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The achievement of women's suffrage throughout the 18th to 19th century marked the changing role of women in society. In the beginning years of the 20th century, an influx of women in the labor force and college empowered them further to fight for simple freedoms that were not afforded to them before.

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Beginning in the mid-19th century, several generations of woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered a radical change in the Constitution - guaranteeing women the right to vote. Some suffragists used more confrontational tactics such as picketing, silent vigils, and hunger strikes. Read more...

Primary Sources
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Additional Background Information

In July 1848 Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, NY. The Seneca Falls Convention produced a list of demands called the Declaration of Sentiments. Modeled on the Declaration of Independence, it called for broader educational and professional opportunities for women and the right of married women to control their wages and property. After this historic gathering, women's voting rights became a central issue in the emerging debate about women's rights in the United States.

Many of the attendees to the convention were also abolitionists whose goals included universal suffrage - the right to vote for all adults. In 1870 this goal was partially realized when the 15th amendment to the Constitution, granting black men the right to vote, was ratified. Woman suffragists' vehement disagreement over supporting the 15th Amendment, however, resulted in a "schism" that split the women's suffrage movement into two new suffrage organizations that focused on different strategies to win women voting rights.

The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) was formed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in May of 1869 - they opposed the 15th amendment because it excluded women. In the year following the ratification of the 15th amendment, the NWSA sent a voting rights petition to the Senate and House of Representatives requesting that suffrage rights be extended to women and that women be granted the privilege of being heard on the floor of Congress.

The second national suffrage organization established in 1869 was the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), founded by Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The AWSA supported the 15th Amendment and protested the confrontational tactics of the NWSA. The AWSA concentrated on gaining women's access to the polls at state and local levels, in the belief that victories there would gradually build support for national action on the issue. While a federal woman suffrage amendment was not their priority, an 1871 petition, asking that women in DC and the territories be allowed to vote and hold office, from AWSA leadership to Congress reveals its support for one.

In 1890, the NWSA and AWSA merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). It became the largest woman suffrage organization in the country and led much of the struggle for the vote through 1920, when the 19th Amendment was ratified. Stanton became its president; Anthony became its vice president; and Stone became chairman of the executive committee. In 1919, one year before women gained the right to vote with the adoption of the 19th amendment, the NAWSA reorganized into the League of Women Voters.

The tactics used by suffragists went beyond petitions and memorials to Congress. Testing another strategy, Susan B. Anthony registered and voted in the 1872 election in Rochester, NY. As planned, she was arrested for "knowingly, wrongfully and unlawfully vot[ing] for a representative to the Congress of the United States." She was convicted by the State of New York and fined $100, which she insisted she would never pay. On January 12, 1874, Anthony petitioned Congress, requesting "that the fine imposed upon your petitioner be remitted, as an expression of the sense of this high tribunal that her conviction was unjust."

Wealthy white women were not the only supporters of women's suffrage. Frederick Douglass, formerly enslaved and leader of the abolition movement, was also an advocate. He attended the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. In an editorial published that year in The North Star, the anti-slavery newspaper he published, he wrote, "...in respect to political rights,...there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the elective franchise,..." By 1877, when he was U.S. marshal for the District of Columbia, Douglass's family was also involved in the movement. His son, Frederick Douglass, Jr.; daughter, Mrs. Nathan Sprague; and son-in-law, Nathan Sprague, all signed a petition to Congress for woman suffrage "...to prohibit the several States from Disfranchising United States Citizens on account of Sex."

A growing number of black women actively supported women's suffrage during this period. They organized women's clubs across the country to advocate for suffrage, among other reforms. Prominent African American suffragists included Ida B. Wells-Barnett of Chicago, a leading crusader against lynching; Mary Church Terrell, educator and first president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW); and Adella Hunt Logan, Tuskegee Institute faculty member, who insisted in articles in The Crisis, a publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), that if white women needed the vote to protect their rights, then black women - victims of racism as well as sexism - needed the ballot even more.

In the second decade of the 20th century, suffragists began staging large and dramatic parades to draw attention to their cause. One of the most consequential demonstrations was a march held in Washington, DC, on March 3, 1913. Though controversial because of the march organizers' attempt to exclude, then segregate, women of color, more than 5,000 suffragists from around the country paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue from the U.S. Capitol to the Treasury Building.

Many of the women who had been active in the suffrage movement in the 1860s and 1870s continued their involvement over 50 years later. In 1917, Mary O. Stevens, secretary and press correspondent of the Association of Army Nurses of the Civil War, asked the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee to help the cause of woman suffrage by explaining: "My father trained me in my childhood days to expect this right. I have given my help to the agitation, and work[ed] for its coming a good many years."

During World War I, suffragists tried to embarrass President Woodrow Wilson into reversing his opposition and supporting a federal woman suffrage amendment. But in the heated patriotic climate of wartime, such tactics met with hostility and sometimes violence and arrest. Frustrated with the suffrage movement's leadership, Alice Paul had broken with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) to form the National Woman's Party (NWP). It employed more militant tactics to agitate for the vote.

Most notably, the NWP organized the first White House picket in U.S. history on January 10, 1917. They stood vigil at the White House, demonstrating in silence six days a week for nearly three years. The "Silent Sentinels" let their banners - comparing the President to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany - speak for them. Many of the sentinels were arrested and jailed in deplorable conditions. Some incarcerated women went on hunger strikes and endured forced feedings. The Sentinels' treatment gained greater sympathy for women's suffrage, and the courts later dismissed all charges against them.

When New York adopted woman suffrage in 1917 and President Woodrow Wilson changed his position to support an amendment in 1918, the political balance began to shift in favor of the vote for women. There was still strong opposition to enfranchising women, however, as illustrated by petitions from anti-suffrage groups.

Eventually suffragists won the political support necessary for ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. For 42 years, the measure had been introduced at every session of Congress, but ignored or voted down. It finally passed Congress in 1919 and went to the states for ratification. In May, the House of Representatives passed it by a vote of 304 to 90; two weeks later, the Senate approved it 56 to 25.

Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan were the first states to ratify it. On August 18, 1920, it appeared that Tennessee had ratified the amendment - the result of a change of vote by 24 year-old legislator Harry Burn at the insistence of his elderly mother. But those against the amendment managed to delay official ratification. Anti-suffrage legislators fled the state to avoid a quorum, and their associates held massive anti-suffrage rallies and attempted to convince pro-suffrage legislators to oppose ratification. However, Tennessee reaffirmed its vote and delivered the crucial 36th ratification necessary for final adoption. While decades of struggle to include African Americans and other minority women in the promise of voting rights remained, the face of the American electorate had changed forever.
Materials created by the National Archives and Records Administration are in the public domain.

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Beginning in the mid-19th century, several generations of woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered a radical change in the Constitution - guaranteeing women the right to vote. Some suffragists used more confrontational tactics such as picketing, silent vigils, and hunger strikes.

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Julia Morgan was a California architect who is best known for her work on Hearst Castle in San Luis Obispo. Additionally, she was a pioneer of reinforced concrete which had several advantages compared to traditional materials like hand-cut stones. Morgan’s work incorporated elements of social change and cultural integration, especially in her designs for the Chinese American YWCA.

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Julia Morgan (January 20, 1872 - February 2, 1957) was an American architect and engineer. She designed more than 700 buildings in California during a long and prolific career. She is best known for her work on Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California.

Morgan was the first woman to be admitted to the architecture program at l'École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the first woman architect licensed in California. She designed many edifices for institutions serving women and girls, including a number of YWCAs and buildings for Mills College.

In many of her structures, Morgan pioneered the aesthetic use of reinforced concrete, a material that proved to have superior seismic performance in the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes. She embraced the Arts and Crafts Movement and used various producers of California pottery to adorn her buildings. She sought to reconcile classical and Craftsman, scholarship and innovation, formalism and whimsy.

Julia Morgan was the first woman to receive American Institute of Architects' highest award, the AIA Gold Medal, posthumously in 2014.

Morgan, the daughter of Charles Bill Morgan and Eliza Woodland Parmelee Morgan, was born on January 20, 1872, the second of five children. Her mother, Eliza, grew up as the indulged daughter of Albert O. Parmelee, a cotton trader and millionaire who financially supported the couple when they moved to San Francisco. Two years after their daughter's birth, the Morgans moved to a home they had built in the suburb of Oakland. Though the Morgans resided on the West Coast, Eliza still kept close ties with her family. Upon the birth of each Morgan child, the Parmalees sent funds for the family to travel by the transcontinental railroad so that the infant could be christened in the traditional Parmelee family church in New York.

Charles Morgan, a mining engineer from New England who had married into a wealthy family, did not succeed in any of his business ventures, so the family relied heavily on the Parmelee fortune. In mid-1878, Eliza took the children to New York to live near the Parmelees for a year while Charles worked in San Francisco. In New York, Julia met her older cousin Lucy Thornton, who was married to successful architect Pierre Le Brun. After returning to Oakland, Julia kept in contact with Le Brun; he encouraged her to pursue a higher education. In New York, Julia had been sick with scarlet fever and was kept in bed for a few weeks. As a result of this illness, she was prone to ear infections throughout her adult life. Upon the death of Albert Parmelee in July 1880, and Julia's grandmother moved into the Oakland house, bringing with her the Parmelee wealth. Both Julia's mother and grandmother provided strong female role models, who because of their wealth had a strong degree of power in the Morgan household.

Morgan graduated from Oakland High School in 1890. She was dedicated to her education and a professional career in architecture. She enrolled in the University of California, in nearby Berkeley, where she studied Engineering, as there was no architectural program. At the university, she was a member of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority and was often the only woman in her math, science, and engineering courses. Morgan helped to create a chapter of the YWCA during her time as an undergraduate student which made it possible for women to use the gymnasium. She graduated in 1894 as the first woman with a B.S. degree in civil engineering at Berkeley with honors. After her graduation, Morgan became a member of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, now the American Association of University Women.

One of the engineering lecturers of her senior year was Bernard Maybeck, an eccentrically dressed architect who designed buildings that Morgan admired for their respect for the surrounding topography and environment. Maybeck mentored Morgan, along with her classmates Arthur Brown, Jr., Edward H. Bennett and Lewis P. Hobart, in architecture at his Berkeley home. He encouraged Morgan to continue her studies at the prestigious École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he had distinguished himself. After graduating in 1894, Morgan gained a year of work experience building with Maybeck, then traveled to Paris in 1896 to prepare for the Beaux-Arts entrance exam. The school had never before allowed a woman to study architecture, but in 1897, it opened its entry process to women applicants, largely because of pressure from a union of French women artists, whom Morgan characterized as " bohemians." Morgan met with these women and was exposed to their feminist views; they discussed how to increase the influence of women in professional careers.

In principle, the school admitted the top 30 candidates. It took Morgan three tries to get in: on the first try, she placed too low, while on her second try, in 1898, although she placed well into the top 30, the examiners "arbitrarily lowered" her marks. After more than a year of further study, tutored by François-Benjamin Chaussemiche, a winner of the Prix de Rome, she finally passed the entrance exams in the Architecture Program, placing 13th out of 376 applicants, and was duly admitted. However, she could study only until her 30th birthday, as the school prohibited older scholars. In early 1902, as her birthday approached, Morgan submitted an outstanding design for a palatial theater. This earned her a certificate in architecture, making her the first woman to receive one from the school; she did so in three years, although the usual time of completion was five years (that was how long Maybeck took, for example). She stayed in Paris long enough to collaborate with Chaussemiche on a project for Harriet Fearing, an ex-New Yorker who contracted for a "grand salon" design for her residence in Fontainebleau.

Upon her return from Paris, Morgan took employment with San Francisco architect John Galen Howard, who was supervising the University of California Master Plan. Morgan worked on several buildings on the Berkeley campus, providing the decorative elements for the Hearst Mining Building and an early proposal for Sather Gate. She was the primary designer for the Hearst Greek Theatre. Howard told a colleague that Morgan was "an excellent draftsman whom I have to pay almost nothing, as it is a woman." She saved her money and made plans to work on her own, accepting important side projects.

In 1904, Morgan was the first woman to obtain an architecture license in California. While living at the old family home in Oakland, she opened her own office in San Francisco, where the staff knew her as 'J.M.' After her first office was destroyed by the 1906 fire, she opened her office in 1907 on the 13th floor of the Merchants Exchange Building, 465 California Street, in the heart of San Francisco's financial district, where she worked for the rest of her career. Between the years of 1907 and 1910, she partnered with Ira Hoover, former draftsman of Howard. Morgan reestablished an individual private practice in late 1910.

In April 1904, Julia Morgan completed her first reinforced concrete structure, the 72-foot bell tower at Mills College, El Campanil, which is located across the bay from San Francisco. Two years later, El Campanil survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake unscathed without any damage, which helped build her reputation and launch her career.

The devastation of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906 provided her with the opportunity to design numerous homes, churches, offices, and educational facilities. An important project was the redesign of the landmark Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco after its interior was severely damaged by fire after the earthquake of 1906. She was chosen because of her then-rare knowledge of earthquake-resistant, reinforced concrete construction. Her work on restoring the Fairmont in less than a year brought her a national reputation as "a superb engineer, an innovative designer and architect, and a dedicated professional." The marked increase in commissions following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake brought her financial success.

"My work here [Fairmont Hotel] has all been structural." -Julia Morgan (1907)

Greatly impressed by her work on the Fairmont, Phoebe Hearst recommended Morgan for several large construction projects, including Asilomar. Her son, William Randolph Hearst, was likewise greatly impressed and, after his mother's death, retained Morgan to design what would become the biggest and most famous project of her career, Hearst Castle.

Julia Morgan involvement with the Hearst family went on for three generations. Her first architecturally related project was commissioned by the family in 1902, when she returned from the Ecole. Her first commission by the family was Phoebe Apperson Hearst's Hacienda at Pleasanton. Morgan's most famous patron was the newspaper magnate and antiquities collector William Randolph Hearst, who had been introduced to Morgan by his mother Phoebe Apperson Hearst, the chief patron of the University of California at Berkeley. It is believed that this introduction led to Morgan's first downstate commission by Hearst for the design of the Los Angeles Examiner Building (circa 1914), a Mission revival style project that included contributions by Los Angeles architects William J. Dodd and J. Martyn Haenkel. It is located at the southwest corner of Broadway and 11th Streets on a city block in Downtown Los Angeles, awaiting adaptive reuse.

In 1919, Hearst selected Morgan as the architect for La Cuesta Encantada, better known as Hearst Castle, which was built atop the family campsite overlooking San Simeon Harbor. Morgan employed tiles, designing many of them herself, from California Faience.

The project proved to be her largest and most complex, as Hearst's vision for his estate grew ever grander over the decades of planning and construction. The project included The Hacienda, a residence-private guest house complex built in hybrid Mission Revival, Spanish Colonial Revival (working with Hispanic experts Mildred Stapley and Arthur Byne), and Moorish Revival styles. It was located a day's horseback ride inland from Hearst Castle, next to the Mission San Antonio de Padua near Jolon, California. Her work on 'the Castle' and San Simeon Ranch continued until 1947, ended only by Hearst's declining health.

Morgan became William Randolph Hearst's principal architect, producing the designs for dozens of buildings, such as Phoebe Apperson Hearst's Wyntoon, which he inherited. The estate includes a castle and "Bavarian village" of four villas, all on 50,000 acres (202 km ²) of forest reserve that includes the McCloud River near Mount Shasta in Northern California. She also did studio and site work for the uncompleted Babicora, Hearst's 1,625,000-acre (6,580 km ²) Chihuahua, Mexico, cattle rancho and retreat.

Julia Morgan's affiliation with the YWCA began when Phoebe Apperson Hearst recommended her for the organization's Asilomar summer conference center, a project she began in 1913. The Asilomar Conference Center, no longer YWCA but State-run, is still in Pacific Grove near Monterey, California. Morgan also designed YWCAs in California, Utah, Arizona, and Hawaii.

