quincentennial of Columbus's discovery of America, is "a zigzag trail of encounters, reactions, and realizations." Solnit, recent winner of an NBCC award for criticism for River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, rambles from place to place and topic to topic in a discursive examination of the current state of leftist protest and activism. Unwilling to accept the bleak, almost apocalyptic worldview of many of her progressive counterparts, Solnit celebrates the hope and optimism that recent episodes reveal. She points to the resurrection of indigenous causes represented by Zapatismo, the WTO protests in Seattle and Cancun and the worldwide protests against the U.S.-led war in Iraq, and other smaller, more marginal protests. Solnit argues persuasively that engaged, thoughtful dissent is far healthier today than many believe. Activists, who operate by nature on the fringes of hierarchies of economy and power, often fail to recognize the power of activity that seems inconsequential. Her goal, in essence, is "to throw out the crippling assumptions with which many activists proceed." While Solnit's goal is admirable and her prose graceful, this book suffers from the same confusion and disorganization she recognizes as necessarily inherent to activism itself. Her examples are diverse yet disjointed; she is overly reliant on the words of others; and she often wanders into spiritual mumbo-jumbo and platitudes. While these tendencies hamper the clarity of her argument, fans of Solnit and progressives may find much to admire here."
—Publishers Weekly

Don Lash: "The threats of Trumpism may seem removed from the struggles within the child welfare system. Sooner or later, however, those struggles will have to join the wider resistance to the Trump regime."
Continue Reading

"To survive, democracy needs a truly radical, truly independent press more than ever before. We need to create a culture in this country in which reading and resistance go hand-in-hand." -Howard Zinn (1922-2010)
Continue Reading

Other books by Rebecca Solnit

City of Women Poster

This 20" x 20" map, created by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro and originally featured in their New York atlas Nonstop Metropolis, reimagines New York City's subway stations named after great women.

City of Women Poster (10-pack)

10-pack of the City of Women poster

This 20" x 20" map, created by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro and originally featured in their New York atlas Nonstop Metropolis, reimagines New York City's subway stations named after great women.

The Mother of All Questions

Rebecca Solnit's timely follow-up to her national bestseller Men Explain Things to Me offers a refreshing take on contemporary feminism.

Whose Story Is This?

New feminist essays for the #MeToo era from the international best-selling author of Men Explain Things to Me.

Men Explain Things To Me

A landmark essay that went viral, inspired the word "mansplaining," and prompted fierce arguments.

Cinderella Liberator

Rebecca Solnit reimagines a classic fairytale with a fresh, feminist Cinderella and new plot twists that will inspire young readers to change the world.

Call Them by Their True Names

Rebecca Solnit unearths the roots of our contemporary crises, countering the despair of our age with a dose of solidarity, creativity, and hope.

Los Hombres Me Explican Cosas

A landmark essay that went viral, inspired the word "mansplaining," and prompted fierce arguments.

Other books of interest

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle

Activist, teacher, author and icon of the Black Power movement Angela Davis talks Ferguson, Palestine, and prison abolition.

Night Thoughts

Writer and actor Wallace Shawn's probing, honest, and self-critical take on civilization and its discontents.

No Is Not Enough

"This year's most immediately useful political book." -Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2017

My Seditious Heart

In constant conversation with the themes and settings of her novels, the essays form a near-unbroken memoir of Arundhati Roy's journey as both a writer and a citizen, of both India and the world, from "The End of Imagination", which begins this book, to 'Azadi', with which it ends.

Choice Words

With reproductive freedom under unprecedented attack, Choice Words, edited by poet Annie Finch, takes back the cultural conversation on abortion.

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Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities Bestselling author Rebecca Solnit reminds us that activism has changed the world in remarkable ways. "One of the Best Books of the 21st Century." -The Guardian "No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that's marked this new millennium."

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This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

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This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

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Klein argues that the climate crisis is also a crisis of our economic and social systems, suggesting radical changes are necessary for sustainability.

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this changes everything: capitalism vs. the climate

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business & economics / environmental economics

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business & economics / international / economics

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business & economics/international - economics

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political science / public policy / economic policy

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political science / public policy / environmental policy

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political science/public policy - economic policy

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political science/public policy - environmental policy

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This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

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The most important book yet from the author of the international bestseller The Shock Doctrine, a brilliant explanation of why the climate crisis challenges us to abandon the core "free market" ideology of our time, restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems.In s...

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Stevenson shares stories from his work fighting for social justice and equality, particularly in the American criminal justice system.

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Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

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Amazon.com: Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption: 9780812984965: Stevenson, Bryan: Books

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Have you ever sat across from a friend, family member, or someone else, and realized they aren't really listening? This episode is a revelation on how listening changes everything ....

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Listen to this episode from Hidden Brain on Spotify. Have you ever sat across from your spouse, colleague or friend and realized that while they may be hearing what you're saying, they aren't actually listening? Poor listening can lead to arguments, hurt feelings, and fractured relationships.

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This podcast explores global solutions to the climate crisis, featuring stories of individuals and communities taking action.

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BBC World Service - People Fixing the World

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Brilliant solutions to the world's problems

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A documentary on the existential threat of climate change and the powerful forces fighting for and against its recognition.

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Chasing Ice is available for individual streaming on these 4 platforms. If you're interested in hosting a public screening or purchasing an educational version of the film, please visit our Screenings page. You can also find clips, stills for the film, and other resources to support you in sharing the film with your community.

Even though the climate crisis is a largely systemic issue, you still have the power to make a difference. The choices we make today have the ability to make a positive difference for years to come. We know it's not feasible for everyone to drive electric cars and adopt a plant based lifestyle, so we've compiled a few other ideas.

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Chasing Ice is available for individual streaming on these 4 platforms. If you're interested in hosting a public screening or purchasing an educational version of the film, please visit our Screenings page. You can also find clips, stills for the film, and other resources to support you in sharing the film with your community.

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It's from over a hundred years ago - from one of the most radical unions in U.S. history, the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World). Seems to still fit quite well

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Echo is one of my favorite recent Marvel Offerings for a number of reasons. This piece by the Choctaw Nation talks about how Marvel Studios worked to try to create meaningful representation in blockbuster entertainment.

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ITTI̱KANA ACHUKMA (A Good Friendship)

Native American representation in television and film has a long, not-so-sterling history, but things seem to be changing for the better in recent years. Studios have shown interest in reversing some of the damaging and inaccurate stereotypes Native Americans have faced on the big screen. Groundbreaking and award-winning shows like Reservation Dogs have blazed a trail for Indigenous inclusion in storytelling, cultural representation, casting, costume design, and much more.

Marvel Studios' new series, Echo, is an exciting project where Native representation, specifically Choctaw representation, has been placed squarely at the forefront of creative development. From the beginning, experts in Choctaw history, culture, and language were included in conversations about how Choctaw people would be portrayed. This significant step shows Marvel Studios' desire to be part of the future of Native American representation in Hollywood, and the Choctaw Nation is proud to partner with the studio on this project.

Chief Gary Batton

Chief Gary Batton reflects on the significance of the Choctaw Nation's partnership with Marvel Studios and the mutual desire to showcase Choctaw culture in a respectful and meaningful way.

Seth Fairchild

Seth Fairchild, Executive Director of Cultural Services, shares the importance of having community input to help represent the Choctaw origin story and stickball accurately.

Stacy Shepherd

Stacy Shepherd, Executive Director of Member Services, discusses the use of Choctaw language and iconography throughout the series.

Choctaw Nation consultants and artist and writer Steven Paul Judd pose on set during the first day of filming.

Following a demonstration of the Choctaw Walk Dance, the cast, crew, and consultants come together to commemorate the first day of filming.

LIGHTS, CAMERA, CULTURE!

