June 27

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
June 27, 1936: Lucille Clifton born.

Q&A with Mia Birdsong

Mia Birdsong is the author of the new book How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community. She is an activist, facilitator, and storyteller, and a senior fellow of the Economic Security Project. She lives in Oakland, California.

Q: What inspired you to write How We Show Up?

A: Writing a book was something I’d thought about as a someday kind of thing, but I didn’t have a specific book in mind.

I was approached by an editor after an event where I spoke. We met up and she asked me great questions that helped me articulate something that had been trying to come forward from the back of my mind.

It was very much about things I needed answers to--questions about belonging, intimacy, interdependence, and accountability. As soon as I realized what the questions were, I knew where to look for answers.

The people I have seen with the most expansive, inclusive, loving, interdependent relationships of family and community are Black, queer, unhoused--folks who experience marginalization. How we show up is very much the book I needed to read.

Q: Your first chapter focuses on the American Dream, and you write that it is "both an illusion and an aspiration." Can you say more about that?

A: The idea of an America meritocracy where anyone can make it with a little hard work is a lie. Most people weren’t even included in the Founders vision of “we the people.”

They didn’t mean women, they didn’t mean Black or Indigenous people, they didn’t mean poor people. They were talking about land-owning white men, like themselves.

That foundational history is the foundation of our systems and institutions. Most wealth in this country is concentrated in the hands of white men.

In my mind, the aspirational part is not about leveling the playing field, but re-envisioning the dream itself. I want things to be more fair, it’s not like having more diversity among the wealth hoarders is better. That would still leave most of us struggling to get by without basic human rights like housing, food, health care, and education.

We’re seeing our greater aspirations articulated in movements that are calling for things like guaranteed income and the abolition of police and prisons. And the progress that’s being made makes clear to us that nothing we want to create a generous, caring, just world is too much, nothing we want to create the future we deserve is unrealistic.

Q: What are some approaches people can take toward community-building during this time of pandemic?

A: There are so many things! I’ve been focusing on how to give and receive support.

For example, I’ve been doing a lot more sharing with neighbors and friends to avoid going to the grocery store. My neighbors across the street just left a bunch of artichokes on my porch. The day before they texted asking if we had any mirin so we gave them an extra bottle we had.

I just gave my next-door neighbor a dozen eggs from our chickens. He has a steady supply of mustard greens for us. I have a neighbor who works at a drug store and she brought me a couple containers of disinfectant wipes when I mentioned that I was having a hard time finding any.

I have a friend who texts me and a couple of other folks when she goes grocery shopping to ask if she can get us anything from the store. At first, I hesitated to say yes because I know what a pain in the ass grocery shopping has become. But I push past my discomfort every time because it’s legitimately helpful. This last week I actually texted her ahead of time to let her know we needed coffee.

This cycle of mutuality strengthens the connections between us, it carves out the grooves of healthy interdependence. These are the kinds of community bonds that build our sense of belonging and actually make us safer.

Q: What do you see looking ahead when it comes to "showing up" for others?

A: I’m mostly focusing on what I know we can do. Covid and this latest cycle of white violence has made it even more clear that our “normal” was failing. Our systems and institutions are supposed to provide us with basic human rights, but they won’t do that unless we demand it.

We’re seeing people show up in opposition to white violence in ways that are creating powerful change. I am hopeful that that level of solidarity continues and becomes more deeply embedded and normalized in our culture.

And then there are some things that systems and institutions can’t and shouldn’t try to do for us.

For example, the government should provide us with excellent health care. But if I’m sick, a friend or a neighbor is going to bring me soup and help me get to and from medical appointments. There is a kind of love, care, consideration, and connectedness that we can only get from each other.

Covid has many of us leaning more deeply into our interdependence. It has us practicing solidarity in ways we haven’t before. I hope that no matter what comes next, we keep tending to our solidarity and interdependence. I hope we allow ourselves to be more vulnerable and intimate with others and reject the lie that we can make it on our own.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m collaborating on a guided journal for the book. It will allow readers to think deeply and creatively about their own relationships and create plans for the kind of growth they’d like to see.

I also started a TV show called My Brilliant Friends. Several weeks ago I realized that the people I wanted to guide me through this uncertain time and into a better future are people I know. And I thought other people might want to hear from them too, so I started this live video series. It’s been fun and has expanded a lot of my thinking in meaningful ways.