Five of the Southern California YWCA buildings were designed by Morgan. The 1918 Harbor Area YWCA (San Pedro, CA) in a Craftsman building is still standing, as is the 1926 Hollywood Studio Club YWCA. Morgan's Riverside YWCA from 1929 still stands, but as the Riverside Art Museum. Her 1925 Long Beach Italian Renaissance branch has been demolished. The "gorgeous" Pasadena YWCA is being acquired by the City for restoration and public use after several decades of decay.

She also designed YWCAs in Northern California, including those in Oakland and in San Francisco's Chinatown. The YWCA building in San Francisco reflects her understanding of traditional Chinese architecture. The building was restored in 2001 by the Chinese Historical Society of America (CHSA), and now houses the Chinese Historical Society of America Museum and Learning Center.

Morgan made many architectural contributions to Mills College, a women's college in the East Bay foothills of Oakland, California. Like her work for the YWCA, they were done in the hopes of advancing opportunities for women.

Mills president Susan Mills became interested in Morgan in 1904 because she wished to further the career of a female architect and because Morgan, just beginning her career, charged less than her male counterparts. Morgan designed six buildings for the Mills campus, including El Campanil, believed to be the first bell tower on a United States college campus. El Campanil should not be confused with The Campanile, a nickname for Sather Tower, the clock/bell tower of nearby UC Berkeley. Morgan helped draft parts of the UC Berkeley campus under John Galen Howard, but the Sather Tower was not her design. Despite being chosen by Mills to design El Campanil and her academic credentials; coworkers like Bernard Ransome, son of Ernest Ransome, did not trust in her abilities as a true concrete expert. Ransome's undermining of Morgan's ability led to less trust in her work and praise veiled in gendered rhetoric at the time. For example, a speaker at the dedication ceremony praised El Campanil for being "reared by the genius of a woman's brain."

Morgan's reputation grew when the tower was unscathed by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The bells in the tower "were cast for the World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago-1893), and given to Mills by a trustee". This success led to Morgan becoming the unofficial principle architect for Mills College for the next two decades.

Morgan also designed the Margaret Carnegie Library (1906), named after Andrew Carnegie's daughter, and the Ming Quong Home for Chinese girls, built in 1924 and purchased for Mills in 1936. It was eventually renamed Alderwood Hall, before becoming the Julia Morgan School for Girls in 2004 (independent of the College). Morgan designed the Mills College Student Union in 1916. Morgan's Kapiolani Cottage has served as an infirmary, faculty housing, and administration offices. Morgan also designed the original gymnasium and pool, since replaced by the Tea Shop and Suzanne Adams Plaza, the first reinforced concrete structure on the west coast.

Among her earliest works was the North Star House in Grass Valley, California, commissioned in 1904-5 by mining engineer Arthur De Wint Foote and his wife, the author and illustrator Mary Hallock Foote.

She considered St. John's Presbyterian Church, in Berkeley, California, her finest Craftsman-style building. It is now the Berkeley Playhouse.

Other projects include the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland; the nearby brick multi-use building at 4021 Piedmont Avenue; the sanctuary of Ocean Avenue Presbyterian Church at 32 Ocean Avenue, San Francisco (where Mission Bay Community Church also meets); and the large Berkeley City Club adjacent to University of California. She designed the World War I YWCA Hostess House in Palo Alto, built in 1918 and later to become the site of the MacArthur Park Restaurant

Some of her residential projects, most of them located in the San Francisco Bay Area, are ultimate bungalows. The style is often associated with the work of Greene and Greene and some of Morgan's other contemporaries and teachers. The buildings represent the Arts and Crafts Movement and the American Craftsman style of architecture. Several houses are on San Francisco's Russian Hill. She lived further west in SF.[citation needed ] One of Morgan's first residential project was to remodel and complete Phoebe Hearst's Hacienda del Pozo de Verona in Pleasanton, California, in Mediterranean and California Mission style. In 1908, Julia Morgan designed the residence of James Henry Pierce at 1650 The Alameda in San Jose, which features rare California timber.

Although Morgan was highly respected as an architect, not much is known about her personal life. She was never married and had no known romances. She kept a low profile and lived modestly, in spite of her wealthy clientele. Colleagues and acquaintances were surprised by her modest sense of fashion, a coworker even went as far as saying that Morgan dressed like a "nobody." Morgan gave few interviews and did not write about herself. Early interviews used gendered rhetoric to speak about her accomplishments and early newspaper articles followed her progress at the École des Beaux Arts. After that she mostly avoided interviews and only agreed to articles that focused on her work to advance her reputation. She worked tirelessly on minimal sleep and food.

She was very independent. During her transition to Paris she had a set of money given to her by her parents for all of her first-year expenses. Even when her funds ran out, she never asked her family for any extra money, but instead learned to live on a tight budget. This experience gave her a concrete understanding of how to handle money efficiently, which helped make her a successful businesswoman after she opened her own practice, and helped her to focus on keeping her projects within her client's budgets.

One of the few public awards she accepted was the University of California, Berkeley, honorary Doctor of Laws degree, its highest award, conferred upon her on May 15, 1929, with the following personal tribute: "distinguished alumna of the University of California, artist and engineer; designer of simple dwellings and of stately homes, of great buildings nobly planned to further the centralized activities of her fellow citizens; architect in whose works harmony and admirable proportions bring pleasure to the eye and peace to the mind."

Intrigued with the gaps in Julia Morgan's life story, Belinda Taylor, wrote Becoming Julia Morgan, a 2012 play in which Taylor imagines a plausible life story for Morgan.

My buildings will be my legacy... they will speak for me long after I'm gone.

Julia Morgan is buried in the Mountain View Cemetery in the hills of Oakland, California.

In 1995, the Julia Morgan Ballroom at the Merchants Exchange Building in San Francisco, where she had her office from 1907 to 1950, was named in her honor.

In 1999, a Mediterranean Revival residence originally built in 1918 for Charles Goethe of Sacramento was renamed the Julia Morgan House. It was earlier added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

In 2006, a children's picture book titled Julia Morgan Built a Castle was published and is available in many public libraries.

On May 28, 2008, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver announced that Julia Morgan would be inducted into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts. The induction ceremony took place on December 15 and her great-niece accepted the honor in her place.

Julia Morgan was the 2014 recipient (posthumous) of the AIA Gold Medal, the highest award of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). She is the first female architect to receive this honor.

Boutelle, Sara Holmes (1988). Julia Morgan, Architect New York: Abbeville Press.[ISBN missing ]

Harris, Gloria G.; Cohen, Hannah S. (2012). "Chapter 9. Architets". Women Trailblazers of California: Pioneers to the Present. Charleston, SC: The History Press. pp. 136-50 [137-40]. ISBN 978-1609496753.

Kastner, Victoria (2022). Julia Morgan: An Intimate Biography of the Trailblazing Architect. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. ISBN 978-1797205632.

Lewis, Anna M. (2014). Women of Steel and Stone: 22 Inspirational Architects, Engineers, and Landscape Designers. Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press. p. 88. ISBN 978-1-61374-511-3.

Morgan, J. (1976). Architectural drawings by Julia Morgan: beau-arts assignments and other buildings. Oakland, Calif: Oakland Museum, Art Dept.

Morgan, J., Hearst, W. R., & Loe, N. E. (1987). San Simeon revisited: the correspondence between architect Julia Morgan and William Randolph Hearst. San Luis Obispo, Calif: Library Associates, California Polytechnic State University.

Morgan, J. (1987). Berkeley houses by Julia Morgan. Berkeley, California: The Association.

Perry, Phillis J. (2018). All About Julia Morgan. Indianapolis, Indiana, Blue River Press ISBN 978-1681570952.

Wilson, Mark A. (2007). Julia Morgan: Architect of Beauty. Salt Lake City, Utah: Gibbs Smith.

Kastner, Victoria. (2003). "Morgan and Associates: Julia Morgan's Office Practice as Design Metaphor." 20 on 20/20 Vision. Boston: AIA Diversity Committee/Boston Society of Architects, pp. 44-51.

Longstreth, R. W. (1977). Julia Morgan, architect. Berkeley Architectural Heritage publication series, no. 1. Berkeley, California: Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association.

McNeill, Karen (May 2007) "Julia Morgan: Gender, Architecture, and Professional Style." Pacific Historical Review, pp. 229-67.

McNeill, Karen (Summer 2012) "'Women Who Build: Julia Morgan & Women's Institutions." California History, pp. 41-74.

Pasadena Cultural Heritage Commission. (1988). Report on reuse of the Julia Morgan YWCA building: YWCA & YMCA Pasadena, California. New York: Halsband.

Quacchia, R. L. (2005). Julia Morgan, architect, and the creation of the Asilomar Conference Grounds: including a comparison with Hearst Castle. Virginia Beach, Virginia: Q Pub.

Steilberg, W. T., & Morgan, J. (1983). Some examples of the work of Julia Morgan. San Francisco: Architect and Engineer of California.

University of California, Berkeley. (1986). Julia Morgan, architectural drawings: inventory of holdings, College of Environmental Design. Berkeley: The College.

Hawthorne, Christopher. "Julia Morgan: Her Quietly Revolutionary Architecture -- a Blend of Beaux-Arts and Bay Area Influences -- Is Finally Earning Its Due." Architect (Washington, D.C.) 103, no. 6 (June 1, 2014): 170-79.

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Julia Morgan (January 20, 1872 - February 2, 1957) was an American architect and engineer. She designed more than 700 buildings in California during a long and prolific career. She is best known for her work on Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California.

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The term "Jim Crow" originates from a show character and becomes synonymous with the state and local laws enforcing racial segregation in the Southern United States. The Jim Crow era came to an end in 1965, largely due to the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

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Black Codes

The roots of Jim Crow laws began as early as 1865, immediately following the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States.

Black codes were strict local and state laws that detailed when, where and how formerly enslaved people could work, and for how much compensation. The codes appeared throughout the South as a legal way to put Black citizens into indentured servitude, to take voting rights away, to control where they lived and how they traveled and to seize children for labor purposes.

The legal system was stacked against Black citizens, with former Confederate soldiers working as police and judges, making it difficult for African Americans to win court cases and ensuring they were subject to Black codes.

These codes worked in conjunction with labor camps for the incarcerated, where prisoners were treated as enslaved people. Black offenders typically received longer sentences than their white equals, and because of the grueling work, often did not live out their entire sentence.

Ku Klux Klan

During the Reconstruction era, local governments, as well as the national Democratic Party and President Andrew Johnson, thwarted efforts to help Black Americans move forward.

Violence was on the rise, making danger a regular aspect of African American life. Black schools were vandalized and destroyed, and bands of violent white people attacked, tortured and lynched Black citizens in the night. Families were attacked and forced off their land all across the South.

The most ruthless organization of the Jim Crow era, the Ku Klux Klan, was born in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, as a private club for Confederate veterans.

The KKK grew into a secret society terrorizing Black communities and seeping through white Southern culture, with members at the highest levels of government and in the lowest echelons of criminal back alleys.

Jim Crow Laws Expand

At the start of the 1880s, big cities in the South were not wholly beholden to Jim Crow laws and Black Americans found more freedom in them.

This led to substantial Black populations moving to the cities and, as the decade progressed, white city dwellers demanded more laws to limit opportunities for African Americans.

Jim Crow laws soon spread around the country with even more force than previously. Public parks were forbidden for African Americans to enter, and theaters and restaurants were segregated.

Segregated waiting rooms in bus and train stations were required, as well as water fountains, restrooms, building entrances, elevators, cemeteries, even amusement-park cashier windows.

Laws forbade African Americans from living in white neighborhoods. Segregation was enforced for public pools, phone booths, hospitals, asylums, jails and residential homes for the elderly and handicapped.

Some states required separate textbooks for Black and white students. New Orleans mandated the segregation of prostitutes according to race. In Atlanta, African Americans in court were given a different Bible from white people to swear on. Marriage and cohabitation between white and Black people was strictly forbidden in most Southern states.

It was not uncommon to see signs posted at town and city limits warning African Americans that they were not welcome there.

Ida B. Wells

As oppressive as the Jim Crow era was, it was also a time when many African Americans around the country stepped forward into leadership roles to vigorously oppose the laws.

Memphis teacher Ida B. Wells became a prominent activist against Jim Crow laws after refusing to leave a first-class train car designated for white people only. A conductor forcibly removed her and she successfully sued the railroad, though that decision was later reversed by a higher court.

Angry at the injustice, Wells devoted herself to fighting Jim Crow laws. Her vehicle for dissent was newspaper writing: In 1889 she became co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight and used her position to take on school segregation and sexual harassment.

Wells traveled throughout the South to publicize her work and advocated for the arming of Black citizens. Wells also investigated lynchings and wrote about her findings.

A mob destroyed her newspaper and threatened her with death, forcing her to move to the North, where she continued her efforts against Jim Crow laws and lynching.

Charlotte Hawkins Brown

Charlotte Hawkins Brown was a North Carolina-born, Massachusetts-raised Black woman who returned to her birthplace at the age of 17, in 1901, to work as a teacher for the American Missionary Association.

After funding was withdrawn for that school, Brown began fundraising to start her own school, named the Palmer Memorial Institute.

Brown became the first Black woman to create a Black school in North Carolina and through her education work became a fierce and vocal opponent of Jim Crow laws.

Isaiah Montgomery

Not everyone battled for equal rights within white society-some chose a separatist approach.

Convinced by Jim Crow laws that Black and white people could not live peaceably together, formerly enslaved Isaiah Montgomery created the African American-only town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, in 1887.

Montgomery recruited other former enslaved people to settle in the wilderness with him, clearing the land and forging a settlement that included several schools, an Andrew Carnegie-funded library, a hospital, three cotton gins, a bank and a sawmill. Mound Bayou still exists today, and is still almost 100 percent Black.

Jim Crow Laws in the 20th Century

As the 20th century progressed, Jim Crow laws flourished within an oppressive society marked by violence.

Following World War I, the NAACP noted that lynchings had become so prevalent that it sent investigator Walter White to the South. White had lighter skin and could infiltrate white hate groups.

As lynchings increased, so did race riots, with at least 25 across the United States over several months in 1919, a period sometimes referred to as " Red Summer." In retaliation, white authorities charged Black communities with conspiring to conquer white America.

With Jim Crow dominating the landscape, education increasingly under attack and few opportunities for Black college graduates, the Great Migration of the 1920s saw a significant migration of educated Black people out of the South, spurred on by publications like The Chicago Defender, which encouraged Black Americans to move north.

Read by millions of Southern Black people, white people attempted to ban the newspaper and threatened violence against any caught reading or distributing it.

The poverty of the Great Depression only deepened resentment, with a rise in lynchings, and after World War II, even Black veterans returning home met with segregation and violence.

Jim Crow in the North

The North was not immune to Jim Crow-like laws. Some states required Black people to own property before they could vote, schools and neighborhoods were segregated, and businesses displayed "Whites Only" signs.

In Ohio, segregationist Allen Granbery Thurman ran for governor in 1867 promising to bar Black citizens from voting. After he narrowly lost that political race, Thurman was appointed to the U.S. Senate, where he fought to dissolve Reconstruction-era reforms benefiting African Americans.

After World War II, suburban developments in the North and South were created with legal covenants that did not allow Black families, and Black people often found it difficult or impossible to obtain mortgages for homes in certain "red-lined" neighborhoods.

When Did Jim Crow Laws End?

The post-World War II era saw an increase in civil rights activities in the African American community, with a focus on ensuring that Black citizens were able to vote. This ushered in the civil rights movement, resulting in the removal of Jim Crow laws.

In 1948 President Harry Truman ordered integration in the military, and in 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that educational segregation was unconstitutional, bringing to an end the era of "separate-but-equal" education.

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which legally ended the segregation that had been institutionalized by Jim Crow laws.

And in 1965, the Voting Rights Act halted efforts to keep minorities from voting. The Fair Housing Act of 1968, which ended discrimination in renting and selling homes, followed.