One of the many ways Marvel Studios honored Chahta culture in Echo is through the use of symbols, icons, and stories that are important to our people. As the story progresses, look for Choctaw diamonds, swirls, artwork, and our seal in costumes and set dressings throughout each episode.
How many Choctaw symbols can you spot?

The Chahta origin story plays a big part at the beginning of Echo. Our ancestors emerged from Nanih Waiya, the Mother Mound, in what is now Mississippi. The imagery of the clay people comes from this story.

Read our origin story and learn more about our earliest ancestors.

Origin Story

The Biskinik is a special friend to the Chahta people. This little woodpecker was blessed by the Creator to live near our ancestors and warn them of danger by tapping out messages on trees. Today, our tribal newspaper bears its name in honor of the "little Choctaw news bird."

Learn more about the Biskinik paper.

Biskinik

Ishtaboli, or stickball, is an ancient game played by several Native American tribes. Originally, it helped our ancestors settle disputes and avoid war. Today, the game is played competitively and in exhibitions across the Choctaw Nation Reservation and beyond.

Learn more about this exciting and fast-paced game.

Stickball

Traditional Choctaw dress incorporates some of our most important iconography. The diamond pattern represents the diamondback rattlesnake, who protected our ancestors' crops. These snakes are not aggressive, but they stand ready to attack if provoked, traits that are also present in the Chahta people.

Learn more about the symbols we use in our traditional regalia.

Traditional Choctaw Dress

Choctaw Language

One of the most important ways the Choctaw Nation exercises its sovereignty is through its language. For generations, Choctaw people were discouraged or outright forbidden to speak their language, and as fluent speakers passed away without handing it down to younger generations, it nearly died out.

The Choctaw Language is going through a period of revitalization, however. In recent years, the Chahta Anumpa Aiikhvna (Choctaw School of Language) has ramped up efforts to increase the number of speakers through the incorporation of technology and a wide variety of learning options.

At each regular meeting, the Tribal Council honors a Choctaw First Language Speaker of the Month. These culture keepers hold a cherished place in our tribe.

Having Echo dubbed in Choctaw is an especially significant milestone for the tribe. Teresa Billy and other language experts worked diligently with Marvel Studios to ensure the highest level of accuracy in the translation process.

Teresa Billy

Teresa Billy is the Assistant Director of the Chahta Anumpa Aiikhvna, or the Choctaw School of Language. Teresa is a first language Choctaw speaker, and her main goal is to protect the identity of the Choctaw people by preserving their language. According to her, "It is important for each of us, as well as for our future generations, to connect us to our mother tongue, which relates us to our rich history, culture and language."

Teresa's work with Marvel Studios' translators allowed the show to be subtitled in Choctaw, a first for our tribe. Not only can tribal members see the language of their ancestors on a major television series, but it will help them realize how important it is to learn their language and use it in their everyday lives.

Teresa's husband, Curtis Billy, also worked on the Echo project, providing valuable historical information about the game of stickball. Unfortunately, Curtis passed away before he could see his contributions on the big screen, but we are so grateful for his involvement.

This Is Choctaw

Go behind the scenes to see how working closely with Choctaw Nation helped bring Marvel Studios' #Echo to life.

The Story of ECHO

Streaming exclusively on Disney+ and Hulu, the origin story of Echo revisits Maya Lopez, whose ruthless behavior in New York City catches up with her in her hometown. She must face her past, reconnect with her Native American roots and embrace the meaning of family and community if she ever hopes to move forward.

Courtesy of Disney Media Kit

Official Trailer (Choctaw Subbed)

Hollywood Comes to the Choctaw Nation

Marvel Studios screened the first two episodes of the upcoming series Echo during Choctaw Nation's annual powwow at The District Theater on November 3, 2023.

The episodes were presented by director Sydney Freeland, who was joined by Seth Fairchild, Executive Director of Cultural Services for Choctaw Nation, for a Q&A conversation after the screening.

View Article

How to Watch

All episodes of Echo are now streaming on Hulu and Disney+.

Who is ECHO?

Alaqua Cox grew up on the Menominee Indian Reservation in Wisconsin. Prior to being cast in the role of Maya Lopez/Echo, she did not have acting experience outside of a high school play.

Like her character, Cox is deaf and a partial amputee, making her one of the first actresses with a disability to play a leading role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). She first appeared as Maya Lopez/Echo in the MCU's 2021 series Hawkeye.

Source: Disney Media Kit

Source: IMDB Profile

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Go behind the scenes to learn about how Marvel Studios' "Echo" and the Choctaw Nation worked together to represent the Choctaw Culture.

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If you've ever wanted to learn American Sign Language, I found this incredible resource. I'll be learning / practicing as much as I can this summer -- if you decide to learn, too, let me know and we can practice together when you're back this fall.

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ASL - American Sign Language: free, self-study sign language lessons including an ASL dictionary, signing videos, a printable sign language alphabet chart (fingerspelling), Deaf Culture study materials, and resources to help you learn sign language. Good for homeschool sign language classes, parents (baby signing), interpreters, and people who just want to learn fun ASL phrases like hello, thank you, I love you, etc.

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It's not too much to say: you'll likely never see the range of human possibilities quite the same way.

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"Graeber and Wengrow offer a history of the past 30,000 years that is not only wildly different from anything we're used to, but also far more interesting: textured, surprising, paradoxical, inspiring . . . It aims to replace the dominant grand narrative of history not with another of its own devising, but with the outline of a picture, only just becoming visible, of a human past replete with political experiment and creativity."
-William Deresiewicz, The Atlantic

"[An] iconoclastic and irreverent new book . . . an exhilarating read."
-David Priestland, The Guardian (UK)

"An instant classic . . . Fatalistic sentiments about human nature melt away upon turning the pages . . . [ The Dawn of Everything] sits in a different class to all the other volumes on world history we are accustomed to reading . . . If comparisons must be made, they should be made with works of similar caliber in other fields, most credibly, I venture, with the works of Galileo or Darwin. Graeber and Wengrow do to human history what the first two did to astronomy and biology respectively."
- Giulio Ongaro, Jacobin

"A boldly ambitious work that seems intent to attack received wisdoms and myths on almost every one of its nearly 700 absorbing pages . . . entertaining and thought-provoking . . . an impressively large undertaking that succeeds in making us reconsider not just the remote past but also the too-close-to-see present, as well as the common thread that is our shifting and elusive nature."
-Andrew Anthony, The Observer (UK)

" The Dawn of Everything is a lively, and often very funny, anarchist project that aspires to enlarge our political imagination by revitalizing the possibilities of the distant past . . . It disavows the intellectual trappings of a knowable arc, a linear structure, and internal necessity. As a stab at grandeur stripped of grandiosity, the book rejects the logic of technological or ecological determinism, structuring its narrative around our ancestors' improvisatory responses to the challenges of happenstance."
-Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New Yorker

"[ The Dawn of Everything] took as its immodest goal nothing less than upending everything we think we know about the origins and evolution of human societies . . . [the book] aims to synthesize new archaeological discoveries of recent decades that haven't made it out of specialist journals and into public consciousness."
- Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times

"A fascinating, radical, and playful entry into a seemingly exhaustively well-trodden genre, the grand evolutionary history of humanity. It seeks nothing less than to completely upend the terms on which the Standard Narrative rests . . . erudite, compelling, generative, and frequently remarkably funny . . . once you start thinking like Graeber and Wengrow, it's difficult to stop."
- Emily M. Kern, Boston Review

"Our forebears crafted their societies intentionally and intelligently: This is the fundamental, electrifying insight of The Dawn of Everything. It's a book that refuses to dismiss long-ago peoples as corks floating on the waves of prehistory. Instead, it treats them as reflective political thinkers from whom we might learn something."
-Daniel Immerwahr, The Nation