Other than that, a lot of my work has disappeared because it involved in-person speaking or facilitating, so I’m also spending a lot more time working on my little city farm. I’ve been gardening for a long time and a few years ago, I added bees and chickens. It’s sanctuary for me and the people in my household. That’s helping to keep me grounded.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I’ve been doing a series of Instagram posts to share more about many of the people I interviewed for the book. So many of them do incredible work and I wanted to say more about them. If you follow me on Instagram @miabirdsong, you can see all that.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with Barb Rosenstock

Barb Rosenstock is the author of the new children's picture book biography Leave It to Abigail!: The Revolutionary Life of Abigail Adams. Her many other books include the new picture book Fight of the Century: Alice Paul Battles Woodrow Wilson for the Vote. She lives in the Chicago area.

Q: Why did you decide to write a children's picture book biography of Abigail Adams, and what do you see as her legacy today?

A: At school visits, there have been a number of elementary school girls who would ask me why I didn’t write about more girls. And that got me thinking…why DIDN’T I write about more girls? Is it possible I was coming at history because I’d been taught a white, male focus?

So I made a conscious effort to focus on some female characters from history. I almost ignored Abigail, though she is sometimes considered America’s first feminist, because all I’d really been taught about her was that she hung laundry in The White House. I had learned in school that she was a housewife, a supporting player, kind of “not worthy” of a book.

And then I started researching in depth…and learned she was a great writer, an open-minded teacher, a committed patriot, a feeder of troops and maker of bullets, a businesswoman, a farmer, you name it, Abigail could do it. John Adams, as a Founding Father, does not exist in history if not for Abigail Adams, Founding Mother. 

Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you? 

A: I read a lot of books, of course, and much of Abigail's copious correspondence. But it was in visiting the Adams Historical Park in Massachusetts and seeing Abigail’s daily life that the book came together.

What surprised me most was how modern Abigail seemed at every turn. She juggled business, friendships, marriage, children, politics, and made it look effortless…plus her warmth and humor comes through in her writing. You were lucky if you could call Abigail Adams a friend. I was lucky to research her life and meet the historians who are preserving her work and legacy.

Q: What do you think Elizabeth Baddeley's illustrations add to the book?  

A: I always say that the key to writing a picture book is writing HALF the story…the other half is for the illustrator. I try to leave room in the book for the art to work out its own details.

Elizabeth brought to life all the emotions and period details of Abigail’s colonial world that would bog down the text. And she accomplished the ultimate, this is (as far as we know) the first book of all time to actually have cross-stitched endpapers and spot art.

Elizabeth is not only an accomplished illustrator, she decided to honor Abigail and women’s work in general by stitching the art by hand. WOW! Take a look, you’ll be blown away!

Q: You also have a new picture book out called Fight of the Century--what can you tell us about that book? 

A: Again, those grade school girls got to me! As if 2020 hasn’t been exciting enough, it is also the anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment which gave women the right to vote.

In Fight of the Century, I tell the story of Alice Paul’s fight for women’s suffrage. The person she was fighting against was the president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson.

Alice and her group used peaceful protest tactics (among the first time in the U.S. that peaceful protest was used to influence a sitting president) and led the first group to ever picket the White House. Woodrow fought, Alice fought harder, and won!

The book is set up like a boxing match. Alice believed in her cause and she was on the right side of history. 

Q: What are you working on now? 

A: I have picture books coming out on the artist Monet (with Mary Grandpré), Monarch butterflies (with Erika Meza), and life in the Sargasso Sea (with Katherine Roy). I’m noodling around with elephant science, Picasso, spiritualism, and ocean migrations, so we shall see.

Q: Anything else we should know? 

A: Please honor our Founding Mothers and those who fought for our suffrage and VOTE in 2020! Also, please support the justice and civil rights causes you believe in. Our country’s future depends on active, engaged, participating citizens.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Barb Rosenstock.

June 26

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
June 26, 1892: Pearl S. Buck born.

Q&A with Rebecca Earle

Rebecca Earle is the author of the new book Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato. Her other books include The Body of the Conquistador and The Return of the Native. She is professor of history at the University of Warwick, UK.

Q: Why did you decide to write this book about potatoes?

A: My journey to this book started a long time ago. I thought of myself as a historian of Spanish America. The last project I did before getting interested in potatoes involved what the Spanish settlers in Latin America thought happened to their bodies when they ate unfamiliar food.

People thought about their health in terms of maintaining stability and not changing their whole lifestyle. Food turned out to be really important in keeping their body on a level plane. Too much unfamiliar food was destabilizing. Particularly starchy food like potatoes and corn—too much was seen as really bad for you.

I was aware that at the time that settlers in Peru were saying it was “iffy food,” potatoes were going global. I got interested in how the potato, which in Spanish colonialism was seen as dubious—how did it travel through the whole world?