Jim Crow laws were technically off the books, though that has not always guaranteed full integration or adherence to anti-racism laws throughout the United States. Several recent pieces of legislation-such as House Bill 1020 in Mississippi, which aimed to disenfranchise the majority-Black capital city of Jackson by creating a new judicial district overseen by white leaders-are often compared to Jim Crow laws.

Sources

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. Richard Wormser.
Segregated America. Smithsonian Institute.
Jim Crow Laws. National Park Service.
"Exploiting Black Labor After the Abolition of Slavery." The Conversation.
"Hundreds of black Americans were killed during 'Red Summer.' A century later, still ignored." Associated Press/USA Today.
"Here's What's Become Of A Historic All-Black Town In The Mississippi Delta." NPR.

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Jim Crow Laws: Definition, Facts & Timeline | HISTORY

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Jim Crow laws were state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation. Enacted after the Civil War, the laws denied equal opportunity to Black citizens.

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The Great Depression was a global economic downturn that saw unemployment rates skyrocket to 23% and global GDP dropping 15%. The economic slump is known for the failures of financial institutions but is better marked by the effectiveness of government intervention. Sweeping changes from government programs such as Roosevelt's "New Deal" and "Work Progress Administration" employed millions and signaled a change in the way the government interacted with the U.S. economy.

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The Great Depression (1929–1939) was an economic shock that affected most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States.[1] The economic contagion began around September 1929 and led to the Wall Street stock market crash of 24 October (Black Thursday). It was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century.[2]

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The Great Migration saw the mass movement of over 6 million African Americans from the South to the North and West due to racial tensions, living conditions, and job opportunities. An influx of African Americans in these more progressive states led to cultural movements that inspired the rise of African American artists, writers, and musicians who strived to redefine their identity and celebrate their culture.

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Black people who migrated during the second phase of the Great Migration were met with housing discrimination, as localities had started to implement restrictive covenants and redlining, which created segregated neighborhoods, but also served as a foundation for the existing racial disparities in wealth in the United States.

Records in this topic cover migratory information and trends captured by various branches and agencies of the government, including employment and housing. There are also records reflecting cultural and social aspects of the lives of those who participated and were impacted by the Great Migration.
Search the Catalog for Records relating to the Great Migration (1910-1970)
Resources

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Black people who migrated during the second phase of the Great Migration were met with housing discrimination, as localities had started to implement restrictive covenants and redlining, which created segregated neighborhoods, but also served as a foundation for the existing racial disparities in wealth in the United States.

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Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" (April, 1939)

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Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" (April, 1939)

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Billie Holiday's haunting song "Strange Fruit," which addresses the horrors of lynching, becomes a powerful protest against racism and oppression in America.

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" Strange Fruit" is a song performed most famously by Billie Holiday, who first sang and recorded it in 1939. Written by teacher Abel Meeropol as a poem and published in 1937, it protested American racism, particularly the lynching of African Americans.

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The zoot suit style was popular from the early 1940s to the early 1950s. It gained prominence in the United States during World War II amongst young Mexican youth who wore it as a sign of cultural pride and identity.

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It was June 1943 when the riots broke out. For over a week, white U.S. soldiers and sailors traversed Los Angeles beating up allegedly "unpatriotic" Mexican-American men, identifiable by their conspicuously voluminous attire. It was, as the historian Kathy Peiss writes in Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style, "perhaps the first time in American history that fashion was believed to be the cause of widespread civil unrest." Starting this month, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will feature an authentic example of one of these catalyzing ensembles as part of a new exhibition, " Reigning Men: Fashion in Menswear, 1715-2015."

With its super-sized shoulder pads, sprawling lapels and peg leg pants, the zoot suit grew out of the "drape" suits popular in Harlem dance halls in the mid-1930s. The flowing trousers were tapered at the ankles to prevent jitterbugging couples from getting tripped up while they twirled. By the '40s, the suits were worn by minority men in working-class neighborhoods throughout the country. Though the zoot suit would be donned by the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong, it was "not a costume or uniform from the world of entertainment," the Chicago big-band trumpeter and clothier Harold Fox once said. "It came right off the street and out of the ghetto.''

Fox was one among many, from Chicago to Harlem to Memphis, who took credit for inventing the zoot suit-the term came out of African-American slang-but it was actually unbranded and illicit: There was no one designer associated with the look, no department store where you could buy one. These were ad hoc outfits, regular suits bought two sizes too large and then creatively tailored to dandyish effect.

To some men, the suit's ostentatiousness was a way of refusing to be ignored. The garment had "profound political meaning," wrote Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man. "For those without other forms of cultural capital," says Peiss, "fashion can be a way of claiming space for yourself."

Wartime rations on fabric made wearing such oversized clothing an inherently disobedient act. Langston Hughes wrote in 1943 that for people with a history of cultural and economic poverty, "too much becomes JUST ENOUGH for them." To underscore the style's almost treasonous indulgence, press accounts exaggerated the price of zoot suits by upwards of 50 percent. But even the real cost of one was near-prohibitive for the young men who coveted them-Malcolm X, in his autobiography, recounts buying one on credit.

Though policemen slashed some zoot suits to ruins, the more likely reason for their disappearance once the craze faded in the 1950s was less dramatic-most were simply refashioned into other garments. Original specimens are mythically hard to come by: It took curators from LACMA over a decade to find one, and when they did, in 2011, it cost them nearly $80,000, an auction record for an item of 20th-century menswear.

But the suit had a luxuriant afterlife, influencing styles from Canada and France to the Soviet Union and South Africa. It was the subject of the Who's first single. In 1978, the actor and playwright Luis Valdez wrote , the first Chicano play on Broadway. The outfit's iconic shape was taken up in the '80s by Japanese avant-garde designers, who sent models down the runway in tumescent suiting around the time that MC Hammer put on his drop-crotch pants-causing outrage in the form of widespread hand-wringing over the alleged immorality of sagging pants, a style that has never quite gone out of fashion. By the time a record called " Zoot Suit Riot," by the swing-revival band the Cherry Poppin' Daddies, became a hit in the late-'90s, the suit's provenance had largely been forgotten. No longer was the zoot suit evocative of the expressive power of fashion for the disenfranchised so much as it was a historical oddity known by a charming name.

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Unraveling the jazzy life of a snazzy style

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The Zoot Suit Riots were a series of conflicts in Los Angeles between Mexican youths and U.S. servicemen. The servicemen, who were mostly white men ,targeted Mexican youth who wore zoot suits by stripping their suits and beating them.

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The economic recovery after WWII led to an explosion in consumerism. With mass production in full swing, design became more aesthetic and less about necessity.

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Although minorities initially had limited access to the consumer boom, they slowly gained buying power and influence. Growth in minority-targeted advertising and the rise of Black-owned media (e.g., Ebony magazine).

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Americans spent their money on cars, televisions and other modern appliance, Library of Congress

At the end of World War II, American soldiers returned home to a country quite different from the one they had left four years earlier. Wartime production had helped pull America's economy out of depression, and from the late 1940s on, young adults saw a remarkable rise in their spending power. Jobs were plentiful, wages were higher, and because of the lack of consumer goods during the war, Americans were eager to spend. During the same years, young couples were marrying and having children at unprecedented rates. New and expanded federal programs, including the G.I. Bill of Rights, allowed many young families to purchase their own homes, often located in rapidly expanding suburbs.

More, Newer, Better
After World War II, consumer spending no longer meant just satisfying an indulgent material desire. In fact, the American consumer was praised as a patriotic citizen in the 1950s, contributing to the ultimate success of the American way of life. "The good purchaser devoted to 'more, newer and better' was the good citizen," historian Lizabeth Cohen explained, "since economic recovery after a decade and a half of depression and war depended on a dynamic mass consumption economy."

Pragmatic Spending
Americans invested in items based around home and family life. At war's end, the items people most desired included televisions, cars, washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, and vacuum cleaners: the machines that would help them modernize their lives. Between 1945 and 1949, Americans purchased 20 million refrigerators, 21.4 million cars, and 5.5 million stoves, a trend that continued well into the 1950s. Historian Elaine Tyler May noted, "The values associated with domestic spending upheld traditional American concerns with pragmatism and morality, rather than opulence and luxury. Purchasing for the home helped alleviate traditional American uneasiness with consumption: the fear that spending would lead to decadence."

Cars and TVs
Television and automobile sales skyrocketed in the 1950s.

With the massive growth in suburban populations, automobiles were needed more than ever, and were within reach for many first-time buyers. Families of all income brackets were buying televisions at a rate of five million a year. Some TV shows, like The Goldbergs and The Honeymooners, catered to working- and middle-class viewers with storylines about ethnic families. In addition, television provided a potent medium for advertisers to reach inside American homes, creating desires for other products.

"The Good Life"
Historian Elained Tyler May believes that the federal government and the American people saw the new consumerism as a way to deemphasize class differences while stressing traditional gender roles. With the things that defined "the good life" within economic reach, working-class people could achieve the upward mobility they craved.

Selling in Order to Buy
In many ways, Tupperware reinforced the ideal of the efficient home and kitchen. After all, Tupperware was meant to help housewives maintain freshness and cleanliness in food storage and preparation. Tupperware also helped fulfill the postwar desire for consumer goods. When asked how she recruited new dealers to her Tupperware distributorship, Jean Conlogue noted, "We tried to fill a need for something that they wanted, like new carpet, or a new refrigerator, and then we would map out for them how many parties they would have to hold." The company further reinforced consumption with their promotions and prizes. As rewards for their high sales, Tupperware dealers were rewarded with top-of-the-line appliances, from washing machines to double boilers.

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The Rise of American Consumerism | American Experience | PBS

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Postwar consumerism was praised as a patriotic contribution to the ultimate success of the American way of life.

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Ended the separate but equal treatment of school children on the basis that race discrimination in public schools was illegal. This ruling allowed integration to begin - although it was slow.

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EnlargeDownload Link Citation: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Opinion; May 17, 1954; Records of the Supreme Court of the United States; Record Group 267; National Archives. View All Pages in the National Archives Catalog View Transcript In this milestone decision, the Supreme Court ruled that separating children in public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional. It signaled the end of legalized racial segregation in the schools of the United States, overruling the “separate but equal” principle set forth in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case. On May 17, 1954, U.S.

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Large public mural artworks from Chicano/and African American communities were used art as a powerful tool for political activism. From murals to poems, these artists expressed their anger and hopes.

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¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now

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In the 1960s, activist Chicano artists forged a remarkable history of printmaking that remains vital today. Many artists came of age during the civil rights, labor, anti-war, feminist and LGBTQ+ movements and channeled the period's social activism into assertive aesthetic statements that announced a new political and cultural consciousness among people of Mexican descent in the United States.

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Feminist Art Movement in the (1960s and 1970s)

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Feminist Art Movement in the (1960s and 1970s)

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During this period, feminist artists challenged traditional art forms and societal roles imposed on women, using art to critique patriarchy, sexism, and the exclusion of women from the art world. Artists like Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, through projects like Womanhouse (1972), focused on women's domestic roles and gendered spaces, blending art with activism.

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Womanhouse (January 30 - February 28, 1972) was a feminist art installation and performance space organized by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, co-founders of the California Institute of the Arts ( CalArts) Feminist Art Program and was the first public exhibition of Feminist Art. Chicago, Schapiro, their students and women artists from the local community, including Faith Wilding, participated. Chicago and Schapiro encouraged their students to use consciousness-raising techniques to generate the content of the exhibition. Together, the students and professors worked to build an environment where women's conventional social roles could be shown, exaggerated, and subverted.

Only women were allowed to view the exhibition on its first day, after which the exhibition was open to all viewers. During the exhibition's duration, it received approximately 10,000 visitors.

The Feminist Art Program began at the California Institute of the Arts in 1971 after an experimental year at Fresno State College under the name Women's Art Program. The students in the program were admitted as a group when Chicago and Schapiro were hired at Cal Arts after Chicago found that the Fresno State College Art department was reluctant to embrace her vision of a new kind of female centered art. It was their intention to teach without the use of authoritarian rules or a unilateral flow of power from teacher to student.

The Feminist Art Program, was slated to occupy a new building, but found itself without adequate space at the start of the school year in 1971. The lack of appropriate studio space paved the way for a collaborative group project set to highlight the ideological and symbolic conflation of women and houses. The end result of this project was the Womanhouse installation, built by the students in an abandoned Victorian house in Hollywood.

The program utilized a method of teaching that relied on group cooperation. Students would sit in a circle, and share their thoughts on a selected topic of discussion. The circular teaching method was intended to provide a "nourishing environment for growth" and to promote a "circular, more womb-like" atmosphere. The goal of these discussions was for each woman to reach a higher level of self-perception, to validate their experiences, as well as the "search for subject matter" to incorporate into artwork and to address their individual aesthetic needs. However, many students fostered resentments towards Chicago and Schapiro, claiming they were suffering from their own power trips. Chicago insisted her students feelings were the result of their own internalized sexism and unconscious manifestations of their difficulties dealing with female authority figures.

The project's goals, as professed by Schapiro and Chicago, were to help students overcome some problems of being a woman. These included "a general lack of assertiveness or ambition", an "unwillingness to push themselves beyond their limits", "lack of familiarity with tools and artmaking processes", and an "inability to see themselves as working people". It was thought that by teaching women to use power tools and proper building techniques, they would gain confidence and subsequently "restructure their personalities" to be consistent with their artistic goals. It was Schapiro and Chicago's belief that "society fails women by not demanding excellence from them."

These techniques were to result in an "exclusively female environment" that included a greater community of female artists. The goal of this community was to expose the students to "established" female artists not limited to Schapiro and Chicago.

Paula Harper, an art historian for the California Institute of Arts Feminist Art Program, is credited for suggesting the idea for Womanhouse. Schapiro supervised Womanhouse' s dramatic works, while Chicago focused on other media. Their intention was to transform a domestic environment into one that fully expressed the experiences of women.

"Womanhouse began in an old deserted mansion on a residential street in Hollywood and became an environment in which: "The age-old female activity of homemaking was taken to fantasy proportions. Womanhouse became the repository of the daydreams women have as they wash, bake, cook, sew, clean and iron their lives away." Before creating the art environments and pieces, the students had to do extensive reconstruction on the house which had been empty for many years. They have to fix broken windows and furnitures.

Construction/Process

The group broke into teams in order to find a suitable location for their "dreams and fantasies". They found a 17-room, 75-year-old dilapidated mansion at 533 N. Mariposa Ave. in a rundown section of Hollywood. Members of the group knocked on doors to find the owner of the house, who one neighbor remarked would "certainly not be interested in the project."

After a visit to the Hall of Records, they found the owner to be Amanda Psalter. The group described their intentions for the house in a letter to the Psalter family. In response, the house was granted through a special lease agreement First Feminist Art Program</ref> for the three-month duration of the project, after which it would be demolished. Construction spanned from November 1971 to January 1972.

The renovation included cleaning, painting, sanding floors, replacing windows, installing lights, and sanding, scraping, and wallpapering walls. New walls were built for practical and aesthetic reasons and women learned wallpapering techniques to refurbish one of the rooms. Eventually a crew was needed to paint the exterior of the house, install locks and advise the women on basic electrical wiring.

The women struggled as they began renovating the mansion during the winter, as the building did not have hot water, heat, or plumbing. Renovations included replacing 25 windows and replacing banisters that had been pulled out by vandals. They worked eight-hour days in a "manner they were unaccustomed to", soon coming to resent the intense, "impossible" demands, even coming to see their administrators as "monsters" and complaining that they would fail." To cope with the frustration of learning new techniques while meeting stringent deadlines, the group held meetings to deal with any problems that arouse and sessions to raise group consciousness. Some former students now see this tension as a result of Chicago's authoritarian presence, feeling that she imposed her own goals on the group.

Here are some perspectives from participators when they recall the struggles of Womanhouse after 25 years later.

Camille Grey : "Put 30 women together and see what happens. A nightmare."

Robin Mitchell: " It was simultaneously one of the best and worst experiences of my life."

Mira Schor: " I left the Program after one year, because of my disagreements, and because I wanted to experience the school outside the confines of the Program. I have avoided group feminism since then."