"The Dawn of Everything is an upbeat book . . . Prehistory, Graeber and Wengrow insist, is vastly more interesting than scholars knew until recently. And not just more interesting, but more inspiring as well . . . this book testifies to David Graeber's admirable energy, imagination, and love of freedom."
-George Scialabba, The New Republic

"The book's 704 pages teem with possibilities. They are a testament, in the authors' view, to human agency and invention - a capacity for conscious political decision-making that conventional history ignores."
-Molly Fischer, New York Magazine

"Sentence by sentence, [ The Dawn of Everything] is clear and forceful and funny, memorable in the manner of a lecture by the kind of professor whose students know they are lucky . . . The authors have organized a profusion of ideas, details, and explanatory paradigms into a vast but comprehensible design, while never ceasing to delight and instruct."
-Phil Christman, Commonweal Magazine

"The premise is exhilarating, and its implications are only beginning to be considered. . . . [You] get the sense that a political consciousness is an artistic consciousness. This view enables us to look at works of art with renewed optimism, as little windows into alternative ways of living rather than 'artificial hells.' . . . At a moment when so many artists, curators, and academics are eager to "decenter the human" in their work, The Dawn of Everything invites us to do the (much harder) job of reframing the braided questions of what humankind was, is, and could be."
-Simon Wu, Artforum

"A startlingly new picture of our shared past: messier and more complicated, flush with diversity, experimentation, and, above all, freedom . . . A culmination of Graeber's lifelong project, as well as a testament to the power of intellectual collaboration . . . A new origin story of human societies, one with a horizon beyond our present disillusionment."
-Jared Spears, Yes! Magazine

"Brainy . . . the latest-and most provocative-in a line of Big History: bold, panoptic works that offer to explain the whole sweep of man's story . . . [as] passionate as you'd expect from a decade-long labor of love-conceived by two learned and mischievous men."
-Tunku Varadarajan, The Wall Street Journal

"A fascinating argument about why humans today are 'stuck' in rigid, hierarchical states that would have appalled our ancestors . . . a fitting capstone to [Graeber's] career . . . The Dawn of Everything begins as a sharp rejoinder to sloppy cultural analysis and ends as a paean to freedoms that most of us never realized were available. Knowing that there were other ways to live, Graeber and Wengrow conclude, allows us to rethink what we might yet become."
-Annalee Newitz, The Washington Post

"Ambitious, polemical and subversive . . . intellectually formidable . . . stimulating entertainment fueled by skepticism, a voracious appetite for research and a sense of humor. Their writing style-conversational and tantalizing, even in copious footnotes in which they call out contemporary anthropologists-keeps the reader absorbed . . . fundamentally encouraging."
- Carlo Wolff, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"An engrossing series of insights into how 'the conventional narrative of human history is not only wrong, but quite needlessly dull'."
- Anthony Doerr, The Guardian

"[A] sense of revelation animates this provocative take on humankind's social journey."
- Bruce Bower, Science News

"Graeber and Wengrow hope to show that human imagination and possibility is broader and more hopeful than we let ourselves believe."
- Noah Berlatsky, NBC News

"Wengrow and Graeber's project has been to show how alternatives of social and economic organization have been a deep part of our ancestry all along . . . No recent book is gaining faster traction in the artworld right now. Artists, take note."
-

"This sweeping and novel synthesis exploring the arc of the human condition . . . may well prove to be the most important book of the decade, for it explodes deeply held myths about the inevitability of our social lives dominated by the state. It is at once a sophisticated analysis packaged in accessible prose that moves briskly in the unfolding tale of humanity's many forms of being and becoming."
- James H. McDonald, New York Journal of Books

"With vivid narrative prose and rich detail... [ The Dawn of Everything] take[s] readers on a myth-busting journey through the inner workings of prehistoric and historic societies around the world, showcasing the remarkable intelligence and agency of ancient peoples and the diverse societal solutions that they helped shape . . . Like Graeber, The Dawn of Everything is a rabble-rouser-a great book that will stimulate discussions, change minds, and drive new lines of research."
- Erle C. Ellis, Science

"A thoroughly mesmerizing book . . . There are almost unlimited possibilities here to build upon . . . If there are any lessons to be drawn from the past, it is that almost any cultural software can be run on human hardware. As Graeber and Wengrow compellingly demonstrate, this suggests a tantalizing range of possibilities for organizing the political world."
- Matthew Porges, Los Angeles Review of Books

" The Dawn of Everything, chockablock with archaeological and ethnographic minutiae, is an oddly gripping read. Graeber, who did his fieldwork in Madagascar, was well known for his caustic wit and energetic prose, and Wengrow, too, has established himself not only as an accomplished archaeologist working in the Middle East but as a gifted and lively writer . . . an imaginative success . . . At its core is a fascinating proposal about human values, about the nature of a good and just existence."
- Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Review of Books

"An ingenious new look at 'the broad sweep of human history' and many of its 'foundational' stories . . . [Graeber and Wengrow] take a dim view of conventional accounts of the rise of civilizations, emphasize contributions from Indigenous cultures and the missteps of the great Enlightenment thinkers, and draw countless thought-provoking conclusions . . . A fascinating, intellectually challenging big book about big ideas."
-Kirkus Reviews [starred review]

"Pacey and potentially revolutionary . . . the argument of the book is firmly based on a deluge of recent evidence that suggests that pre-agricultural societies were complex, that agriculture was not the sudden turning point it is claimed to be and, most importantly, that large, successful systems such as cities have been run without central, rule-giving controllers . . . This is more than an argument about the past, it is about the human condition in the present."
-Bryan Appleyard, The Sunday Times (UK)

" The Dawn of Everything reimagines the human story from its earliest beginnings. Easily one of my favorite books of the year, every chapter left me with something to chew over. This is one of those books that will challenge you to reconsider everything."
- Emily B., Powells.com
As new discoveries upend what we think we know about human history, it is time to jettison old narratives and tell new stories about ancestors who were as human-and thus as vibrant, intelligent and complicated-as ourselves. Graeber and Wengrow take on this task with verve and passion."
- Philip Deloria, co-editor of A Companion to American Indian History

"Graeber and Wengrow have effectively overturned everything I ever thought about the history of the world. A thorough and elegant refutation of evolutionary theories of history, The Dawn of Everything introduces us to a world populated by smart, creative, complicated people who, for thousands of years, invented virtually every form of social organization imaginable and pursued freedom, knowledge, experimentation, and happiness way before the "Enlightenment." The authors don't just debunk the myths, they give a thrilling intellectual history of how they came about, why they persist, and what it all means for the just future we hope to create. The most profound and exciting book I've read in thirty years."
-Robin D.G. Kelley, Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History, UCLA, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

"This is not a book. This is an intellectual feast. There is not a single chapter that does not (playfully) disrupt well seated intellectual beliefs. It is deep, effortlessly iconoclastic, factually rigorous, and pleasurable to read."
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author The Black Swan

" The Dawn of Everything is also the radical revision of everything, liberating us from the familiar stories about humanity's past that are too often deployed to impose limitations on how we imagine humanity's future. Instead they tell us that what human beings are most of all is creative, from the beginning, so that there is no one way we were or should or could be. Another of the powerful currents running through this book is a reclaiming of Indigenous perspectives as a colossal influence on European thought, a valuable contribution to decolonizing global histories."
-Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark and Orwell's Roses

"Not content with different answers to the great questions of human history, Graeber and Wengrow insist on revolutionizing the very questions we ask. The result: a dazzling, original, and convincing account of the rich, playful, reflective, and experimental symposia that 'pre-modern' indigenous life represents; and a challenging re-writing of the intellectual history of anthropology and archaeology. The Dawn of Everything deserves to become the port of embarkation for virtually all subsequent work on these massive themes. Those who do embark will have, in the two Davids, incomparable navigators."
-James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology ('Demeritus'), Yale University, author of Seeing Like a State