Q: How did you research the book, and what did you find that especially surprised you?

A: Another reason I got into writing about potatoes is that the story about how potatoes spread into Europe in the 16^th and 17^th centuries never sat right with me.

It was particularly satisfying to find I was right to be suspicious. Most people in Europe distrusted potatoes. They weren’t in the Bible; they were lumpy and peculiar. People were flummoxed by them. Nobody would eat potatoes until farsighted aristocrats [led the way] and poor people learned to eat potatoes.

That really bothered me, the idea of the gullible peasants and enlightened monarchs. There’s evidence that the first people to grow potatoes were small farmers and peasants!

Q: You write, "Potatoes, in short, are a good way of thinking about the origins of the modern world." What are some ways in which they help understand the origins of the modern world?

A: I think of the modern world as shaped by capitalism. The Enlightenment idea helped create modernity, and potatoes are a way of thinking through that.

The Enlightenment idea was to focus on the individual, the freethinking autonomous individual. That was the basis of democracy, of the modern world—that’s how we build society. It’s what Kant wrote about, making your own decisions.

Also emerging in the 18^th century was the idea of society as a collective, to be individuals but not spiral off in [many different] directions.

This underpinned classical economics. Adam Smith wrote about people making self-interested choices that flow together. It’s a recipe not for chaos, but for individual choices to organize the self into something that still works.

Why potatoes? It’s a way of thinking about that. How does it work that individual choices lead to a well-functioning society, and is that really true?

There are tensions about public health and eating that go right to that tension. There’s the idea that we should choose what we eat, but we’re concerned that if everybody else makes bad decisions we will be an uncompetitive [society]. The tension is between organizing ourselves but wanting government organization.

The debates about potatoes emerged in the 18^th century. Potatoes were at the heart of many debates. People should eat potatoes—we’re not ordering you, but you ought to do it.  You can get to tensions about where we sit in relation to the collective.

Q: What do you see looking ahead when it comes to the intersection between food and politics?

A: The situation we are all in right now is making people think about food.

There was an open letter a novelist in Italy published when Italy was in lockdown, a letter from your future, a list of things we are going to be doing. It said you’ll eat, and then you’ll eat again. There are not that many other things to do. Food is looming large in people’s minds.

There’s an interesting article by Michael Pollan in the New York Review of Books on meat-packing plants, where social distancing is impossible. Thousands of people have died of the virus, and he looks at their health and the health of eaters.

Whether this will stick, I don’t know.

Q: You include some recipes in the book--how did you choose them?

A: I wasn’t going to put recipes in, but to their credit, the publishers said they wanted recipes! I doff my hat to Cambridge.

I was trying to look for recipes that exemplified the point I was trying to make in that chapter. If I’m saying there was a late 18^th century vogue for creating soups for the poor using potatoes, I would find a recipe. It’s partly looking at it as evidence, and looking for things that were surprising.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Online teaching. I’m head of the department in the history department at Warwick, and my life has been taken over by what the pandemic has done to university teaching.

My aspiration is to look at recipes as archives of women’s lives. Women who didn’t write letters had a dogeared cookbook or collections of recipe cards. It’s how we use these sources to open up stories.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with David Stasavage

David Stasavage is the author of the new book The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today. His other books include Taxing the Rich and States of Credit. He is dean for the social sciences and Julius Silver Professor of Politics at New York University.

Q: Why did you decide to write this book focusing on the history of democracy?

A: I’ve done a lot of work on governance and states in Europe, and how we got to democracy. I wrote a paper on how democracy developed in Europe and not elsewhere, and I realized I got it wrong.

Democracy is not a European invention, it’s more of a human invention. I wanted to look at how it developed and why, and why modern democracy arose in Europe and not in the Middle East.

Q: You begin your book by writing, "Where does democracy come from, how is it sustained, and what is its future? These are questions that have a special salience today in our current age of democratic anxiety." Can you say more about how understanding this history helps us understand what’s going on today?

A: What we learned in school tended to tell us that there were ancient forms of democracy and that the founding fathers created a representative form of democracy that worked well in the United States.

It lost sight of the fact that the way most people participate in democracy is by voting. In earlier forms, people participated in a deep and connected way. The Greek form of democracy was that the people should govern.

If we lose sight of that—now, participation is extremely broad but not deep, and we need to think about how to make it deeper, and for people to be connected.

It’s even more of a problem in a society as large as ours today. People begin to distrust [the system]. If democracy is about governing and people distrust it, it leads to bad changes, the polarization and distrust we are experiencing today.