Nancy Youdelman: " Looking back 25 years later, I have mixed feeling about the Feminist Art Program - We had something really incredible and unique and somehow we could not get beyond personalities and create a lasting support system."

Chicago and Schapiro invited other local artists Sherry Brody, Carol Edison Mitchell and Wanda Westcoast to participate and to hang their work alongside that of the other women.

Among the artists and CalArts students that collaborated were:

Beth Bachenheimer (Shoe Closet, Dining Room)

Sherry Brody (Lingerie Pillows, The Dollhouse, Dining Room)

Judy Chicago (Menstruation Bathroom, Cock and Cunt Play)

Susan Frazier (Nurturant Kitchen/Aprons in Kitchen)

Camille Grey (Lipstick Bathroom)

Paula Harper (suggested project, Art Historian)

Vicky Hodgetts (Nurturant Kitchen/Eggs to Breasts)

Kathy Huberland (Bridal Staircase)

Judy Huddleston (Personal Environment)

Janice Johnson

Karen LeCocq (Leah's Room, Dining Room)

Janice Lester (Personal Space, Cock and Cunt Play)

Paula Longendyke (Garden Jungle)

Ann Mills (Leaf Room)

Carol Edison Mitchell (Quilts)

Robin Mitchell (Painted Room, Dining Room)

Sandra (Sandy) Orgel ("Ironing", Linen Closet)

Jan Oxenberg (Three Women)

Christine (Chris) Rush ("Scrubbing", Necco Wafers)

Marsha Salisbury

Miriam Schapiro (The Dollhouse, Dining Room)

Robin Schiff (Nightmare Bathroom)

Mira Schor (Red Moon Room)

Robin Weltsch (Nurturant Kitchen/Eggs to Breasts)

Wanda Westcoast (Curtains in Nurturant Kitchen)

Faith Wilding (Womb Room & Waiting, Cock and Cunt Play, Dining Room, Crocheted Environment)

Shawnee Wollenmann (The Nursery, Three Women)

Nancy Youdelman (Leah's Room, Three Women)

In the journal , Paula Harper says, "the young students did not have much personal experience of traditional marriage and homemaking roles of women. Nonetheless, the ideas of all were influenced by the general aim of feminists in the late 1960s to revise women's position in society by bringing attention to their oppression, and this ideology clearly shared by the many individuals involved gave Womanhouse its impact.

Working collaboratively on Womanhouse, the students gained new skills while developing a deeper understanding of human and personal experiences. The students also provided tours of the exhibition, which gave them the opportunity to articulate their artwork while maintaining their personal vision when faced with criticism. Even though the exhibition provided the students with great satisfaction and team effort some of the artists didn't feel any personal accomplishment, and were looking forward to going back to work on their individual projects.

The mansion contained a variety feminist installations, sculptures, performances and other forms of art. The artists creating Womanhouse did so, centralizing a white, cisgender, heterosexual and middle-class experience of womanhood in the early 70s. By transforming a "woman's space" (such as a kitchen) into a radical feminist art truly made a statement. Here they spoke out about women issues, as well as criticizing the patriarchy. This helped women artists and architects gain recognition and acknowledgement that their work could be seen on the same level as men. Using a mansion as their chosen setting furthered their statement.

Rooms/installations

Womanhouse displayed the conventions of women through artistic spaces and experiences. Rooms included a pink kitchen, a bride thrown against a wall, a closet with sheets, and a bathroom for menstruation.

Nurturant Kitchen - by Susan Frazier, Vicki Hodgetts, Robin Weltsch. Present in the kitchen are plates of food under a line of light bulbs, resembling it to a factory worker's assembly line. This highlights the dehumanizing aspects of a woman's role as nurturer.

Aprons in Kitchen - by Susan Frazier A display in Nurturant Kitchen. Aprons are fashioned with breasts and other female body parts. This allows the female to remove her bodily features when she is done with housework, implying that her physical body is inextricably linked to her societal role.

Eggs to Breasts - Forms cover the ceilings and walls, starting as eggs on the ceiling and gradually transforming into breasts as the pattern continues down. Underscores the woman's traditional role as a nurturer by combining images of the kitchen and of a woman's sagging breasts.

Dining Room - by Beth Bachenheimer, Sherry Brody, Karen LeCocq, Robin Mitchell, Miriam Schapiro, Faith Wilding. The Dining Room features a crown molding of lifelike painted fruit. A mural, based on a 19th-century still life by Anna Peale, is displayed on a wall behind the dining room table. The table itself features a bread dough sculpture, turkey, ham, pecan pie, vinyl salad bowl, vinyl wine glasses and a wine bottle. A chandelier hangs above the table. Below the table, a stenciled-rug is painted directly onto the floor. Dining Room is the most collaborative project in Womanhouse, utilizing the efforts of seven women to complete. It is meant to express a generous, bountiful and romantic aura.

Leah's Room - by Karen LeCocq, Nancy Youdelman. Lea, a character based on the aging courtesan from Colette's novel , sits in a watermelon pink bedroom. The performance (performed by LeCocq) occurred continuously on a daily basis, and involved Lea applying makeup meticulously, then removing it, in an endless cycle to illustrate the pain of aging and the desperate process of trying to restore one's beauty. The performance illustrates the high standards of beauty levied by the pressure of society for women to maintain at all cost. Lea makes continual efforts to keep the attention of a man as her beauty deteriorates with age.

Menstruation Bathroom - by Judy Chicago. The bathroom is painted a stark white, and a layer of gauze covers the shelves. A single trashcan is overflowing with what appear to be used tampons, a woman's "hidden secret" that cannot be covered up.

The Dollhouse Room - by Sherry Brody, Miriam Schapiro. According to Schapiro, The Dollhouse Room juxtaposes themes of "supposed safety and comfort in the home" with "terrors existing within its walls".

The Dollhouse - The Dollhouse serves as the centerpiece of The Dollhouse Room. It is a six-room miniature house. The artist's studio room contains a miniature nude man atop a pedestal, with an erect penis and bananas at his feet. Downstairs, a miniature woman sits at her dressing table. There are many monsters present in the dollhouse, despite its familiar domestic aspects. To the left of the artist's studio is a nursery with a baby replaced by a monster. Outside the window, peering in, is a grizzly bear. Downstairs, a group of ten men stare in through the kitchen window. A rattlesnake is curled on the parlor floor. The Dollhouse was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in 1995 and is the only publicly available piece of Womanhouse.

Lingerie Pillows - Created by Sherry Brody, the pillows were sewn from underwear and bras and displayed on a small tabletop. Miriam Schapiro related a story that the curator of LACMA came to have a tour of Womanhouse. In the Dollhouse Room, he picked up one of the pillows and when he realized that he was holding, he was embarrassed. Schapiro recalled that everyone in the room had laughed, but upon reflection she wished that she had questioned his aversion to something delicate, intimate, and feminine.

Workshops led by Judy Chicago were held in the Living Room of the house. Ideas for pieces were derived from "informal working sessions", in which the women acted out aspects of their lives.

Three Women - Three 'types' of women are represented; the hustler, the hippie, and the mother. They wear exaggerated makeup are initially meant to be comical. They tell the stories, all 'trapped' in some aspect of being a woman.

Maintenance Pieces: Scrubbing, Performed by Christine Rush and Ironing, Performed by Sandra Orgel - Two performance pieces pertaining to maintenance. A woman scrubs the floor on all fours with a brush in a continuous, repetitive motion. Another woman irons identical sheets over and over. This isolated monotonous tasks for an audience to highlight their performative nature, and how these performances play a role in the construction of gender roles.

Cock and Cunt play - Written by Judy Chicago, performed by Janice Lester and Faith Wilding. Two characters wearing costumes featuring comically large genitalia converse as "She" and "He", each acting out the roles of their designated sex. "He" argues that her lack of a penis justifies having to do the dishes. This is meant to show how exaggerated essentialist notions about the female body contribute to her role in the domestic sphere and to reveal the consequences of stereotyping.

The Birth Trilogy - In the first section, a group of women stands in a line as they symbolically 'give birth' to one another. The 'babies' in this scenario lay on the ground until their 'mothers' come to hold and nurture them. In the end, all of the women gather in a circle as they chant and sing with heads bowed. The chant grows louder with time, ending in a "peak of ecstatic sound".

Womanhouse was the first feminist art project to receive attention on a national scale following its review by Time (magazine). Womanhouse exhibition served as an introduction of feminism to the general public a revolutionary act for the early 1970s, and it sparked lots of debates. One year after Womanhouse closed, in an article published by Ms. Magazine: "Many women artists have organized, are shedding their shackles, proudly untying the apron strings--and, in some cases, keeping the apron on, flaunting it, turning it into art."

A 1972 review in the Los Angeles Times by William Wilson described Womanhouse as a "lair of female creativity" that "reminds us that the female is our only direct link with the forces of nature". Though he remarks that "man's greatest creative acts may be but envious shadowings of her fecundity", this review may have also highlighted stereotypical patriarchal attitudes surrounding connections between women's bodies, the domestic, and nature that Womanhouse attempted to critique. Paula Harper argued that such language is an attempt by critics to soften the impact of Womanhouse by assimilating it according to conventions of femininity.

Some individuals strongly opposed this exhibition. Some critics claimed that radical feminist art projects such as Womanhouse "undermined aesthetic standards" in the 1970s. Others claimed that it was more therapy than art. Paula Harper challenged this critique, arguing that challenging the definition of art is a "function of the avant-garde".

Lack of scholarly attention paid to Womanhouse is attributed to its very early production in the context of feminist art, its lack of controversiality in relation to other installations of the time (most notably Chicago's own The Dinner Party), and some accusations of essentialism. However, it is also argued that the piece illustrates, complicates and subverts a "false binary" of essential and constructed identity which enhances its value and relevancy.

Artists, artworks, and institutions have been inspired by Womanhouse. The Womanhouse exhibition cannot be rebuilt, but a few of the rooms have been recreated for special exhibitions. In 1995, for example, the Bronx Museum of the Arts exhibited The Dollhouse by Sherry Brody and Miriam Schapiro, along with Faith Wilding's Womb Room, a recreation of Judy Chicago's Menstruation Bathroom, and Beth Bachenheimer's Shoe Closet, among others."

The feminist spirit of Womanhouse lives on through the website Womenhouse, which was inspired by the groundbreaking 1972 exhibition. Faith Wilding is among the participants in this collaborative site featuring virtual rooms and domestic spaces. Womenhouse catapults the issues raised by the original exhibition into the 21st century, within "a cyber-politics that addresses the multivalent vicissitudes of identity formation and domesticity."

Womanhouse was produced by Johanna Demetrakas. Miriam Schapiro arranged for a 47-minute documentary film to be made about the project and released in the summer of 1972. The project was produced by Johanna Demetrakas under the auspices of the American Film Society and is a part of Women Make Movies and was released in 1974. Demetrakas was said to be "impressed" and "inspired" by the project. Its European distribution is assured by le peuple qui manque.

Womanhouse is Not a Home was a film produced by Lynne Littman and directed by Parke Perine. It aired during February 1972 on the local KCET PBS channel. The film showed the installations, had the women artists speak about their work, and featured a consciousness raising session with Gloria Steinem.

Woman's House was an experimental film by Mako Idemitsu. It is a 13-minute film that provides close up details of various installations.

Balducci, Temma. 2006. "Revisiting 'Womanhouse': Welcome to the (deconstructed) "Dollhouse"." Woman's Art Journal 27, no. 2: 17-23.

Chicago, Judy. 1972. "Menstruation Bathroom." Art Journal 31, no. 3: 269.

Chicago, Judy and Miriam Schapiro. 1971. "Feminist Art Program." Art Journal 31, no. 1: 48.

Harper, Paula, The First Feminist Art Program: A View from the 1980s, Signs, vol. 10, no. 4, summer, 1985, pp. 762-781.

Lippard, Lucy. 1993. "In the Flesh: Looking Back and Talking Back." Women's Art Magazine no. 54: 4-9.

Raven, Arlene, "Womanhouse," The Power of Feminist Art, London: Thames and Hudson, 1994, pp. 161-172.

Schapiro, Miriam, The Education of Women as Artists: Project Womanhouse, Art Journal, vol. 31, no.3, Spring, 1972, pp. 268-270.

Sider, Sandra. "Womanhouse: Cradle of Feminist Art". Art Spaces Archive Project. 2010 August 5. http://www.as-ap.org/content/womanhouse-cradle-feminist-art-sandra-sider-0.

Wilding, Faith. "Womanhouse". Womanhouse. 2014 October 4. http://womanhouse.refugia.net/.

Ulrike Muller, Re:Tracing the Feminist Art Program, 1997. http://www.encore.at/retracing/index2.html

Lucy Lippard, "Household Images in Art," Ms. 1 (no. 9, March 1973), p. 22.

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Womanhouse (January 30 - February 28, 1972) was a feminist art installation and performance space organized by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, co-founders of the California Institute of the Arts ( CalArts) Feminist Art Program and was the first public exhibition of Feminist Art.

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Womanism and Feminist Art in the (1960s and 1970s)

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Womanism and Feminist Art in the (1960s and 1970s)

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Womanism, coined by Alice Walker, sought to bring attention to the experiences of Black women, expanding the feminist discourse to include race and class.

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By Stephanie Younger *
This article was re-published on Afroféminas Magazine on March 9, 2021 *
1. "From womanish. (Opp. of "girlish," i.e. frivolous, irresponsible, not serious.) A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mothers to female children, "you acting womanish," i.e., like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered "good" for one. Interested in grown up doings. Acting grown up. Being grown up. Interchangeable with another black folk expression: "You trying to be grown." Responsible. In charge. Serious."
In 1983, Alice Walker, a Black feminist, poet, author and activist coined the term "womanist" in her book, "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Womanist Prose." Womanism offers a space for Black feminists who have been erased from our own labor for the mainstream feminist movement, which often centers white, cis women who are seeking to be equal to white, cis men. Being "outrageous, audacious and willful" and "responsible" embodies Black feminists who are reclaiming our power from folks who silence us by telling us to choose between fighting for intersectional Black liberation, or fighting for white cis women to be equal to white cis men. Having a desire to learn from each other people fights for our liberation in a way that doesn't reflect systems what we are liberating ourselves from white supremacy and every issue that goes hand-in-hand with it, such as elitism, capitalism, and imperialism.
2." Also: A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women's culture, women's emotional flexibility (values tears as natural counterbalance of laughter), and women's strength. Sometimes loves individual men, sexually and/or nonsexually. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a separatist, except periodically, for health. Traditionally a universalist, as in: "Mama, why are we brown, pink, and yellow, and our cousins are white, beige and black?" Ans. "Well, you know the colored race is just like a flower garden, with every color flower represented." Traditionally capable, as in: "Mama, I'm walking to Canada and I'm taking you and a bunch of other slaves with me." Reply: "It wouldn't be the first time." "
Walker's focus on Black feminists, feminists of color, and "women who love other women, sexually and/or nonsexually," and being "committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people" is to understand that the fight for Black liberation cannot exist without centering all Black life expresses, and that Black liberation cannot exist without liberating Black queer women and Black trans women. To pick and choose which Black lives are worthy of being liberated, is to reflect what we are liberating ourselves from in the first place. As for Black women who are cis, light-skinned, and middle-class, etc., we must constantly check ourselves for how we perpetuate violent systems such as cissexism, colorism, classism, elitism, and ableism. The fight for Black lives centers the narratives and is being led by of Black women, Black queer people, Black trans people, and Black nonbinary people, but it's often believed to center Black cis men. Walker's analogy between the Black race and a flower garden is an expression that Black people do not have monolithic or single-issue experiences, but that we are multifaceted.
3. "Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless." 4. "Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender."
Like purple and lavender, feminism and womanism are similar, but they are not interchangeable. Walker specifically centers and promotes Black joy in a world that glorifies the idea of Black people being "strong" at the expense of vulnerability. Alice Walker's emphasis on Black joy is especially significant in a world where our oppressors think Black people owe them "education" and "resources" on how to not oppress us. Black folks deserve better than being tone policed and gaslighted when we remind our oppressors that we are not their self-improvement space. We deserve better than nonprofits that tokenize us and exploit our labor in the name of "amplifying Black voices." Black women, Black queer people and Black trans people deserve better than being given the empty support of being called "strong" for having to bite our tongues about the pain and trauma that comes from living in a world that hates us.

During the pandemic, and the current uprisings in defense of Black life, I not only learned that Black liberation isn't about looking to anti-Black systems, such as the police state and the carceral state to hold itself accountable. Black liberation is not, and has not been about looking to "allies," nor is it asking white nonprofits to stop erasing Black people from our labor. The thing that I've personally learned from Alice Walker's definition of womanism was to protect my peace, by divesting from the nonprofit industrial complex, and saying "no" to co-optation of Black liberationist spaces, and focus on building community by centering the liberation of all Black life. In a world where Black people are devalued and erased from our own work by spaces that claim to do the opposite, it's important that we root ourselves in creating our own spaces that center the liberation of all Black lives.

Stephanie Younger is an 18-year-old based in Richmond, Virginia, whose work centers the intersections Black feminism and womanism have with prison and police abolition. In 2017, she created Black Feminist Collective.

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What Alice Walker's Definition of Womanism Taught Me in 2020

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Eze Amos/Getty Images By Stephanie Younger * This article was re-published on Afroféminas Magazine on March 9, 2021 * 1. "From womanish. (Opp. of "girlish," i.e. frivolous, irresponsible, not serious.) A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mothers to female children, "you acting womanish," i.e., like a woman.

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Environmental Activism (1960s - present day)

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Environmental Activism (1960s - present day)

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The rise of factories and large-scale operations led to increased pollution, deforestation, and a general degradation of the natural landscape. This led concerned citizens to push back against unchecked industrial growth.

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I. Origins of the Environmental Movement · Exhibit · Give Earth a Chance: Environmental Activism in Michigan

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Michael Heizer's Art in the Environment (1960s to present day)

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Michael Heizer's Art in the Environment (1960s to present day)

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Heizer was a major figure in environmental art starting in the late 1960s. He thought art had to be radical and reflect American landscapes. He created massive land structures and sculpted the environment itself.

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A struggle for social justice and equality for African Americans, leading to significant legislative changes like the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Prominent figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Malcolm X emerged as leaders

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American civil rights movement, mass protest movement against racial segregation and discrimination in the southern United States that came to national prominence during the mid-1950s. This movement had its roots in the centuries-long efforts of enslaved Africans and their descendants to resist racial oppression and abolish the institution of slavery. Although enslaved people were emancipated as a result of the American Civil War and were then granted basic civil rights through the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, struggles to secure federal protection of these rights continued during the next century. Through nonviolent protest, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s broke the pattern of public facilities' being segregated by "race" in the South and achieved the most important breakthrough in equal-rights legislation for African Americans since the Reconstruction period (1865-77). Although the passage in 1964 and 1965 of major civil rights legislation was victorious for the movement, by then militant Black activists had begun to see their struggle as a freedom or liberation movement not just seeking civil rights reforms but instead confronting the enduring economic, political, and cultural consequences of past racial oppression.
(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Britannica essay on "Monuments of Hope.")

Abolitionism to Jim Crow

American history has been marked by persistent and determined efforts to expand the scope and inclusiveness of civil rights. Although equal rights for all were affirmed in the founding documents of the United States, many of the new country's inhabitants were denied essential rights. Enslaved Africans and indentured servants did not have the inalienable right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" that British colonists asserted to justify their Declaration of Independence. Nor were they included among the "People of the United States" who established the Constitution in order to "promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." Instead, the Constitution protected slavery by allowing the importation of enslaved persons until 1808 and providing for the return of enslaved people who had escaped to other states.

As the United States expanded its boundaries, Native American peoples resisted conquest and absorption. Individual states, which determined most of the rights of American citizens, generally limited voting rights to white property-owning males, and other rights-such as the right to own land or serve on juries-were often denied on the basis of racial or gender distinctions. A small proportion of Black Americans lived outside the slave system, but those so-called "free Blacks" endured racial discrimination and enforced segregation. Although some enslaved persons violently rebelled against their enslavement ( see slave rebellions), African Americans and other subordinated groups mainly used nonviolent means-protests, legal challenges, pleas and petitions addressed to government officials, as well as sustained and massive civil rights movements-to achieve gradual improvements in their status.

During the first half of the 19th century, movements to extend voting rights to non-property-owning white male labourers resulted in the elimination of most property qualifications for voting, but this expansion of suffrage was accompanied by brutal suppression of American Indians and increasing restrictions on free Blacks. Owners of enslaved people in the South reacted to the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia by passing laws to discourage antislavery activism and prevent the teaching of enslaved people to read and write. Despite this repression, a growing number of Black Americans freed themselves from slavery by escaping or negotiating agreements to purchase their freedom through wage labour. By the 1830s, free Black communities in the Northern states had become sufficiently large and organized to hold regular national conventions, where Black leaders gathered to discuss alternative strategies of racial advancement. In 1833 a small minority of whites joined with Black antislavery activists to form the American Anti-Slavery Society under the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison.

Frederick Douglass became the most famous of the formerly enslaved persons who joined the abolition movement. His autobiography-one of many slave narratives-and his stirring orations heightened public awareness of the horrors of slavery. Although Black leaders became increasingly militant in their attacks against slavery and other forms of racial oppression, their efforts to secure equal rights received a major setback in 1857, when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected African American citizenship claims. The Dred Scott decision stated that the country's founders had viewed Blacks as so inferior that they had "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." This ruling-by declaring unconstitutional the Missouri Compromise (1820), through which Congress had limited the expansion of slavery into western territories-ironically strengthened the antislavery movement, because it angered many whites who did not hold enslaved people. The inability of the country's political leaders to resolve that dispute fueled the successful presidential campaign of Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the antislavery Republican Party. Lincoln's victory in turn prompted the Southern slave states to secede and form the Confederate States of America in 1860-61.

Although Lincoln did not initially seek to abolish slavery, his determination to punish the rebellious states and his increasing reliance on Black soldiers in the Union army prompted him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) to deprive the Confederacy of its enslaved property. After the American Civil War ended, Republican leaders cemented the Union victory by gaining the ratification of constitutional amendments to abolish slavery ( Thirteenth Amendment) and to protect the legal equality of formerly enslaved persons ( Fourteenth Amendment) and the voting rights of male ex-slaves ( Fifteenth Amendment). Despite those constitutional guarantees of rights, almost a century of civil rights agitation and litigation would be required to bring about consistent federal enforcement of those rights in the former Confederate states. Moreover, after federal military forces were removed from the South at the end of Reconstruction, white leaders in the region enacted new laws to strengthen the " Jim Crow" system of racial segregation and discrimination. In its Plessy v. Ferguson decision (1896), the Supreme Court ruled that " separate but equal" facilities for African Americans did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, ignoring evidence that the facilities for Blacks were inferior to those intended for whites.

The Southern system of white supremacy was accompanied by the expansion of European and American imperial control over nonwhite people in Africa and Asia as well as in island countries of the Pacific and Caribbean regions. Like African Americans, most nonwhite people throughout the world were colonized or economically exploited and denied basic rights, such as the right to vote. With few exceptions, women of all races everywhere were also denied suffrage rights ( see woman suffrage).

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American civil rights movement | Definition, Protests, Activists, & Facts

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American civil rights movement, mass protest against racial segregation and discrimination in the southern U.S. that came to national prominence during the mid-1950s. Its roots were in the centuries-long efforts of enslaved Africans and their descendants to abolish slavery and resist racial oppression.

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Joy Harjo, a Muscogee poet, uses storytelling to preserve cultural heritage and confront historical injustices.

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Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She earned her BA from the University of New Mexico and MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Harjo draws on First Nation storytelling and histories, as well as feminist and social justice poetic traditions, and frequently incorporates indigenous myths, symbols, and values into her writing. Her poetry inhabits landscapes-the Southwest, Southeast, but also Alaska and Hawaii-and centers around the need for remembrance and transcendence. She once commented, "I feel strongly that I have a responsibility to all the sources that I am: to all past and future ancestors, to my home country, to all places that I touch down on and that are myself, to all voices, all women, all of my tribe, all people, all earth, and beyond that to all beginnings and endings. In a strange kind of sense [writing] frees me to believe in myself, to be able to speak, to have voice, because I have to; it is my survival." Her work is often autobiographical, informed by the natural world, and above all preoccupied with survival and the limitations of language. She was named U.S. poet laureate in June 2019.

A critically-acclaimed poet, Harjo's many honors include the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, the Josephine Miles Poetry Award, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award. She has received fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rasmuson Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation. In 2017 she was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize in Poetry.

In addition to writing poetry, Harjo is a noted teacher, saxophonist, and vocalist. She performed for many years with her band, Poetic Justice, and currently tours with Arrow Dynamics. She has released four albums of original music, including Red Dreams, A Trail Beyond Tears (2010), and won a Native American Music Award for Best Female Artist of the Year in 2009. She has been performing her one-woman show, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, since 2009 and is currently at work on a musical play, We Were There When Jazz Was Invented. She has taught creative writing at the University of New Mexico and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana and is currently Professor and Chair of Excellence in Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Harjo is a founding board member of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation.

Harjo's first volume of poetry was published in 1975 as a nine-poem chapbook titled The Last Song. These early compositions, set in Oklahoma and New Mexico, reveal Harjo's remarkable power and insight into the fragmented history of indigenous peoples. Commenting on the poem "3 AM" in World Literature Today, John Scarry wrote that it "is a work filled with ghosts from the Native American past, figures seen operating in an alien culture that is itself a victim of fragmentation...Here the Albuquerque airport is both modern America's technology and moral nature-and both clearly have failed." What Moon Drove Me to This? (1980), Harjo's first full-length volume of poetry, appeared four years later and includes the entirety of The Last Song. The book continues to blend everyday experiences with deep spiritual truths. In an interview with Laura Coltelli in Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak, Harjo shared the creative process behind her poetry: "I begin with the seed of an emotion, a place, and then move from there... I no longer see the poem as an ending point, perhaps more the end of a journey, an often long journey that can begin years earlier, say with the blur of the memory of the sun on someone's cheek, a certain smell, an ache, and will culminate years later in a poem, sifted through a point, a lake in my heart through which language must come."

Harjo's collections of poetry and prose record that search for freedom and self-actualization. In books such as She Had Some Horses (1983; reissued 2008), Harjo incorporates prayer-chants and animal imagery, achieving spiritually resonant effects. One of Harjo's most frequently anthologized poems, " She Had Some Horses," describes the "horses" within a woman who struggles to reconcile contradictory personal feelings and experiences to achieve a sense of oneness. The poem concludes: "She had some horses she loved. / She had some horses she hated. / These were the same horse." As Scarry noted, "Harjo is clearly a highly political and feminist Native American, but she is even more the poet of myth and the subconscious; her images and landscapes owe as much to the vast stretches of our hidden mind as they do to her native Southwest." Indeed nature is central to Harjo's work. The prose poetry collection Secrets from the Center of the World (1989) features color photographs of the Southwest landscape accompanying Harjo's poems. Praising the volume in the Village Voice, Dan Bellm wrote, "As Harjo notes, the pictures 'emphasize the "not-separate" that is within and that moves harmoniously upon the landscape.'" Bellm added, "The book's best poems enhance this play of scale and perspective, suggesting in very few words the relationship between a human life and millennial history."

Harjo's work is also deeply concerned with politics, tradition, remembrance, and the transformational aspects of poetry. In Mad Love and War (1990) relates various acts of violence, including the murder of an Indian leader and attempts to deny Harjo her heritage, explores the difficulties indigenous peoples face in modern American society. The second half of the book frequently emphasizes personal relationships and change. Leslie Ullman noted in the Kenyon Review, that "like a magician, Harjo draws power from overwhelming circumstance and emotion by submitting to them, celebrating them, letting her voice and vision move in harmony with the ultimate laws of paradox and continual change." Highly praised, the book won an American Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. In her next books such as The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (1994), based on an Iroquois myth about the descent of a female creator, A Map to the Next World: Poetry and Tales (2000), and How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems (2002), Harjo continues to draw on mythology and folklore to reclaim the experiences of native peoples as various, multi-phonic, and distinct. Using myth, old tales and autobiography, Harjo both explores and creates cultural memory through her illuminating looks into different worlds. As poet Adrienne Rich said, "I turn and return to Harjo's poetry for her breathtaking complex witness and for her world-remaking language: precise, unsentimental, miraculous." In recent collections of poetry and prose Harjo has continued to "expand our American language, culture, and soul," in the words of Academy of American Poets Chancellor Alicia Ostriker; in her judge's citation for the Wallace Stevens Award, which Harjo won in 2015, Ostriker went on to note that Harjo's "visionary justice-seeking art transforms personal and collective bitterness to beauty, fragmentation to wholeness, and trauma to healing."

Harjo's memoir Crazy Brave (2012) won the American Book Award and the 2013 PEN Center USA prize for creative nonfiction. In an interview with Jane Ciabattari, Harjo discussed the meaning of her last name ("so brave you're crazy") and her work's attempt to confront colonization. "Who are we before and after the encounter" of colonization, Harjo asked. "And how do we imagine ourselves with an integrity and freshness outside the sludge and despair of destruction? I am seven generations from Monahwee, who, with the rest of the Red Stick contingent, fought Andrew Jackson at The Battle of Horseshoe Bend in what is now known as Alabama. Our tribe was removed unlawfully from our homelands. Seven generations can live under one roof. That sense of time brings history close, within breathing distance. I call it ancestor time. Everything is a living being, even time, even words." Harjo's other recent books include the children and young adult's book, For a Girl Becoming (2009), the prose and essay collection Soul Talk, Song Language (2011), and the poetry collection Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015), which was shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize.

Consistently praised for the depth and thematic concerns in her writings, Harjo has emerged as a major figure in contemporary American poetry. While Harjo's work is often set in the Southwest, emphasizes the plight of the individual, and reflects Creek values, myths, and beliefs, her oeuvre has universal relevance. Bellm asserted: "Harjo's work draws from the river of Native tradition, but it also swims freely in the currents of Anglo-American verse-feminist poetry of personal/political resistance, deep-image poetry of the unconscious, 'new-narrative' explorations of story and rhythm in prose-poem form." According to Field, "To read the poetry of Joy Harjo is to hear the voice of the earth, to see the landscape of time and timelessness, and, most important, to get a glimpse of people who struggle to understand, to know themselves, and to survive."

Harjo told Contemporary Authors: "I agree with Gide that most of what is created is beyond us, is from that source of utter creation, the Creator, or God. We are technicians here on Earth, but also co-creators. I'm still amazed. And I still say, after writing poetry for all this time, and now music, that ultimately humans have a small hand in it. We serve it. We have to put ourselves in the way of it, and get out of the way of ourselves. And we have to hone our craft so that the form in which we hold our poems, our songs in attracts the best."

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Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She earned her BA from the University of New Mexico and MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Harjo draws on First Nation storytelling and histories, as well as feminist and social justice poetic traditions, and...

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Native Americans Fighting in Vietnam (1955 - 1975)

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Native Americans Fighting in Vietnam (1955 - 1975)

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Despite the historical hypocrisy of Native soldiers serving a government that had oppressed their people, they often viewed military service as an extension of their cultural values of bravery and warrior roles, embodying a sense of duty to protect their communities and uphold ancestral traditions.

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Approximately 42,000 American Indians—one of four eligible Native people compared to about one of twelve non-Natives—served in the armed forces during the war in Vietnam (1964–75). Many were drafted, but a large number volunteered, often citing family and tribal traditions of service as a reason.

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Hip-Hop emerged in the 1970s in the South Bronx, New York City, as a response to social issues and cultural expressions. Comprises four main components: DJing, MCing (rapping), graffiti art, and breakdancing.

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From the street corner to the world stage, hip hop has grown into one of the world's most prominent musical genres and cultural influences. Explore significant events in hip hop history and its explosive evolution.

Hip hop is more than music; it's a cultural movement that incorporates different elements of art. Four foundational elements characterize hip hop culture. The original four main pillars of hip hop include DJing/turntablism, MCing/rapping, B-boying/breaking, and visual/graffiti art. These forms of expression have also developed into further subcultures with lasting legacies.

"Rap is something you do; hip hop is something you live."

The intersection of these four elements also generated a cultural revolution that rapidly spread across the globe. The global influence of hip hop culture has shaped music styles, fashion, technology, art, entertainment, language, dance, education, politics, media, and more. To this day, hip hop continues to be a global phenomenon, developing new art forms that impact the lives of new and old generations.

Hip hop is a subculture and an art movement that emerged from the Bronx in New York City during the early 1970s. Its development reflected the negative effects of post-industrial decline, political discourse, and a rapidly changing economy.

Looking back to New York City during this era, we see an economic collapse. The city's economy was falling apart due to the decline of the manufacturing industry and construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway. Much of the white middle class moved to the suburbs to escape the social and economic challenges. The migration shifted demographics and segregated communities. Conditions worsened in neighborhoods prominently populated by African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Caribbean immigrants. Urban despair also brought rising crime, gang violence, and poverty.

Consequently, businesses closed their doors, causing many economic opportunities and sources of entertainment to evaporate. As a result, urban youth turned to the streets for recreation and self-expression. The abandoned buildings and parking lots set the stage for block parties. These block parties laid the groundwork for everything associated with early hip hop culture. DJs and MCs brought the music by setting up mobile " Sound Systems " introduced by Jamaican culture. Sheets of cardboard became dance floors for break-dancers, and brick walls transformed into canvases for graffiti.

A new era was on the rise fueled by sentiments of anger, hardship, and abandonment. However, the emerging hip hop movement transformed despair and racial barriers into numerous creative outlets. It also became an outlet to deal with violence.

Several people were influential in creating hip hop. However, the most notable pioneers are DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash. These three innovators are known as the "Holy Trinity" of hip hop.

One of the most influential hip hop pioneers was DJ Kool Herc, a Jamaican immigrant regarded as the founding father of hip hop. Kool Herc made history in 1973 when he and his sister hosted the "Back to School Jam" in the recreation room of their Bronx apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. This historical party is recognized for launching the hip hop movement.

DJ Kool Herc also introduced the "breakbeat" DJ technique - a mixing practice he adapted from Jamaican dub music. However, Kool Herc would play funk, soul, and other genres with percussive sections. Using a pair of turntables, Kool Herc would play two copies of the same record and then switch between them to extend the percussive section known as the break. Kool Herc named this breakbeat juggling style of DJing "The Merry-Go-Round." This breakbeat turntablism quickly became influential in the rise of hip hop music, rapping, and breakdancing.

The break section was also the most anticipated part of a song where people danced the most. Break-dancers would form dancer circles and save their best dance moves for the break. Kool Herc named the people dancing to his music B-Boys and B-Girls, which was short for Break-Boys and Break-Girls. Overtime, breaking evolved and became a global subculture that transcended into the mainstream.

Kool Herc also helped develop the rhythmic spoken delivery of rhymes and wordplay performed by MCs. He would speak in rhythm and rhyme over instrumental parts of songs to hype the crowd. His style of lyrical chanting and rhythmic wordplay was an early form of rapping inspired by the Jamaican tradition of toasting. He would shout phrases like "B-Boys, B-Girls, are you ready? Keep on rock steady," "This is the joint! Herc beat on the point," "To the beat, y'all," and "You don't stop!"

Kool Herc also enlisted his friend Coke La Rock to control the mic at their parties. During one party, Coke La Rock dropped the line "There's not a man that can't be thrown, not a horse that can't be rode, a bull that can't be stopped, there's not a disco that I Coke La Rock can't rock." Many consider this verse as the first rap lyrics and Coke La Rock as the first MC of hip hop.

Another influential figure of hip hop to emerge from New York City was Afrika Bambaataa, also known as "The Godfather." Bambaataa was a pioneering DJ and music producer who organized block parties in the Brox during the late 1970s. He was also a visionary who helped guide the city's youth away from gang life, drugs, and violence. He formed Universal Zulu Nation , a music-oriented organization that encourages peace and unity through the expressions of hip hop culture. Members introduced urban youth to DJing, breakdancing, rapping, and visual art. Soon after, Bambaataa categorized these forms of expression as the "four elements" of hip hop. To this day, Zulu Nation continues to spread hip hop culture throughout the world.

In 1982, Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force released "Planet Rock," one of the most influential early hip hop songs. Instead of rapping over funk beats, Bambaataa created an electronic sound by sampling Kraftwerk and using the Roland TR-808 drum machine. The song helped popularize the TR-808, which became a staple of hip hop music.

Grandmaster Flash is another innovative DJ from the Bronx, New York City. He was the first DJ to manipulate records in a backward, forward or counterclockwise motion. He also invented distinct DJing techniques such as the backspin, cutting, punch phrasing, and scratching.

Grandmaster Flash also organized a group called Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five in 1976. The group became widely acknowledged as one of the most influential hip hop acts. They delivered a unique style by trading off lyrics between four rappers and blending them with Flash's unrivaled DJ skills. Flash would also perform acrobatic DJing skills by manipulating vinyl with his fingers, toes, elbows, and objects.

Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five had several influential songs. However, their most prominent song was "The Message." This critical hit further solidified rap as a genre and put rappers at the forefront for the first time. The powerful lyrics also detailed the grim realities of life in the ghetto, which was a significant shift from the traditional rhythmic chants of early hip hop.

In 2007, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five made history again. The group became the first hip hop act inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The early 1980s was a vital turning point for hip hop and music production. Synthesizers, samplers, and drum machines became cheaper and more accessible. Roland's iconic TR-808 drum machine became the weapon of choice. Instead of relying on DJ breakbeats, music producers could now program original drum patterns. The TR-808 also became a cornerstone of hip hop for its powerful bass drum sound.

Sampling technology also emerged during the 1980s. DJs experimented with early samplers such as the Linn 9000, E-mu SP-1200, and the Akai MPC60. They used these samplers to piece together breaks in songs rather than using turntables. Samplers also allowed producers to perform, rearrange sections, sequence arrangments, edit, and mix music in new ways. These production methods were an early form of remixing.

Over time sampling technology advanced. A new generation of samplers such as the AKAI S900 provided increased memory, higher sampling rates, better editing capabilities, and more. Music producers experimented with techniques such as layering sounds, looping, sequencing elaborate arrangements, adding effects, and more.

Turntable and mixer technology also advanced. There was an increase of DJs scratching records to create new sounds and effects. The most influential turntable was the Technics SL-1200 due to its strong motor, durability, and fidelity.

During the mid 1980s and early 1990s, hip hop spread across the country in full force. It brought an era that significantly transformed hip hop culture. This new era became known as "the golden age of hip hop." Many characterize this turning point by its explosion of diversity, influence, stylistic innovation, and mainstream success.

Record labels recognized the genre as an emerging trend and invested a lot of money into the movement. Independent record labels like Tommy Boy, Prism Records, and Def Jam became successful. They were releasing records at a fast pace in response to the demand generated by local radio stations and club DJs.

New scenes and different styles of hip hop also emerged from city to city as the culture popularized. However, hip hop music was still mostly experimental. Although, the new generation of hip hop producers had access to more advanced drum machines and samplers that allowed them to take hip hop music to the next level.

One of the definitive characteristics of hip hop's golden age was the heavy use of sampled music. No copyright laws protected music from being sampled, so artists could use samples from a variety of sources without legal troubles. They were capturing samples from various genres ranging from jazz to rock music. However, sampling was not limited to music. R.Z.A. of the Wu-Tang Clan sampled sound clips from his collection of 1970s Kung Fu films.

The lyrical content of hip hop developed as well. The early rhythmic chants of the 1970s progressed into metaphorical lyrics exploring a range of subjects. Artists also performed the lyrics over a more complex, multi-layered instrumental arrangement. Artists such as Melle Mel, KRS-One, Rakim, Chuck D, and Warp 9 were pivotal in advancing hip hop lyrics and the art of rapping.

There was also a wave of new school rappers who were pivotal in bringing hip hop to the mainstream. At the forefront was RUN DMC, a hip hop trio who fused rap with hard rock. They took rap into the Top Ten when they collaborated with Aerosmith on a rap remake of "Walk This Way." The single conquered the radio and MTV, catapulting rap even further into the mainstream. Some other innovators in the golden age of hip hop were L.L. Cool J, Public Enemy, the Beastie Boys, A Tribe Called Quest, and many others.

It wasn't just the music propelling hip hop culture. Hip hop fashion also hit the mainstream. Various clothes, shoes, accessories, and hairstyles became a form of expression. Street slang, later known as Ebonics, also crossed over into the mainstream. For example, the words "bling" and "fo' shizzle" have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Rap music heavily used sampling in the early 1990s. Original copyright owners of the music being sampled heard parts of their songs in new rap music. They didn't like other artists cashing in on their work and wanted compensation for the use of their music.

After many legal actions, the Government passed several copyright enforcement laws. They required artists to clear all samples in advance to avoid lawsuits. However, clearing samples was expensive, and many record labels could not afford to clear all the samples. Hip hop music took a whole new direction, and producers had to make original sounds rather than relying heavily on samples. We heard a different sound because producers were no longer sampling commercially released songs. As a result, the music lost much of its jazz and soul influences.

Hip hop music became even more commercial, becoming the top-selling music genre by the late 1990s. Different regional styles also emerged such as West Coast hip hop, gangster rap, Southern rap, rap rock, and various other genres. A new wave of artists also emerged, such as N.W.A., Dr. Dre, Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dog, the Notorious B.I.G., Nas, Jay-Z, and several others. By the end of the decade, hip hop was an integral part of popular music. It even found its way into mainstream pop and electronic music.

Hip hop history has a fascinating story worth exploring more. This cultural movement has seen considerable change and evolution since its inception in the seventies. What began as a local movement intended to provide a haven for African-American and Puerto Rican youth in New York City, has become a global phenomenon. To this day, hip hop continues to be a dominant force influencing the culture around the world.

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Hip Hop History: From the Streets to the Mainstream

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Hip hop is one of the world's most prominent musical genres and cultural influences. Explore significant events in hip hop history and its explosive evolution.

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Shifting Political Climate (1980s to 1990s)

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Shifting Political Climate (1980s to 1990s)

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The political landscape of the 1980s and 1990s in the United States was characterized by a notable shift toward conservatism, largely influenced by the Reagan administration's policies. Key issues included the resurgence of traditional family values, anti-communism, economic deregulation, and a focus on law and order.

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Timeline of modern American conservatism - Wikipedia

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The 1980s in America were marked by significant cultural tensions, particularly concerning issues of race, gender, and identity. These conflicts manifested in various art forms, reflecting broader societal struggles and changes. Artists and activists utilized various platforms to address these tensions, influencing public perception and policy.

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The forced relocation of the Muscogee people to Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), resulting in significant loss of life and cultural upheaval.

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Monument at New Echota to the Cherokees who died along the trail.
Courtesy of Stephen Conn on Flickr's Creative Commons

Guided by policies favored by President Andrew Jackson, who led the country from 1828 to 1837, the Trail of Tears (1837 to 1839) was the forced westward migration of American Indian tribes from the South and Southeast. Land grabs threatened tribes throughout the South and Southeast in the early 1800s. Across the United States, the Federal Government consolidated and relocated tribes to reservations forcing them to surrender their lands in pieces by negotiating one treaty after another with the tribes. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, the impetus for the Trail of Tears, targeted particularly the Five Civilized Tribes in the Southeast. As authorized by the Indian Removal Act, the Federal Government negotiated treaties aimed at clearing Indian-occupied land for white settlers. The Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole were among the resettled tribes. The National Park Service Trail of Tears National Historic Trail interprets the Trail of Tears primarily as it relates to the Cherokee.

Following the Indian Removal Act, a treaty determined the fate of the Cherokee in the eastern United States. Named after the capital of the Cherokee Nation in New Echota, Georgia, the Treaty of New Echota (1835) gave tribal lands east of the Mississippi River to the Federal Government in exchange for $5,000,000. This agreement preserved the Cherokee Nation but at a great cost. Conceived as a land swap, the Treaty of New Echota was a trade of Cherokee land in the East for land in the West. This arrangement relied on the assumption that most would be willing to abandon an established life in the East for a long journey to an unknown life further west. Not all Cherokee walked the Trail of Tears; some remained in North Carolina where they today form the Eastern Band of the Cherokee.

Negotiations between the government and the Cherokee occurred not with official tribal representatives but instead with a group of four men. Major Ridge, John Ridge, Elias Boudinot (also named Buck Watie), and Andrew Ross spoke for the tribe. As soon as word of the actions by this unauthorized group spread, petitions were organized and more than 14,000 signatures were obtained against the treaty. Nevertheless, President Jackson signed the treaty in 1836, and the State of Georgia began to limit the rights of Cherokee. Removal began in 1836 with the first group of Cherokee leaving in 1837 and the majority traveling in 1838. Many went west with little warning, when federal troops drove them from their homes giving them no time to prepare for a long journey. In 1839, most of the group of men who signed the treaty were murdered for signing away Cherokee lands in the East.

The Trail of Tears records the Cherokees' journey from its beginning, routes along the way, campsites, and the gravesites and disbandment sites that mark the end of the journey. From a "beginning," soldiers took the Cherokee to forts, emigration depots, or other areas to form them into larger groups (detachments) for the march west. Next, traveling a series of routes, both overland and by water, the Cherokee made the difficult journey. Campsites help document the Cherokee on their journey. Gravesites and disbandment sites are reminders of the hardships the Cherokee experienced not only while going to the Indian Territory in the West, but also in their new lives that began at end of the trail. Rather than one Trail of Tears, several routes with different origins and destinations in more than a half-dozen States tell the story. This description of the Trail of Tears is able to highlight only a handful of the interesting sites for visitors to see on the Trail of Tears.

Beginnings
The removal of the Cherokee began in 1838 under the leadership of General Winfield Scott who, with 7,000 soldiers and members of various State militias, escorted the Cherokee and other Indians west. At the time of removal, the Cherokee were primarily in Georgia, though tribal lands extended into Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina, and other States. At New Echota, Georgia, the pro-treaty faction of the Cherokee signed away Cherokee lands in Appalachia and began the removal process. Negotiations for the treaty--despite a petition and vote to reject the terms--took place at nearby Red Clay Council Ground, approximately 13 miles south of Cleveland. Visitors to Red Clay Council Ground can see where the meeting occurred and view exhibits on the Cherokee. Five miles northeast of Cleveland is Rattlesnake Springs, an assembly site and location of the last council of the Cherokee before their westward removal. Here, the Cherokee resolved, despite relocation, to carry on Cherokee culture, language, and traditions in the new land. For many, the long walk west began in earnest from Rattlesnake Springs. Perhaps as many as 13,000 Cherokee left from here, though not all would reach Indian Territory. In all, 4,000 Cherokee died on the way to present-day Oklahoma.

Before leaving, the Cherokee were an established people. The partially reconstructed Cherokee capital at New Echota is accessible for visitors to tour the home and school of Samuel Worcester, a print shop (from which pro-treaty faction member Elias Boudinot edited the English and Cherokee-language Cherokee Phoenix), the tribal Supreme Court Building, and a relocated tavern. As the tribal capital for 13 years (1825-1838), New Echota was the legislative, judicial, and literary center of Cherokee culture. In addition to constructing government buildings at New Echota, some Cherokee built substantial homes. The Georgia residences of two major Cherokee leaders, Chief John Ross and Major Ridge, remain and are open for tours. The Ross House is in Rossville, Georgia and the plantation home of Major Ridge is in Rome, Georgia. Built by a wealthy Cherokee family, the Vann Home (1804), at Spring Place, Georgia also is still standing and open to the public. Most other evidence of Cherokee settlement is gone.

From these homes and other buildings that no longer remain, the Cherokee were driven to cramped, unhealthy assembly centers in each State which served as temporary holding locations from which larger groups would then go to one of three emigration depots. Though the Trail of Tears began with the forcing of individuals from their homes, the National Park Service interprets the trail as primarily having three trailheads--the emigration depots at Fort Cass (near Charleston, Tennessee), Ross's Landing (near Chattanooga, Tennessee) and near Fort Payne (Alabama). While changed from its days as a ferry landing and starting point for many of the Cherokee, Ross's Landing has an outdoor Trail of Tears exhibit. From these starting points, thousands of Cherokee traveled an average of 1,000 miles to the lands they had received in the Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma.

Routes
Most of the displaced Cherokee walked west on the roads, although some went by boat. Rounded up into assembly centers, sent to emigration depots, and then herded west, most Cherokee followed the overland route of Lieutenant B.B. Cannon. Cannon led a group of Cherokee who voluntarily relocated west in 1837. Armed soldiers flushed the Cherokee out of their homes and stripped them of valuable possessions. Tightly packed in holding centers, they found that food and water were scarce and disease and death were common. From those assembled at Rattlesnake Springs, for example, 13 organized detachments made the journey west. While most walked, the infirm and mothers with young children traveled in wagons. Space was limited because food, blankets, and other supplies occupied most of the room. Those who were still alive five months later found themselves in Indian Territory.

Of the 17 total detachments of Cherokee that traveled along the Trail of Tears, the majority went by foot. Those who walked to present-day Oklahoma left mostly between August and November 1838, following a variety of overland routes. As tens of thousands of feet stepped west and wagon train after wagon train followed, the travelers wore down both new paths and old. The Springfield to Fayetteville road segment near Elkhorn Tavern close to Pea Ridge was the supply link between Springfield, Missouri and Fort Smith Arkansas before the Civil War. In 1838, it carried more than mail and goods, as thousands of Cherokee were marched along the road. Today, visitors to Pea Ridge can see part of the path the Cherokee took and learn more about the march west on the park's auto tour route. Some Cherokee who traveled west on the Trail of Tears returned to fight at Pea Ridge during the Civil War. Other trail locations feature portions of the Memphis to Little Rock Road, along which the Cherokee traveled. Some intact segments are visible today at Village Creek State Park, near Newcastle, Arkansas, or on Henard Cemetery Road, near Zent, Arkansas.

Campsites
The long march took the Cherokee and their military escorts several months. At campsites, the travelers spent a few nights resting between stages of the trip or waiting for weather conditions to improve so they could continue west. Locations like Mantle Rock, today part of Mantle Rock Nature Preserve near Smithland in Livingston County, Kentucky, contain part of the roadbed used by the Cherokee and a Cherokee campsite. A large natural sandstone arch, Mantle Rock, offered a good shelter for the Cherokee. Not all campsites were in ideal locations. Continuing from Mantle Rock, the 11 of 13 overland detachments of Cherokee that passed through the area next crossed the Ohio River by ferry from Kentucky to Illinois. The ferry could only transport a limited number at any one time, forcing the Cherokee camped at Mantle Rock to wait. An unusually cold winter froze both the Ohio and Mississippi rivers halting the last detachment at Mantle Rock. This waiting in cramped, often unhealthy, conditions meant that some of the Cherokee died at Mantle Rock.

Gravesites and Disbandment Sites
Burial sites of Cherokee who died while at Mantle Rock are largely unknown. Other gravesites along the trial have markers. Whitepath and Fly Smith, two Cherokee elders, traveled in the second detachment and died near Hopkinsville, Kentucky in October of 1838 along the highway from Nashville to Hopkinsville. Honored as elders and defenders of Cherokee traditions and culture, they lie in well-marked graves within the local Trail of Tears Park. Visitors to the park can see their graves and learn more about Cherokee culture at a heritage center.

The Cherokee who successfully made the trip west "exited" the Trail of Tears at disbandment sites like Fort Gibson, Oklahoma. Today, the fort and surrounding land are open to visitors. Other groups simply began to spread out upon reaching the Indian Territory. At the time of its construction in 1824, Fort Gibson was on the southwestern edge of "settled" land and was the main presence of the Federal Government on the western frontier.

Having endured the long removal process west, the Cherokee in the Indian Territory began building a new life in Tahlequah, the new tribal capital. The Indian Territory combined with the Oklahoma Territory in 1907 to form the State of Oklahoma. Some families, like the Murrells, rebuilt successful lives in Oklahoma despite the removal process. Visitors can tour the Murrell Home and grounds in Park Hill just outside Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

A people with a strong commitment to maintaining their cultural identity, the Cherokee survived the Trail of Tears. Amid great personal loss and circumstances difficult to imagine today, individual Cherokees emerged as protectors of the people and culture. One of these leaders, Chief John Ross, who was influential before removal and a source of constancy amid change, lies buried near Tahlequah at Ross Cemetery in Park Hill, Oklahoma. The area around this cemetery was one of the first places the Cherokee established themselves after coming west. The cemetery is open to visitors who can see the grave of John Ross as well as other family members. Beginning a new life in a new land was not easy, and the graveyard documents both the life of Chief John Ross and the difficulties faced by settlers in the Indian Territory.

The Trail of Tears is a story of conquest, but it is also a story of victory. The Cherokee still speak their language today and tribal traditions endure--testaments to the strength of a people, resolute in their desire to preserve their culture and heritage on their way for hundreds of miles to life in a new land.
The Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, a unit of the National Park System, stretches across Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. For more information, visit the National Park Service Trail of Tears National Historic Trail website or call 505-988-6098. To assist with planning your visit, view trail-related sites listed by State at Places to Go and a list of trail-related sites managed by the Federal Government on Nearby Attractions. Other locations along the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail listed in the National Register may be found here. Not all of these sites are open to the public and some may be on private land. A list of certified trail locations that specifically encourage public access is also available on the trail's website.

Rattlesnake Springs, the John Ross house, and the Major Ridge house are also the subject of an online lesson plan, The Trail of Tears and the Forced Relocation of the Cherokee Nation. The lesson plan has been produced by the National Park Service's Teaching with Historic Places program, which offers a series of online classroom-ready lesson plans on registered historic places.

* Red Clay Council Ground is part of Red Clay State Park
* New Echota Historic Site; a National Historic Landmark
* John Ross House; a National Historic Landmark
* Major Ridge Plantation Home; a National Historic Landmark
* Vann Home; Historic American Buildings Survey
* Ross's Landing
* Springfield to Fayetteville Road - Elkhorn Tavern Segment, Pea Ridge National Military Park
* Memphis to Little Rock Road - Village Creek Segment, Village Creek State Park
* Mantle Rock Nature Preserve; National Register of Historic Places file: text and photos.
* Whitepath and Fly Smith Gravesite in Trail of Tears Commemorative Park; National Register of Historic Places file: text and photos.
* Fort Gibson; a National Historic Landmark; Historic American Buildings Survey.
* Murrell Home; a National Historic Landmark; National Register of Historic Places file: text and photos; Historic American Buildings Survey.
* Ross Cemetery (located near the Murrell Home in Park Hill, OK); National Register of Historic Places file: text and photos

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Multi-State: Trail of Tears National Historic Trail (U.S. National Park Service)

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Guided by policies favored by President Andrew Jackson, who led the country from 1828 to 1837, the Trail of Tears (1837 to 1839) was the forced westward migration of American Indian tribes from the South and Southeast. Land grabs threatened tribes throughout the South and Southeast in the early 1800s.

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"The Oakland Projects" by Suzanne Lacy (1991-2001)

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"The Oakland Projects" by Suzanne Lacy (1991-2001)

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A series of public art projects in Oakland, California, aimed at promoting community dialogue on issues like race, violence, and youth identity.

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The Oakland Projects (1991-2001) — SUZANNE LACY

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A ten-year series of installations, performances and political activism with youth in Oakland, California.

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Coordinated terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda on the United States, targeting the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It led to significant changes in U.S. foreign and security policies.

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“9-11” redirects here. For the collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky, see 9-11 (book).

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The U.S. and coalition forces invaded Iraq, citing the presence of WMDs and links to terrorism. The event marked a significant moment in the War on Terror.

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Pew Research Center - U.S. Politics & Policy

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Twenty years ago this month, the United States launched a major military invasion of Iraq, marking the second time it fought a war in that country in a little more than a decade. It was the start of an eight-year conflict that resulted in the deaths of more than 4,000 U.S. servicemembers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

The war began March 19, 2003, with an overwhelming show of American military might, described by the unforgettable phrase "shock and awe." Within weeks, the United States achieved the primary objective of Operation Iraqi Freedom, as the military operation was called, ousting the regime of dictator Saddam Hussein.

Yet the military campaign that began so auspiciously ended up deeply dividing Americans and alienating key U.S. allies. As Americans looked back on the war four years ago, 62% said it was not worth fighting. Majorities of military veterans, including those who served in Iraq or Afghanistan, came to the same conclusion.

The bleak retrospective judgments on the war obscure the breadth of public support for U.S. military action at the start of the conflict and, perhaps more importantly, in the months leading up to it. Throughout 2002 and early 2003, President George W. Bush and his administration marshaled wide backing for the use of military force in Iraq among both the public and Congress.

The administration's success in these efforts was the result of several factors, not least of which was the climate of public opinion at the time. Still reeling from the horrors of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Americans were extraordinarily accepting of the possible use of military force as part of what Bush called the "global war on terror."

By early 2002, with U.S. troops already fighting in Afghanistan, large majorities of Americans favored the use of military force in Iraq to oust Hussein from power and to destroy terrorist groups in Somalia and Sudan. These attitudes represented "a strong endorsement of the prospective use of force compared with other military missions in the post-Cold War era," Pew Research Center noted at the time.

Bush and senior members of his administration then spent more than a year outlining the dangers that they claimed Iraq posed to the United States and its allies. Two of the administration's arguments proved especially powerful, given the public's mood: first, that Hussein's regime possessed "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD), a shorthand for nuclear, biological or chemical weapons; and second, that it supported terrorism and had close ties to terrorist groups, including al-Qaida, which had attacked the U.S. on 9/11.

As numerous investigations by independent and governmental commissions subsequently found, there was no factual basis for either of these assertions. Two decades later, debate continues about whether the administration was the victim of flawed intelligence, or whether Bush and his senior advisers deliberately misled the public about its WMD capabilities, in particular.

In the months leading up to the war, sizable majorities of Americans believed that Iraq either possessed WMD or was close to obtaining them, that Iraq was closely tied to terrorism - and even that Hussein himself had a role in the 9/11 attacks. Two decades after the war began, a review of Pew Research Center surveys on the war in Iraq shows that support for U.S. military action was built, at least in part, on a foundation of falsehoods.

The path to war: From the 'axis of evil' to a 'mushroom cloud'

In his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush began making the case for why the United States might need to use military force to remove Saddam Hussein from power. "Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror," he said. "The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons, for over a decade."

Iraq was one of three countries, along with Iran and North Korea, that constituted an "axis of evil," according to Bush. But Iraq drew much more attention from the former president than did those countries. "This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world," Bush said.

Even before his speech, Americans were inclined to believe the worst about Hussein's regime. In a survey conducted a few weeks prior to the State of the Union, 73% favored military action in Iraq to end Hussein's rule; just 16% were opposed. More than half (56%) said the U.S. should take action against Iraq "even if it meant U.S. forces might suffer thousands of casualties."

Bush delivered this address, among the most memorable of his presidency, just four months after the terrorist attacks in New York City and near Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Americans remained on edge: 62% said they were very or somewhat worried another terrorist attack was imminent.

At that point, more than a year before the United States went to war, Americans overwhelmingly embraced several possible rationales for military action: 83% said that if the U.S. learned that Iraq had aided the 9/11 terrorists, that would be a "very important reason" to use military force in Iraq; nearly as many said the same if it was shown that Iraq was developing WMD (77%) or harboring other terrorists (75%).

Over the next several months, Bush and other senior officials claimed with varying degrees of certainty that there was evidence justifying the use of U.S. military force. In a speech to a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in August 2002, former Vice President Dick Cheney was unequivocal in asserting: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."

On other occasions, Bush and his advisers suggested that even if there was no definitive proof that Iraq possessed WMD, it was too risky not to act, given Hussein's failure to abide by UN weapons resolutions. "The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he [Hussein] can acquire nuclear weapons," said National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in a CNN interview. "But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

Such warnings resonated strongly with Americans: Most believed that Hussein either already possessed WMD or was close to obtaining them. In October 2002, 65% of the public said Hussein was close to having nuclear weapons, while another 14% volunteered that he already possessed them. Just 11% said he was not close to developing such weapons.

That month, Congress overwhelmingly approved a resolution authorizing Bush to use the U.S. armed forces "as he determines to be necessary and appropriate" to defend the security of the United States and enforce UN resolutions on Iraq. (This month, more than 20 years after it passed, Congress is moving to repeal the resolution.)

In addition to alleging that Hussein possessed (or was on the verge of obtaining) unconventional weapons, administration officials also repeatedly linked his regime to terrorists and terrorism. For the most part, these allegations were vague and unspecified, but on occasion, senior officials - including the president himself - directly connected Iraq with al-Qaida, the terrorist group that attacked the United States on 9/11. "We know that Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist network share a common enemy - the United States of America," Bush said that October. "We know that Iraq and al-Qaida have had high-level contacts that go back a decade."

Neither Bush nor senior administration officials directly linked Iraq or its leader to the planning or execution of the 9/11 attacks. Yet a sizable majority of Americans believed that Hussein aided the terrorist attacks that took nearly 3,000 lives.

The same month that Congress approved the use of force resolution against Iraq, 66% of the public said that "Saddam Hussein helped the terrorists in the September 11th attacks"; just 21% said he was not involved in 9/11. In February 2003, a month before the war began, that belief was only somewhat less widespread; 57% thought Hussein had supported the 9/11 terrorists.

It is not entirely clear why so many Americans - including majorities in both parties - embraced this falsehood. But by connecting Hussein to terrorism and the group that attacked the United States, administration officials blurred the lines between Iraq and 9/11. "The notion was reinforced by these hints, the discussions that they had about possible links" with al-Qaida terrorists, the late Andrew Kohut, founding director of Pew Research Center, told The Washington Post after the war was underway in 2003.

As prospects for war grew, thousands took to the streets to protest

In the months leading up to the war, majorities of between 55% and 68% said they favored taking military action to end Hussein's rule in Iraq. No more than about a third opposed military action.

However, support for military action in Iraq was consistently less pronounced among a handful of demographic and partisan groups.

The Center's final survey before the U.S. invasion, conducted in mid-February 2003, highlighted these differences: Women were about 10 percentage points less likely than men to support the use of military force against Iraq (61% vs. 71%).

A sizable majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (83%) favored the use of military force to end Hussein's rule. Democrats and Democratic leaners were less supportive; still, more Democrats favored (52%) than opposed (40%) military action.

Yet Democrats were divided in opinions about whether to go to war in Iraq, with liberal Democrats less likely than conservative and moderate Democrats to favor using military force.

To build greater backing for the use of force among U.S. allies - and assuage lingering public concerns about war - the administration dispatched one of its most popular figures, Secretary of State Colin Powell, to the UN Security Council. In a pivotal moment in the Iraq debate, Powell presented what he described as "facts and conclusions, based on solid intelligence" to show that Iraq had failed to comply with UN weapons resolutions. "Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option, not in a post-Sept. 11 world," Powell said.

Powell's address had a significant impact on U.S. public opinion, even among those who were opposed to war. Roughly six-in-ten adults (61%) said Powell had explained clearly why the United States might use military force to end Hussein's rule; that was greater than the share saying Bush had clearly explained the stakes in Iraq (52%). Powell was particularly persuasive among those who were opposed to using force in Iraq: 39% said he had clearly explained why the U.S. may need to take military action, about twice the share saying the same about Bush.

In a last-ditch effort to prevent war, millions of protestors took to the streets in numerous cities across the world and in the U.S. on Feb. 15. While the largest demonstrations were in London and Rome, several hundred thousand antiwar protesters crowded the streets of New York City, with some carrying signs saying "No Blood for Oil."

Americans initially rallied behind the war; then support plummeted

After the war began, administration officials were confident that the United States would quickly prevail. For a time, it appeared they would be right: U.S. and allied forces easily overwhelmed the Iraqi army.

By April 9, U.S. forces and Iraqi civilians brought down a statue of Saddam Hussein in a Baghdad square. And on May 1, Bush stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln - in front of a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished" - and declared that major combat operations had ended.

Yet the war continued for another eight years. Public support for the use of U.S. military force in Iraq, which rose to 74% during the month that Bush gave what became known as his "Mission Accomplished" speech, never again reached that level.

As U.S. forces faced a mounting Iraqi insurgency, a growing share of Americans - especially Democrats - expressed doubts about the war. The share of Americans saying the U.S. military effort in Iraq was going well, which surpassed 90% in the war's early weeks, fell to about 60% in late summer 2003.

There had been partisan differences in attitudes related to Iraq since Bush began raising the prospect of war in 2002. But as the war continued, these differences intensified: In October 2003, a 56% majority of Democrats said that U.S. forces should be brought home from Iraq as soon as possible, a 12-point increase from just a month earlier. By contrast, fewer than half of independents (40%) and just 20% of Republicans favored withdrawing U.S. troops.

Support for U.S. military action declined further the next year as two incidents brought the horrors of war home to Americans. In March 2004, four American private security contractors were killed and their bodies desecrated in a spate of anti-American violence. Then, the first pictures emerged of abuse of prisoners by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib, an Iraqi prison. In a survey that May, the share of Americans who said the use of military force was going at least "fairly well" fell below 50% for the first time.

Bush's reelection as president in November underscored the extent to which the war in Iraq had divided the nation. Among the narrow majority of voters (51%) who then approved of the decision to go to war, 85% voted for Bush; among the smaller share (45%) who disapproved, 87% voted for his Democratic opponent, John Kerry, according to national exit polls.

Public support for the war declined further during Bush's second term. By January 2007, with the situation on the ground deteriorating, Bush defied growing calls from Democrats to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq and instead announced that he was sending more troops to the country. What Bush called "a new way forward " in Iraq - which became more widely known as the troop surge, or surge - was a risky gambit to alter the trajectory of the war.

The new strategy, in which more than 20,000 additional U.S. forces were deployed to Iraq, was broadly unpopular with a public that had grown weary of war. By roughly two-to-one (61% to 31%), Americans opposed Bush's plan to send additional forces to Iraq. Bush's new strategy "triggered increased partisan polarization on the debate over what to do in Iraq," the Center noted in its report on the January 2007 survey.

Still, while the overall impact of the surge on Iraq was intensely debated, it was widely credited with helping to reduce the level of violence in the country, both among U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians. While Americans acknowledged the improvement in the situation in Iraq, they remained deeply skeptical of the decision to go to war.

In November 2007, nearly half of Americans (48%) said the war was going very or fairly well, an 18 percentage point increase from February of that year. Yet support for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq was undiminished; by 54% to 41%, more Americans favored bringing troops home from Iraq as soon as possible rather than keeping troops there until the situation had stabilized. Those attitudes were virtually unchanged from earlier in 2007.

With the 2008 presidential campaign approaching - and roughly 100,000 U.S. troops still in Iraq - it seemed likely that the war would again be a major issue. During the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama repeatedly contrasted his early opposition to the war with Hillary Clinton's 2002 Senate vote in support of the war authorization.

However, after Obama defeated Clinton for the Democratic nomination and faced John McCain in the general election, the Iraq War was increasingly overshadowed by turmoil in financial markets, which triggered a worldwide economic crisis. In national exit polls conducted after Obama's victory over McCain, 63% of voters cited the economy as the most important issue facing the country; just 10% mentioned the war in Iraq.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama vowed to end the war in Iraq, adding that the United States "would be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in." Three years later, the U.S. withdrew all but a handful of its troops; in a ceremony on Dec. 15, 2011, the United States lowered the flag of command that had flown over Baghdad. President Obama's decision drew overwhelming public support. A month before the ceremony, 75% of Americans - including nearly half of Republicans - approved of his decision to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq.

Yet Obama soon discovered how difficult it would be for the U.S. to fully disengage from Iraq. In 2014, a new security threat emerged in Iraq - the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. With ISIS taking over territory in Iraq and committing high-profile terrorist acts, the group quickly became one of the U.S. public's top security threat s. In response, Obama reluctantly authorized U.S. airstrikes and dispatched a small number of U.S. forces back to Iraq. Five years later, his successor, then-President Donald Trump, claimed that the group was on the verge of defeat in Iraq and Syria, although some U.S. security officials say it remains a threat.

Judgments on the Iraq War and its impact on Bush's legacy

The Iraq War has a long and complicated legacy. After the war officially ended, it remained an issue, to varying degrees, in both the 2012 and 2016 presidential election campaigns. Even in the 2020 campaign, nearly a decade after the war's end, Trump and Joe Biden each portrayed themselves as better able to extricate the nation from what have been called "endless wars" - the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

By that point, most Americans had largely moved on from the war. Shortly before the United States withdrew its forces in 2011, a majority of Americans (56%) had concluded that, despite the war's enormous costs, the U.S. had "mostly succeeded" in achieving its goals in Iraq.

But over the next few years, that belief faded. By 2018, the 15th anniversary of the start of the war, just 39% of Americans said the U.S. had succeeded in Iraq, while 53% said it had failed to achieve its goals.

Even among Republicans, who had consistently favored the use of U.S. military force throughout the war and before it began, there were divisions over whether the U.S. had achieved its goals in Iraq. Only about half (48%) of Republicans and Republican leaners said the U.S. had succeeded, although that was 10 points higher than four years earlier.

The Iraq War will long be associated with the presidency of George W. Bush, its primary architect and one of its strongest advocates. When Bush looked back at the war in his 2010 memoir, "Decision Points," he acknowledged that mistakes had been made. Among them, he said in an interview with NBC News, was his 2003 "Mission Accomplished" speech. "No question it was a mistake," Bush said.

As far as the failure to find WMD in Iraq, "no one was more shocked and angry than I was when we didn't find the weapons," Bush said. Still, he was insistent that going to war in Iraq and removing Hussein from power was the right thing to do.

The war's impact on Americans' views of Bush's presidency was underscored in a December 2008 survey, conducted shortly before he left office. Asked what Bush would be most remembered for, roughly half (51%) cited wars, with 29% specifically mentioning the war in Iraq. No other issue, not even Bush's leadership following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was mentioned as frequently.
Lead image, from left: President George W. Bush declares that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended" on May 1, 2003. Soldiers in Kuwait near the Iraqi border. Baghdad burns at the start of "Operation Iraqi Freedom." Students in Los Angeles protest the coming war. Wooden crosses for lost U.S. troops at a roadside memorial in Lafayette, California, in 2007. (Stephen Jaffe/AFP; Ian Waldie; Mirrorpix; Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times; Justin Sullivan, all via Getty Images)

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A Look Back at How Fear and False Beliefs Bolstered U.S. Public Support for War in Iraq

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Twenty years ago this month, the U.S. launched a major invasion of Iraq. President George W. Bush and his administration at first drew broad public support for the use of military force. Yet the campaign soon left Americans deeply divided, and by 2019, 62% said the Iraq War was not worth fighting.

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The Yes Men Fix the World Documentary (2009)

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The Yes Men Fix the World Documentary (2009)

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The documentary follows The Yes Men’s satirical performances that challenge corporate ethics and economic policies, emphasizing art’s role in activism.

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The Yes Men is a 2003 American documentary film about the early culture jamming exploits of The Yes Men.

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AI challenges traditional cultural definitions of art and creativity, sparking debates about whether art requires human emotion and intention. AI tools can democratize art by making creative technologies more accessible, but they also risk cultural expression if not used thoughtfully.

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The emergence of AI-image generators, such as DALL-E 2, Discord, Midjourney, and others, has stirred a controversy over whether art generated by artificial intelligence should be considered real art - and whether it could put artists and creators out of work. The Gazette spoke with faculty who are involved in the production of art - a writer, a film animator, an architect, a musician, and a mixed-media artist - to ask them whether they see AI as a threat or a collaborator or a tool to further their own creativity and imagination. The interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
Novelist and short-story writer Daphne Kalotay, instructor, Creative Writing & Literature Program, Harvard Extension School Saxophonist, percussionist, and composer Yosvany Terry, senior lecturer on music, director of Jazz Bands Independent animator Ruth Stella Lingford, senior lecturer on Art, Film, and Visual Studies
I recently judged a story contest, and reading the shortlist was a clue to the challenges AI might encounter in creating good writing versus great. The best of these human-written stories surprised me with 1) unique ways of viewing the world (personality), 2) linguistic originality, 3) inimitable details that could come only from personal experience. Other stories were written deftly yet lacked these elements of originality and surprise. AI is a superb mimic and quick learner and might easily write strong works in recognizable modes, and with linguistic experimentation if prompted, but - I think - will lack true insight and experience. Most at risk are commercial genres with easily recognizable styles and tropes. Even something like autofiction with its ruminating first-person narrators is easily mimicked - but what will be missing, I'm guessing, is genuine vision from living in a specific physical world.

When it comes to the performative aspect of music, artificial intelligence is not a concern to me. Music can transmit and represent emotion, and AI cannot do either of those things yet. And especially within jazz and creative music, music is in-the-moment composition, something that happens as musicians are collaborating onstage. That sense of interplay, or the ability to react in the moment, is something that artificial intelligence can't reproduce because to do that requires being intelligent and having the agency to use your curiosity and your musical vocabulary. Only then, you can be able to react and create music in the moment.

With regards to composition, we know that AI has been used to compose music for film and television for quite a few years. That is a concern because AI is doing the work that musicians used to do. But when you hear those compositions by AI, they lack surprise, emotion, and even silence. I love dramatism in music, and for me, emotion in music is important, and AI is not there yet. As for how music gets to people, this is where we have seen tremendous changes. The many music platforms we have, such as Spotify, YouTube, iTunes, etc., use algorithm-based features, and they make musical recommendations based on what you listen to. We all know that AI is behind it. Musicians would like to see algorithms suggest composers who are less known rather than those who are already popular. The new technology should democratize the field, make sure that people have access to things that are outside the mainstream, and learn to recognize musical traditions that are not only from the Western world.
Mixed-media artist Matt Saunders '97, Architect and urban planner Moshe Safdie, design critic in architecture, Graduate School of Design professor and director of undergraduate studies, Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies
It's important to welcome AI with open arms to try to understand what AI can do for us and work with it in creative ways. Any new technology is first seen as a threat to the status quo, like the way radio was received when it first aired. There have always been movements opposing those innovations. I don't think AI is different, but we must remember that all these innovations are man-made, and as humans we can create and innovate. As a musician, I think we should open our eyes, ears, and arms to work with the new knowledge and innovation that AI can bring.

Often, when I speak to my contemporaries in the animation world, they prefer not to think much about AI. But of course, we need to.

Generally speaking, AI does threaten jobs in the animation industry. I'm told that it is already being used in some large studios. But it will also be a collaborator.

I am told by a knowledgeable friend that it would be possible to train AI on my style and have it work as an assistant in my work. I can see how this would be useful, but, as I actually like the repetitiveness of the animation process, the idea is not very appealing, at least for my own personal work. But it might be a tempting idea in commercial jobs, though I have not explored it yet. In my personal work, the repetition of hand drawing (I draw on a digital tablet) gives me access to a less conscious, intentional side of the creative process, which I think makes the work richer and more nuanced.

Although it is maybe far-fetched to talk about AI as creative or imaginative, the melding of images from different sources, with large elements of the random, closely approximates some aspects of the creative process. AI is acting like a sort of collective unconscious, and I do find some of what it produces very interesting. I don't suppose that animated films made entirely by AI would be very successful, but used with human guidance throughout the process, they could probably work very well.

I recently attended the Annecy Festival, and many people I spoke to there talked about "riding the shark" - harnessing the power of AI while staying in control. People also predicted the audience's fatigue with the look of AI. It was noticeable that a high proportion of films shown at this year's festival were made using recognizably analog techniques - stop-motion, animated painting, etc. - and this seems like a reaction against the dominance of computer-generated imagery in the last years. We do seem to want to see evidence of the human hand. Of course, AI may soon be able to simulate that absolutely seamlessly!

A programmer I spoke to was of the opinion that the panic over the power of AI is hype-manufactured by its makers to disguise its limitations and make it seem sexier. This person saw it going the same way as VR, seeming to offer unlimited potential, but then fizzling out. I would like to think that he's right, but I can't quite believe it.

To the question of whether AI can be a threat or collaborator, I might respond that every new technology upends conventions and delivers not only new possibilities but a new kind of material intelligence. I am sure many artists will be intrigued by the "agency" of AI and seek ways to grapple or collaborate with it. Many already are. And we should be grateful to be challenged and knocked out of our habits and assumptions! Most of the things that worry me about this fall into the realm of the social and ethical. I hope there are great artists to help us imagine around and work with this new reality.

As to whether it could be creative or comparable, I end up in circular thinking. Art means what we ascribe to it. It can be a provocation, but it is essentially always part of a conversation. Many artists are already using the inventions (and provocations) of AI in works of great substance, but of course the artists are still the ones bringing it into the room. If things change, maybe that will change too.

I've been following AI since the 1970s, when Marvin Minsky [one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence] and I spent time together. But AI has emerged as the product of an extraordinary computation capacity; algorithm, which is quite different from what Minsky had imagined when he started working on it. For him, AI was the science of making machines be as intelligent as humans, with the capacity for human reasoning.

Right now, it seems to me that AI has an extraordinary capacity to analyze, but I don't see it yet doing the kinds of things we, architects, do in our head when we design, which involves taking into account a very large number of variables and sorting them out. And yet, as an architect, I think AI can change our lives. If we ask the right questions, AI is going to give us significant answers. For example, I can ask AI, "I have this building that's sitting on this particular site, and I'd like to optimize the sun, the shadow pattern, and I'd like to position the windows at the place of optimal orientation," and I think AI could give us a helpful response. We could perfect our designs or improve them based on the response. But I don't think it's going to give us the whole answer. For example, if you ask AI to make a garden with hideaways, clearings, and planting arrangements for all the seasons, I think it'll do that very well. But if you want to have a garden arranged in a way that is magical and pleases you, I'm not sure it can do that.

I'm not frightened of AI at all. I'm intrigued. I think AI will be able to create graphic presentations of extraordinary beauty and interest, but that leads us to the question of what is art. Art has an element that is spiritual, emotional. It is something that happens when you look at Picasso's "Guernica" and makes you think of the cruelty of humans to humans, or when you look at a Monet piece, and you feel the unity with nature. In terms of art created by AI, I don't think we can call it art. I don't see AI yet doing the kind of creative things we do. I can see that it composes a piece of music, but I don't think it could create Beethoven's last sonatas on its own. AI can imitate something that's already been created and regurgitate it in another format, but that is not an original work.

When our firm designed the Jewel Changi Airport in Singapore, our idea was to have retail shops, airport facilities, and an attraction. The idea that this attraction should be a magical garden came from me. I wonder if AI could have come up with the same idea. I don't think so, but who knows? That would be a very interesting test.

I don't know if Minsky's dream of artificial intelligence is attainable because it assumed that AI attains consciousness and independence of thoughts. Therefore, in some ways, artificial intelligence is a misnomer. Maybe I'm underestimating its capacity, but from where I stand as an amateur, because I'm an architect, not a mathematician, it seems to me that intelligence assumes a certain independence and consciousness, which I don't think AI has right now.

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Is art generated by artificial intelligence real art?

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Writer, animator, architect, musician, and mixed-media artist detail the potential value and limit of works produced by AI.