"Synthesizing much recent scholarship, The Dawn of Everything briskly overthrows old and obsolete assumptions about the past, renews our intellectual and spiritual resources, and reveals, miraculously, the future as open-ended. It is the most bracing book I have read in recent years."
-Pankaj Mishra, author of The Age of Anger

"Graeber and Wengrow take up a question as old as Rousseau-the origin of social inequality-only to reveal that it predates Rousseau and may in fact be the wrong question, based on rubbish history and reactionary speculation. Scavenging through the most up-to-date archaeological research and most recent anthropological record, the authors give us a world more various and unexpected than we knew, and more open and free than we imagine. This is social theory in the grand, old-fashioned sense, delivered with spell-binding velocity and an exhilarating sense of discovery."
-Corey Robin, Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center

"A fascinating inquiry, which leads us to rethink the nature of human capacities, as well as the proudest moments of our own history, and our interactions with and indebtedness to the cultures and forgotten intellectuals of indigenous societies. Challenging and illuminating."
-Noam Chomsky

"Graeber and Wengrow debug cliches about humanity's deep history to open up our thinking about what's possible in the future. There is no more vital or timely project."
-Jaron Lanier, author of Dawn of the New Everything

"Fascinating, thought-provoking, groundbreaking. A book that will generate debate for years to come."
-Rutger Bregman, author of Utopia for Realists

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"Graeber and Wengrow offer a history of the past 30,000 years that is not only wildly different from anything we're used to, but also far more interesting: textured, surprising, paradoxical, inspiring . . .

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Property rights start with theft

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Across centuries, land that was collectively worked by the landless was claimed by the landed, and the age of private property was born.

On the train to Laxton I was facing backward, heading south from Scotland, with the fields of England rushing away from me. I searched their dark creases and their uneven hedges for something I didn't know how to see, something I wasn't even certain was visible. I was trying to locate the origins of private property, a preposterous pursuit. There in those hedges, I was looking for a living record of enclosure, the centuries-long process by which land once collectively worked by the landless was claimed by the landed. That land already belonged to the landed, in the old sense of ownership, but it had always been used by the landless, who belonged to the land. The nature of ownership changed within the newly set hedges of an enclosed field, where the landowner now had the exclusive right to dictate how the land was used, and no one else belonged there.

From my backward-facing seat, I saw a long stone wall on the crest of a cliff. "The Wall," John Berger writes, "is the front line of what, long ago, was called the Class War." Walls, fences, hedges, and ditches were all used to mark the boundaries of enclosed land, so that sheep could be kept there, or some other profit could be pursued. Enclosure is how nearly all the agricultural land in Britain came to be owned by less than one per cent of the population. In " The Making of the English Working Class," the historian E. P. Thompson writes that enclosure was "a plain enough case of class robbery, played according to fair rules of property and law laid down by a parliament of property-owners and lawyers."

The pilgrims who sailed on the Mayflower were not property owners but economic migrants financed by property owners. They were also communists, in that they agreed to work communally and share the profits of their labor for the first seven years of their settlement, though that agreement did not last beyond the first year. They settled on land held by the Wampanoag people, who did not practice the absolute ownership of land. Among the Wampanoag, rights to use the same plot of land could overlap, so that one family might hold the right to fish in a stream and another might hold the right to farm the banks of that stream. Usage rights could be passed down from mothers to daughters, but the land itself could not be possessed.

I once saw some old suitcases lying open on a museum floor, each full of living sod, the work of the South African artist Kemang Wa Lehulere. His art, the museum catalogue explained, was an effort to reimagine deleted scenes from history. Enclosure would seem to be one such scene. Deleted, perhaps, because it unfolded so slowly, in the course of about five hundred years. It began in the Middle Ages and was completed by acts of Parliament in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This land revolution set the stage for the Industrial Revolution. Enclosure, Marx argued, is what produced the landless wage workers who became the proletariat. Historians disagree on that, so it is safer to say that enclosure produced Romantic poetry, a literature marked by nostalgia for a lost world. "All sighed," the landless poet John Clare wrote, "when lawless law's enclosure came."

Clare was a homesick poet, always trying to write himself back to the open fields of his childhood. "Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene," he wrote, "Nor fence of ownership crept in between." After writing four books of poetry, he was certified insane and admitted to an asylum. But he absconded from the asylum and walked eighty miles back to the place he was from. He slept in ditches and ate grass and believed he was going back to his first love, who was no longer alive. Ever since I saw those suitcases on the museum floor, Clare has walked eighty miles through my mind carrying a suitcase of his native sod.

Laxton is the one remaining village in England that was never enclosed, and where tenant farmers still work the land coöperatively, as they have for at least the past seven hundred years. They use the open-field system, cultivating crops on narrow strips of land that follow the curvature of the hills. There are no hedges or fences between these strips, and working them requires collaboration among the farmers.

In the time before enclosure, shared pastures where landless villagers could graze their animals were common. Laxton had two, the Town Moor Common and the much larger Westwood Common, which together supported a hundred and four rights to common use, with each of these rights attached to a cottage or a toft of land in the village. In Laxton, the commons were a resource reserved for those with the least: both the commons and the open fields were owned by the lord of the manor, and only villagers with little more than a cottage held rights to the commons.

As a visitor from the age of private property, it seems remarkable to me that commoners held rights to land they did not own or rent, but, at the time, it was commonplace. In addition to common pasture, commoners were granted rights of pannage, of turbary, of estovers, and of piscary-rights to run their pigs in the woods, to cut peat for fuel, to gather wood from the forests, and to fish. These were rights to subsistence, rights to live on what they could glean from the land. In the course of enclosure, as written law superseded customary law, commoners lost those rights. Parliament made property rights absolute, and the traditional practice of living off the land was redefined as theft. Gleaning became trespassing, and fishing became poaching. Commoners who continued to common were now criminals. An entire legal history is told in the four lines of one anonymous English poem:

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.

"This is where your pilgrims were from-Nottinghamshire," the driver of the taxi I took from Retford station to Laxton told me, gesturing out the window. "Did you know that?" I did not. I asked him if many people farmed out here. Nearly all I'd seen since I got on the train that morning had been rolling fields with nobody in them. "Machines do the farming," he said. "Most people do something else."

My driver had voted for Brexit. He hadn't expected it to pass, but he wasn't sorry it did. This was in 2016, so Brexit was still just an idea. "We can't be told what to do now," the driver said. He talked about tariffs and trade deals, though it wasn't clear to me what those meant for him beyond the idea of independence. I mentioned that I tried to take a bus to Laxton, but after reading the schedules in the station I learned that the bus didn't run every day. "Transit is in bad shape," he said. He blamed it on the pensioners, who rode for free.

The idea that shared resources are inevitably ruined by people who exploit them is sometimes called the tragedy of the commons. This is not just an attitude that passes for common sense but an economic theory: "The Tragedy of the Commons" was the title of a 1968 essay by the ecologist Garrett Hardin. His essay has been cited so often that it has kept the word commons in use among people who know nothing about the commons. "The tragedy of the commons develops in this way," Hardin wrote. "Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy."

Hardin was a white nationalist who subscribed to what is now called "replacement theory." He believed that the United States needed to restrict nonwhite immigration, because, as he put it, "a multiethnic society is insanity." In 1974, he published an essay titled "Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor," in which he warned of the dangers of creating a world food bank: "The less provident and less able will multiply at the expense of the abler and more provident," he wrote, "bringing eventual ruin upon all who share in the commons."

Hardin was writing long after the commons had been lost to enclosure, and his commons was purely hypothetical. Actual, historical commons weren't the free-for-all he imagined. In Laxton, villagers who held rights to Westwood Common could keep twenty sheep there, or the equivalent in cows. No one was allowed to keep more animals on the commons in summer than they could support in winter. Common rights were continuously revisited and revised in the course of centuries, as demand rose and fell. In 1662, the court fined a Laxton man "for not felling his part of thistles in the Town Moor." As E. P. Thompson observed, "Commoners themselves were not without commonsense."

What Hardin considers the "inherent logic of the commons" is actually the logic of capitalism, the dominant logic of our time. That logic dictates expansion, no matter the consequences, and it has brought our world, as Hardin warned it would, near ruin. "Ruin," he wrote, "is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons." Freedom, in this context, is what we might call free enterprise, freedom having been redefined, in our age, as access to profit.

The word "nostalgia" is composed of Greek words for "homecoming" and "pain." The Swiss physician who first used the term, in 1688, considered it a serious condition, a disease of the mind that weakened the body. The physician's case studies included the story of a girl sent to a faraway hospital to recover from a bad fall. That girl began to refuse food and medicine, and would only repeat, "I want to go home." The physician recommended treating the early stages of nostalgia by distracting the patient, inducing vomiting, and opening a vein for bleeding. If all that failed, the only option that remained was to return the patient to their native land. This, he observed, often resulted in a full recovery.

For hundreds of years, nostalgia continued to be considered a mental illness or a neurological disorder. Anyone could suffer from nostalgia, but it particularly plagued the displaced, and as late as 1938 it was described as an "immigrant psychosis." Even now, nostalgia remains a pitiable condition in the popular imagination-not dangerous or life-threatening, but sentimental and backward-looking.

Sentimental to no end, John Clare wrote of his despair at the prospect of losing two beloved elm trees, which a local landowner was planning to sell for wood. The man who first promoted Clare's poetry intervened to save the aging elms, though he was likely more concerned about Clare than the trees. Clare was prone to debilitating dark moods and, later, delusions. The exact nature of his madness remains a mystery. Was it brought on by the stress of poverty? By malnutrition? His biographer, Jonathan Bate, suggests that he likely suffered from more than one problem, the most obvious being ordinary depression. "Clare's genius was exceptional," Bate writes, "but his 'madness' was not."

Psychologists no longer consider nostalgia a disorder but, rather, a psychological strategy, a way of drawing solace from the past in an uncertain present. Feelings of emptiness or meaninglessness can be dispelled by memories that feel full and meaningful. "The mind is 'peopled'," the psychiatrist D. G. Hertz writes of the nostalgic experience. Nostalgia is often a response to loneliness, the authors of a 2008 study observed, and they concluded that it may "redress deficiencies in belongingness."

Perhaps a deficiency in belongingness is what leads to political nostalgia, of the sort evoked by the slogan "Make America Great Again." White-nationalist movements are animated by what the writer Zadie Smith calls "a radical desire for time travel." Whereas personal nostalgia peoples the mind with real memories, political nostalgia often travels back to a time that is as unreal as time travel itself. In this past, white people imagine themselves free from competing claims to land and property, to rights and recourses. This is a past in which we had no obligation to other people. Such a past never existed, but that sort of freedom remains an enduring fantasy.

Under feudalism, tenants were obligated to work the land of their lords, and lords were obligated to provide for the basic needs of their tenants. In 1725, the lord of a manor in the Midlands was advised by his steward on how best to allocate pasture land to poor families: "Widow Sutton I think deserves one more than Richard Wilkins, for though he has 3 children he is better able to work for them than this woman, who besides her own 2 small children maintains her husband's mother, who otherwise must be an immediate charge of the parish." More striking even than the assumption that this lord should help provide for people who are caring for other people is the way the steward's argument is made-this argument is not based on morality, or legality, but on necessity. The widow "deserves" the land because she needs it.

Laxton has a tight center where the farmers all live within walking distance of the pub. This makes it distinct from all the rural places I have known. Standing at the center of the village, I had the feeling that I was standing inside an idea, an idea about how to live in relationships of necessity with other people. I felt at home in the idea, and I puzzled over this for a moment, feeling held close by the tight center of a village where I had never been, wondering if I was making myself at home in my own imagination.

There were two rooms for let above the barn next to the pub, and I could see several farmsteads from the windows of the one where I stayed. As I walked through the gate in front of the barn, I took note of seven different sorts of fencing, including a brick wall and a stone wall. It occurred to me then, for the first time, that the absence of enclosure might not be marked by the absence of walls and fences. I had not yet located the commons in Laxton, and I wondered how I would identify them. "The commons is invisible," the historian Peter Linebaugh warns, "until it is lost."

I walked through the village past the church, which was built around 1190 and had a fresh grave in the churchyard. Some of the tidy farmhouses had laundry drying on clotheslines behind them, hidden from the road. Attached to every farmstead was an aluminum placard with the name of the farm printed in large Helvetica and, slightly smaller, a logo of a crown with the words "Crown Estate." The village, I noted, had been branded.

I stopped short when I entered the fields, arrested by their spare beauty. The late August sun was low in the sky, and big round bales of hay rode the slopes of the hills, which were quilted in crops. Golden wheat stood ripe in some strips and in others it had been shorn down to its bright stubble. Stepping onto the edge of a recently harvested strip, I dragged my fingers through a carpet of felled wheat on the ground. This is what the French peasants in Millet's painting "The Gleaners" were gathering into their aprons. Painted on a large canvas of dimensions usually reserved for religious subjects, "The Gleaners" is a reminder that gleaning was authorized by scripture. Those three women bending to their work, quietly dominating the foreground of the painting, drew incredible ire at the Paris Salon, in 1857. "His three gleaners," one critic wrote, "have gigantic pretensions."

Gleaning rights were the subject of hot debate in France at that time. The right to glean the remains of the harvest had traditionally been reserved for the poor, as in England. But opening harvested fields to gleaners, which was once an obligation of the landowners, had recently been redefined in France as an act of charity and was now seen as an infringement on private property. New bourgeois landowners complained that "gangs of women" were "pilfering" their crops.

In Agnès Varda 's 2000 film, "The Gleaners and I," made in her old age, she finds the gleaners of our time still scavenging in fields and orchards, in urban markets and curbside dumpsters. Gleaners carry away the too-small or too-large potatoes that farmers have dumped in piles by the side of the road. At low tide, gleaners collect the oysters that storms have torn from commercial oyster beds. In the city, a man walks through an outdoor market after all the venders have left, picking up discarded vegetables and eating bits of lettuce as he goes. A salvage artist combs the curbsides and makes sculptures out of broken windshield wipers. Gleaning and art-making, Varda suggests, are in the same venerable tradition as trash-picking and the refusal to throw old things away just because they are old.

On the road coming out of the open fields, I met a man missing a hand. He told me with enthusiasm that he was an Americanophile, a word I'd never heard. He'd been to Florida and Texas and Arizona, and he didn't see why I would ever leave. "You have everything over there," he said. "I'd live there if I could afford it."

He was a farmer in Laxton but not for much longer. He was retiring, he told me-too much government meddling. Yesterday, he had gone to town to buy some rat poison, but he was thwarted by the government. He spoke at a quick clip and I didn't catch what the government had to do with the rat poison, but I understood the gist of his complaint. He told me he was a fan of American cowboy pictures. "Tombstone," he said, with reverence. He went driving once through the States, touring the landscape of the Westerns, and he stayed in the town of Tombstone, but he wasn't impressed. It's little more than a museum now, with reënactments of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral three times a day. "Laxton's quaint," he said, "but Tombstone's even a bit quainter."

The cowboys in "Tombstone" are based on a gang of smugglers who called themselves the Cowboys. They were the reason that it was once, in the town of Tombstone, an insult to call a cattleman a cowboy. In the movie, the lawmen who pursue the Cowboys aren't upstanding citizens but men who give up gambling for law enforcement when things begin to fall apart. Those lawmen came to Tombstone to get rich, and, in the end, they leave bereaved.