There has been a lot of discussion lately about whether democracy is in retreat or even dying. If we want to understand why that might or might not happen we need to look at the deep history of democratic governance covering many centuries on multiple continents.  

Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?

A: The book covers a lot of societies over a long time span. I can’t pretend to be a specialist [on all of them], but there are good secondary sources and good ethnographic accounts.

In Chapter 2, there’s the example of the Huron in North America. French Jesuits tried to convert them, and they wrote 70-odd volumes about them. It’s a fantastically detailed if somewhat biased account of a society with no real central state. The only way anyone could govern was to seek the cooperation of the general population.

If you get a leader who begins to create a state bureaucracy, it’s hard to supersede that with democracy. There’s a tension between the development of the state and the preservation of democracy.

I knew when I started this [book] that many societies had practiced collective governance, particularly before European conquest, but I don't think I appreciated just how widespread the practice was. I do think this gives us an entirely new perspective on democracy's origins. It wasn't invented in one place at one time.

Q: You examine various forms of government in Europe, China, and the Middle East. What are some of the key ways in which they differ?

A: China was best contrasted to Europe. It’s the European model stood on its head. There was a pattern of large centralized development with relatively advanced forms of agriculture, that was intensive and organized in a way that allowed rulers to monitor what people were doing and collect taxes.

It lent itself to a more autocratic form of government. It was more advanced than Europe, but more autocratic.

Agricultural development in Europe at the time was more primitive. There was more uncertainty about crops and what people were doing, and it was difficult for rulers to implement an autocratic model.

The rulers were obliged to govern with members of the population, who would form councils—the forerunners of parliaments or legislatures.

The Middle East was in between. It had a form of early democracy with a lot of consultation. The only option was collective government.

It didn’t change as a result of Islam. It changed when, as a result of the Arab conquest, the area in present-day Iraq developed intensive agriculture. The caliphs copied them, and they no longer needed people to help them govern. They were off to a more autocratic pattern of rule.

The really stark difference between these three regions was how China and the Middle East had much stronger states at an early date if we think about how much revenue they could extract from society. This went hand in hand with an autocratic model of governance. 

European states were very weak through the medieval and early modern era, and it was this weakness that forced rulers to govern collectively with their people. This was the only way to do things, and it set Europe off on a different, more democratic course.

Q: What do you see looking ahead when it comes to democracy, particularly here in the United States?

A: Our system of democracy with voting, the representative way we [experience democracy], may need to evolve. You can adopt democracy in a different way.

When you go back to the early republic in the United States, the elites were not resting on their laurels and saying we have a constitution and that’s fine. They were terrified it might not work, having a democratic form of government on this scale.

The two big efforts were the Postal Service Act of 1792, which subsidized the distribution of newspapers for a penny, and the common school movement of the early 19^th century, with state-funded schools for everybody.

The idea was that if we want democracy, people need to be educated.

One of the things we have learned in recent years is that in a very large democracy like the United States it is hard to keep citizens connected with government, and this then leads to distrust and polarization. 

Whether or not Donald Trump wins in November, this problem is not going to go away easily. To deal with it we need to make new investments in connecting citizens with government in a way that leaders did in the early republic.

Q: What do you think should be done to make people feel more connected?

A: One way was shown in the past few weeks. A large-scale decentralized movement went and protested to exercise their thoughts about the grave injustices done to African Americans. It’s an essential part of democratic participation. My kids are sensitized to things in a way that I was not at their age.

A second way is how online participation can work in governance. It’s only been for a short period of time; it’s something we’ll figure out over time.

The Black Lives Matter form of participation happened on its own but in some way we need the efforts of the government to get people involved.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: The book I published before this, with a co-author, was Taxing the Rich. Democracy on its own has done little to generate equality, despite the idea that people have the same right to participate.

I suggest in the current book that when you go back to the 18^th or 19^th centuries, they were not worried about inequality, they worried about the radical expropriation of wealth. If our institutions were designed to contain efforts to reduce inequality, was there too much done?

It’s a tricky question. In the 19^th century, as democracy was spreading in Western Europe, the elites saw that it didn’t result in punitively high tax rates for the wealthy, and that people with money could get along very well in a democracy.

That is a real question going forward, particularly after the epidemic. It could lead to a dramatic escalation of economic inequalities, correlated with race. And also gender inequalities. With Zoom and online schooling, invariably women are juggling homeschooling and kids.

Our democracy may not be very well suited to cope with this. I’m starting to write and think about those issues.

The question for us today, and all the more so in the wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter, is how our democracy could actually do something about inequality.  