The story of enclosure is sometimes told as a deal, or a transaction, in which landowners traded away their traditional relationship with the landless in exchange for greater independence. By releasing themselves from their social obligations to provide for the poor, they gained the freedom to farm for profit. And this freedom, or so the story goes, is what allowed the increased efficiencies that we call the agricultural revolution. Commoners lost, in the bargain, the freedom once afforded to them by self-sufficiency. Dispossessed of land, they were now bound to wages.

Like "common," which shifts in meaning from "widespread" to "shared" to "vulgar," the word "independent" is unsteady. It can mean "free from outside control," or it can mean "not connected to each other," and those meanings sometimes collide. The myth of the American cowboy is the myth of an isolated man beholden to no one, though actual cowboys were neither isolated nor free from obligation. The independence of the cowboy is an American fiction. In England, cattle drovers did the same work as cowboys, but those drovers never became emblematic of a national fantasy. "The symbol of independence," Linebaugh writes, "was the commoner."

Commoners were "rough and savage," according to eighteenth-century rhetoric. They were lazy. Their practice of sharing land was "barbarous," and their economy was "primitive." They had an inexplicable preference for using their free time for sport, rather than for paid labor. Their defenders argued that commoners were in fact industrious and self-sufficient. "What defenders saw as hard work and thrift," the historian J. M. Neeson writes, "critics saw as squalor and desperation." But everyone agreed that commoners were independent, in that they did not have to work for wages. And everyone understood that the enclosure of the commons would force commoners to become wage workers, and that this would cost them their independence.

When I returned to the pub after dinner, it was crowded with farmers, as the pub keeper had promised it would be. She met me at the door and told me she'd found me a farmer to talk with, a man named Johnny Godson. She'd bribed him with a pint to sit down with me, she said with a wink. "America," Godson said as he shook my hand. "You have big fields." Godson was in his seventies, born and raised in Laxton. He was quick to tell me that he knew this way of farming was widely considered obsolete. "We're medieval!" he said, laughing.

When I asked Godson about the commons, which I had been looking for since I arrived, he told me that Westwood Common had been ploughed under, in 1941, after a road was put through. Godson knew a man, long ago, who had kept a cow on Westwood Common. Keeping just one cow, I knew, was once the equivalent to half a year's wages for a laborer. I wondered what happened to that man when the common was ploughed. "He got another job," Godson said with a shrug.

Some areas in Laxton were enclosed in the eighteenth century, forming four private farms on the peripheries of the parish. But Laxton as a whole was never enclosed, Godson reported with relish, because the lords couldn't afford the expense of buying out small landholders. The estate remained in open fields owing to debts, disagreements, and the financial strain caused by the construction of a new manor house in 1864. The lords were not particularly well off and the land in Laxton was not rich, either.

Godson didn't own the land he farmed or the house he lived in. He was a tenant, in the medieval fashion. The resident lord of Laxton, the sixth Earl Manvers, owned the village and most of its land until 1952, when he sold it to the Ministry of Agriculture for preservation. In 1981, the ministry sold Laxton again to Crown Estate. "Crown Estate is," Godson paused dramatically, "a body that makes money for the government." He smirked, "That's the most polite way of putting it!"

Crown Estate is a corporation whose profits go to the national treasury. It owns shopping centers and offshore wind farms, all of Windsor Estate and the whole of Regent Street in London, as well as nearly all the seabed of the U.K. Crown Estate dates back to the Norman Conquest, but its annual report is slickly contemporary. After Crown Estate acquired Laxton, the historian John Beckett noted, "Managing Laxton is almost impossible to square with their statutory duty to increase income and enhance the capital value of properties under their control."

Godson knew that the village was more valuable as real estate than it was as farmland. He suspected it would be divided up and sold in the near future. Laxton, which survived the Black Death, all the waves of enclosure, multiple agricultural depressions, two world wars, and a bombing, might end here, in contemporary capitalism. If I were to come back in ten years, Godson predicted, Laxton would be gone. "But I'll be gone, too," he said, with a wry smile.

Laxton was sold in 2020, but it was not divided up. It is now held by Thoresby Estate, one of the largest landowners in Nottinghamshire. Laxton's new landlord is Gregor Pierrepont, a distant cousin of the sixth Earl Manvers, and a member of the family that managed Laxton for several hundred years, starting in 1640. For now, Laxton has been saved from the pressures of capitalism by a landowner bound to something like feudal obligation. Those old relationships of obligation, Pierrepont tells me, were not just between landlords and tenants, but between neighbors and fellow-farmers. Obligation was "both horizontal and vertical." It might sound ridiculous to speak of feudalism in 2022, he acknowledges, but he still believes in noblesse oblige. "Those blessed with great fortune," he says, "do have a moral responsibility."

As a condition of the purchase, the open-field system in Laxton will be preserved, which means that it is unlikely to be profitable. "It makes no sense as an investment," Pierrepont admits. "It is an objectively terrible investment." But his interest in Laxton is not strictly financial; it is ecological and historical. "Laxton is similar to the old oaks here at Thoresby," Pierrepont says. "They are Sherwood Forest. They have never been 'improved.' "

The morning after I talked with Godson, I climbed over a gate to walk out onto one of the shares of land that he farmed. It was once the site of a Norman castle, but all that remained of the castle was an earthen mound covered in wildflowers. From the mound, I looked out over the fields of Nottinghamshire and saw the cooling towers of a power plant and some wind turbines in the distance. Sherwood Forest, home of Robin Hood, was once overseen from here. The forest, back then, would have reached nearly to this field.

Quite a bit of scholarly sweat has been spent over the question of whether or not Robin Hood was a real man. The history of the distant past is often speculative. Like science fiction, it gives us a way of thinking about what might be possible, as much as what might have been. In this sense, both the past and the future are imaginary, but real, too, as ideas. Telling the story of a "good outlawe" is a way of thinking about bad laws, or lawless laws, as John Clare would call them. If Robin Hood was a man, I imagine he was born into his own story long after it was first recorded in the fourteenth century, and I imagine he was a Black.

The Blacks of eighteenth-century England were poachers, dispossessed of hunting land, who led raids on forests reserved for wealthy landowners. In protest of game laws, the Blacks killed deer in Hampshire and Windsor Forest, their faces blacked with soot as a disguise. They were met with the Black Act of 1723, which introduced the death penalty for more than fifty offenses, including going in disguise. The Black Act also criminalized fishing and hunting rabbits. "No other single statute passed during the eighteenth century equalled it in severity," the criminologist Leon Radzinowicz writes, "and none appointed the punishment of death in so many cases."

The Blacks were sentenced to death not just for poaching but for "conscious social resentment" of the rich. They were hanged for what would later be called class consciousness. The Blacks were white, in the racial terms of our time, but those terms had not yet taken their current meaning. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the poor and the landless of England were often talked about in the same terms as those used to describe Native Americans and Africans. Commoners were a "mischievous race," "a sordid race," and an "idle, useless and disorderly set of people." They were "barbarians." Their industry was a "lazy industry," and their independence a "beggarly independence." Commoners were loathed, as Neeson notes, "with a xenophobic intensity."

Around 1800, the notion of a "working class" had not yet been established. The scholar Saree Makdisi writes that, at that time, when the rural poor of England and the poor "City Arabs" of London were talked about as an uncivilized race, "these wretched people were not merely being compared to other races and civilizations, as though really 'we' knew all along that 'they' were 'our people,' but rather that they really were not 'our people'; they were not 'us.' " They were not "us" until "us" became defined by whiteness.

Capitalism, the scholar Cedric Robinson argues, was not a revolutionary departure from feudalism but an extension of it, a new permutation. Under feudalism, the English rehearsed a racial hierarchy based on blood and birth, and this was the first stage in the development of an economic system dependent on racism. Later, Southern planters in the U.S. would imagine themselves as landed gentry and their slaves as feudal subjects. Capitalism here was built on slavery, and capitalism everywhere has depended on the idea that one group of people is entitled to extract profit from another, an idea that is often expressed in terms of us and them.

The Irish, too, were among the peoples regarded by English landowners as a distinct and inferior race. English settlers dispossessed Irish Catholics of their land, and by the mid-eighteenth century Catholics held only seven per cent of Ireland. The farmers who tore down fences and hedges to protest enclosure in Ireland are remembered there as Whiteboys. Over time, they resurfaced as the Whitefeet, the Blackfeet, and the Defenders-an enduring rebellious tradition.

Long after the peak of enclosure in Ireland, during the famine that killed around a million people, thousands of boatloads of food were exported by the British. There was more than enough grain on ships leaving port to feed Ireland's starving people, but that grain was grown for profit.

The millions of Irish who emigrated to the U.S. in the decades around the famine went to work digging canals and building railroads and aligning themselves with the White Republic. The Irish proved themselves white by opposing abolition, driving free Blacks out of the occupations they shared, destroying Black homes and churches in riots, joining militias, and organizing themselves into violent gangs like the Killers. And so, in the process of proving themselves white, the descendants of the Defenders became Killers. Today, the Chicago River still runs green every St. Patrick's Day. I wonder what of the tradition of Irish rebellion against enclosure might be recovered now, and how it might live alongside the Black radical tradition.

One of John Clare's poems of loss is about a spring where, for as long as anyone could remember, the young people of his village had gathered on a certain Sunday to drink sweetened water. With enclosure, the spring became private property, and that tradition was lost, along with others. "For many villagers, enclosure was experienced as an engine of social more than economic alienation," Bate writes. Social alienation was agony for Clare, as much as seeing common lands ruined. In a letter from the asylum where he was sent after his escape from the first asylum, he asked after dozens of his former neighbors by name, mentioning nearly half the families in the village.

Late in the evening, in the Laxton pub full of people who had known one another all their lives, Godson borrowed the pub keeper's phone to call his neighbor, who he assured me was not sleeping. "I have a girl here who wants to talk with you," Godson told him, adding, with a chuckle, "She's a foreigner!"

Godson's neighbor farmed the open fields, like his father and grandfather before him. When I found this farmer the next day, he gestured toward the farmstead across the street, where cheese was once made from cows milked there and pigs were fattened for slaughter. "Thirty acres used to be enough to support two generations," he said. "Now a hundred acres is a part-time job."

The landowners who promoted enclosure promised "improvement," and "improvement" is still the word favored by some historians. But we should be wary of the promotional language of the past. Leaving the commons to the commoners, one eighteenth-century advocate of enclosure argued, would be like leaving North America to the Native Americans. It would be a waste, he meant. Imagine, he suggested, allowing the natives to exercise their ancient rights and to continue to occupy the land-they would do nothing more with it than what they were already doing, and they would not "improve" it. Improvement meant turning the land to profit. Enclosure wasn't robbery, according to this logic, because the commoners made no profit off the commons, and thus had nothing worth taking.

Godson's neighbor showed me the remnants of ridges and furrows, ghosts of the mortarboard plow, under the tall grass at the end of a strip. His grandfather had cut hay by hand, using a scythe, and had driven a plow pulled by a team of horses. He pointed to the place in the field where his grandfather would have watered his horses, and he imagined the farmers of the past all gathered there, "nattering away." Horses, he told me, were superior to the gas combustion engines that replaced them. They could be fed off the land, they produced manure, and they reproduced themselves. He said that farmers were reluctant to give up horses for tractors.

The Luddites, the notorious machine-breakers of nineteenth-century England, were not opposed to machines so much as they were opposed to what machines were doing to their lives. Here in Nottinghamshire, they protested the framework-knitting machines that were replacing skilled stocking-makers, leaving them without a livelihood. Ned Ludd, a legendary boy who smashed two stocking frames, was rumored to live in Sherwood Forest as an outlaw. Like the commoners who levelled fences in protest of enclosure, the Luddites had something they wanted to protect from improvement.

"Would you want to go back, though, to that preënclosure era?" the journalist Laura Flanders asks Peter Linebaugh in a televised interview. Isn't life better now, she wonders-especially for women? I consider this, thinking of a Laxton woman who was brought before the court in 1594 for fornication, the evidence being her pregnancy. I think of Clare's wife, centuries later, illiterate and caring for seven children while her husband wrote poetry. But "Would you go back?" strikes me as the wrong question to ask of nostalgia. The question, as Zadie Smith puts it, is how to "restate the things you find valuable in the past . . . in a way that's livable in this contemporary moment." How to locate the commons in a world that is mostly enclosed. How to recover a tradition of rebellion against monied claims to property. How to use machines rather than be used by them. How to be canny, like the workers of the past, and how to be conservationists, like commoners. We can learn from the time before enclosure, but we can't go back there. "Time," the poet Robyn Schiff tells me, "is the enclosure that encircles us all."

Godson's neighbor paused his truck on the crest of a hill, and from there we could see the boundaries of Laxton, marked by trees. We could see the enclosures, too-farmsteads nestled in the folds of the land, far from the village center. If I were John Clare, I would write a poem about sitting in that Land Rover, surveying the limits of someone else's known world, feeling nostalgic for a life I never lived, and homesick for a home that was never mine. Near the end of his life, Clare wrote in code, omitting all vowels, "ppl tll m hv gt n hm n ths wrld." It was a text to the future: "people tell me I have got no home in this world."

"The wheat in the ear and the blossoming bean belonged to John Clare because he could see them and touch them and walk through them," Neeson writes. "He owned this world because it was open to him." He owned the fields the way my child's father owned the alleys of Chicago, which belonged, in his boyhood, to the children who ranged through them freely. Children, who can't own any property of their own, need commons for their play. And, in that sense, we all start out as commoners.

At Kings Cross, in London, less than two hours by train from Laxton, I took the Tube to visit a childhood friend. In his neighborhood, there were signs taped to lampposts that read "Save our Library! Save our Archives!" The libraries, my friend told me, were losing their funding. Another commons threatened with enclosure. "Were there commons in America?" his British wife asked us. "No," my American friend answered with certainty. I was not so sure. I thought of the paved path along the river where we grew up. It was a post-industrial right-of-way, built on the bed of a former railroad. But its purpose was recreation, not subsistence, and it was made for the benefit of the middle class, not the poor.

The General Inclosure Act of 1845, passed after most of the land in England had been enclosed, declared that some land should be set aside for exercise and recreation. London is now full of parks that were once commons. There is Clapham Common, Streatham Common, Clapton Common, and Barnes Common, where commoners cut furze to burn for heat. Now there are tennis courts in Plumstead Common, where a group of women once axed down fences and set the furze on fire to protest enclosure. My friend and his wife live on the edge of a park, not a former common but land that was levelled by German bombing. When I remarked that it must be nice, in such a big city, to live next to a park, his wife replied, "In theory."

There were drug dealers in the park at night, my friend explained, and prostitutes. I asked if prostitution was illegal in London and his response suggested that I should understand I'd travelled to Great Britain, not Mars. But why should it be a given, I wondered, that a woman cannot legally sell her own body?

The sex workers in the park were using the commons the way it has always been used, to eke out a living, however mean. Their work was illegal, but enclosure made all sorts of subsistence illegal. In 1842, long before " Capital," a young Marx wrote a series of articles about a law that criminalized taking wood from forests where the gathering of fallen wood was once a customary right. In Germany, as in England, this was a right exercised by women, particularly widows.

Before enclosure, common lands were the livelihood of common women. Women gleaned in the fields, and from the wastes they brought in nuts and berries for food, herbs for medicine, rushes for baskets and hats, and wood and furze for fuel. After enclosure, Neeson writes, women became more dependent on men's wages. The loss of the commons was, for women, a loss of independence.

When I returned from England, I stepped out of a taxi and into my own enclosure. In feudal terminology, I'm a freeholder, in that I own land, but less than an acre, not enough to support a cow. I dictate what happens on my land, and I dig up sod and plant new hedges, but the true owner of this place is the bank. In the years since I moved here, the picket fence that surrounds my garden has lost several pickets and the gate has fallen off. "There's a hole in every wall," Linebaugh promises, "and thus a commons behind every enclosure." There's a past behind every future, too, and a hole between them.

I read Linebaugh's 2014 book, " Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance," all the way across the Atlantic, long into what would be the night in London, until the icon of an airplane on the screen in front of me reached the edge of North America. Enclosure in America, Linebaugh writes, began with the theft of native land, and our Luddites were insurrectionary enslaved people who broke tools on plantations. Bound by a common thread, those enslaved people produced the cotton that was spun and woven in England, on the machines the Luddites were breaking. In North Dakota, at that moment, the Standing Rock Sioux were chaining themselves to construction equipment. They would be joined in their camp of tepees and pup tents and communal kitchens by Maori and Muslims and military veterans and members of more than ninety Native nations of the Americas. They would remain through the winter, through water cannons and tear gas and blizzards, a living reminder that we still have, in our water and air, a commons.

What we do not still have-what we have lost-is common rights. These rights once limited the reach of private property, and when the balance of rights shifted toward those who owned property, this wrong was felt by both the common people and the land. In one poem, Clare writes in the voice of a plot of land, and the land itself is nostalgic. "There was a time my bit of ground / Made freemen of the slave," it remembers. The land feels the loss of the people who lost their rights to the land.

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Eula Biss writes about the twined histories of enclosure and capitalism, and visits Laxton, the sole remaining village in England that was never enclosed, where tenant farmers still work the land coöperatively.

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Leaders of an island county in Washington that moved most employees to a 32-hour workweek in October say the experiment is showing signs of success.

San Juan County, which encompasses the San Juan Islands, garnered national attention last year when it announced it would be one of the first local governments in the U.S. to ditch a 40-hour workweek, joining a growing trend among some private employers. The county of 18,000 residents switched employees like office workers, nurses, park stewards, laborers and equipment operators to a shorter workweek without lowering their overall pay.

Months later, the county has begun recruiting and retaining more employees, most workers say they're happier and healthier, and public services have generally been maintained, according to a county report released Tuesday.

Employees surveyed by the county in March and April say they're spending their extra time away from work on things like errands, medical appointments, their families, hobbies and volunteering. Many say they're more rested and more satisfied with their jobs as a result.

The workweek change negotiated with a labor union has presented some logistical challenges, including for county departments that staff front desks and phone lines. And it's stressed out some managers, who, along with Sheriff's Department employees, weren't included in the change. But it's also been a cost saver for the county, the six-month report says.

"We're encouraged by the initial results. However, we know that more data and more time with the schedule will be vital to understanding its true impacts on the organization," interim County Manager Mark Tompkins said in a statement, noting that one-year and two-year reports are planned.

"We know our residents are not the only ones watching - other municipalities and organizations are taking notes from the lessons learned here," Tompkins and other county leaders said in Tuesday's report.

Positive results

San Juan County's bold move emerged from negotiations with AFSCME 1849, which represents about 70% of the county's employees and which sought big raises last year to offset inflation. Switching those employees to a 32-hour workweek allowed the county to boost their per-hour wages without breaking its budget or raising taxes on residents. The County Council approved the deal in a union contract that runs through 2025.

When they announced the change in August, leaders also said they hoped it would help them recruit and retain workers, citing a chronic 10% to 15% job vacancy rate and problems with employee burnout. Hiring can be particularly hard in San Juan County; although the islands offer natural beauty and laid-back charm, they're only accessible by ferry, boat or plane.

Residents often have to head to the mainland to visit doctors, see relatives and do shopping. County leaders said a 32-hour workweek would give employees more time to travel to the mainland without taking off work, while also giving them more time to care for their families. At the time, county and AFSCME 1849 leaders suggested productivity might actually increase.

"The 32-hour workweek win has been significant for our members," AFSCME's executive committee said in Tuesday's report, arguing that the move could set a new standard for government workers across the state.

Since the 32-hour workweek started, the time it takes the county to fill open positions has dropped 62% and voluntary separations (employees quitting or retiring) have dropped 46%, Tuesday's report says. The county received 91 job applications from January to March 2024, after receiving only two applications from January to March 2023, according to the report.

In the county's recent survey of all employees (including those not covered by the workweek change), 88% said the policy was a reason for them to keep working for the county and most said they'd recommended someone apply for a county job because of the schedule. Many new hires said the schedule was a factor they considered when they applied.

Also in the survey, 83% of respondents said the schedule had improved their work-life balance and 67% reported an increase in job satisfaction.

What are they doing with their extra personal time? Three-quarters said they were spending some of that time with family, while nearly that many said they were running off-island errands and pursuing hobbies. Fewer mentioned other jobs; side jobs are more plentiful during the summer tourist season.

Although the start of the 32-hour workweek coincided with cold and flu season, county employees used 31% less sick time this winter than last winter, according to Tuesday's report. In the survey, 78% of respondents reported improved mental health, 71% reported feeling more rested and 70% said they'd used some of their extra personal time for medical appointments.

Frances Robertson, a marine biologist who leads the county's effort to protect its southern resident orcas and who was on AFSCME 1849's negotiating team, now has Fridays off. She hangs out with her children after waking up, then dives into her own research - on minke whales in the Salish Sea. She knows several people who've delayed retirement because of the schedule shift.

"It's nice to have a slower morning with my kids," and then, Robertson said, "You're just more focused during the days you're at work."

Questions remain

Most of the county's employees are working 20% fewer hours, but total hours worked across the organization dropped only 8% on average from October to March, partly because more job vacancies were filled.

Some departments are using staggered scheduling to provide services every day, while others have switched to four-day weeks. They're using collaborative software, holding fewer meetings and cross-training employees to get the same amount of work done in less time, Tuesday's report says.

"The county has experienced little variation in its ability to deliver key programs and services," the report says. "No staff positions or programs have been cut and public services are being maintained."

For example, the county's information technology department is providing more help and the health and community services department is delivering more meals to seniors than before the 32-hour workweek, the report says.

The transition hasn't been completely smooth, with 12% of employees reporting additional stress related to the 32-hour workweek. Some managers say they're working longer hours to make sure deadlines are met.

"Staff identified challenges with interdepartmental communication, completing tasks within their shorter workweeks and managing the seasonality of certain, time-intensive projects," the report says.

Public reactions have been mixed, with 34% of employees reporting positive feedback and 34% negative feedback. Some offices are closed on Fridays.

"I have Friday as a day off and have been denied service at several county offices that say closed on Friday due to new schedule," one resident commented on a county Facebook post about Tuesday's report.

The assessor's office has fallen behind a bit because the employees who visit properties to assign taxable values are spending fewer hours in the field, said interim Assistant County Manager Brandon Andrews.

Pressure on the parks department will increase this summer, with grass to mow and a county fair to organize, Andrews said in an interview.

"I don't think this check-in should be viewed as conclusive yet," he said.

But the public works department has reported no disruptions, and there's "pretty good consensus" among county leaders, Andrews said, that the new workweek's clear benefits mean any wrinkles are worth trying to iron out.
This coverage is partially underwritten by Microsoft Philanthropies. The Seattle Times maintains editorial control over this and all its coverage.

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Here's how a 32-hour workweek is going for this WA county

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A small island county in Washington state moved most of its local government employees to a 32-hour workweek in October. Most indicators say it's a positive change for work and life.