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

Q&A with David Parrish

David Parrish is the author of the new book The Gyroscope of Life: Understanding Balances (and Imbalances) in Nature. He is a Virginia Tech professor emeritus of crop and soil environmental sciences, and he lives in southwestern Virginia.

Q: Why did you decide to write this book, and how long did it take to complete it?

A: The impetus to writing the book was twofold. One was my dear niece, who is an author and a book agent. Whenever we got together, she would encourage me to write a book. I never felt I knew enough about anything that would appeal to a general audience.

Then, I received a 2016 Christmas gift from my younger son of Hope Jahren's Lab Girl, which is a very readable account of her life as a biologist and soil scientist. About halfway through her book, I began thinking, "Maybe I can do something like this."  So I began writing Gyro. That was over three years ago. 

I call this book "my love song to biology." My goal from the outset has been to make biology as fun and appealing to nonscientists as it has been for me.

My problem: I had no experience writing for a non-technical audience. It took me some time to find a "voice" and develop content that would appeal to a wider audience.

The book has gone through three versions. It started out as "Plant Philosophy" and was almost entirely botanical. But there are just too many good stories and examples that come from zoology. So I added lots of new words. To keep it from becoming a tome, lots of old words -- to include whole chapters -- were "left on the cutting room floor".

Q: How was the book's title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

A: I was two years into working on the book when using a gyroscope metaphorically to explain balances (and imbalances) in nature just "appeared" during a writing session.

Life, whether considered at the cellular level -- cells being the basic units of life -- or at higher levels of organization (organisms, ecosystems, or even the ecosphere), prospers when all of the requisite parts are present and operating smoothly.

Anything that disrupts that balance puts life at risk -- causes the gyroscope (life) to wobble or even teeter over.

Gyroscopes were a favorite toy when I was growing up. It was a real "aha" moment when I realized how apt it was as a metaphor for life. It caused me to go back and rework major sections of chapters already written.

This was the second version of the book, which came about after letting the whole project sit on a back burner for several months, allowing me to come back to it with fresh eyes and an improved voice.

Q: You created the word "autobiologic," which you use in the book--how would you define it, and how does it fit into the creation of this book?

A: Interesting question, because this is what led to the third/final version of the book. After putting the second version of the book aside for another few months, I realized that, in my attempts to write in a more accessible way, I was venturing into some areas that were not really science-based.

I was resorting regularly to what I decided to call “autobiologic” (auto = self, bio = life, logic = reason), bits of blue-sky musing and reasoning – not science as it is more deliberately practiced. 

These are occasions where, in dealing with some principle or phenomenon, I would go off on explanatory or exploratory riffs, relying more on logic than on data. The reasoning is sound, but it is not always data based.

So, to duck the potential criticism of "real" scientists, I labeled such musings "autobiologic." In the third major revision of the book, a lot of autobiological discussions were so labeled, and I felt comfortable in ascribing autobiologic to other scientists as well; Darwin used it a lot.

Q: You write that you are "sanguine" about there being solutions to the problems besetting the earth. What do you see looking ahead?

A: I am confident that Mother Nature can repair the damage we are doing to the planet if we will just allow her to. Life is resilient (extinctions aside). The gyroscopes can repair themselves and run smoothly/sustainably again.

But that cannot happen until we bring our numbers down. The way we feed 7.7 billion of us is not sustainable. The disruption of climate caused by human activities is destabilizing gyroscopes at all levels of life. Earth simply cannot sustain so many of us.

I have hopes -- which is really not the same as sanguine, but I wanted to sound positive -- that we can find a humane way to bring down the number of human beings on this planet. Demographers point out that birth rates drop as standards of living, education, and women's status rise.

We must work past the current political/social impasse caused by provincialism and nationalism and realize that Earth is everyone's home and that the same tide that lifts dinghies, skiffs, and scows also lifts ocean liners.

Only if we can gain control of our reproduction can we hope to see things begin to move in a positive direction ecologically and environmentally.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: We could make the case that biology is an existential science. I firmly believe that understanding (and applying) biological principles can make a positive difference in human lives and in all life.

I'd like to think that this little book might cause readers to see life, gender, sustainability, science, and our place on Earth in a more nuanced way -- a way that allows Mother Nature to restore balance to life's gyroscopes.

The notion of subduing the Earth and having dominion over its living forms was okay in the day when that was written, maybe 3,500 years ago. That was in the Bronze Age, and Earth's population was probably 35 to 40 million. In the Industrial Age and with 7.7 billion of us, that philosophy simply does not play well.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb