Wilberforce, Clarkson, Wesley. Britain’s great abolitionist activist Granville Sharp. Each of these consequential figures of eighteenth-century Atlantic world were galvanized by the moral power of a modest Quaker teacher who never ventured more than a few miles from his home in Philadelphia: Anthony Benezet. While Benezet was buried in an unmarked grave, his fingerprints are all over the extinction of the Atlantic slave trade and the gathering strength of America’s own burgeoning abolitionist movement. He was a figure of global importance, “a saint,” Garry Wills called him, a great bearer to the rest of the world of the American ideals (no matter how compromised) of equality and liberty.

A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI

Drawing on two years of ethnographic research mixed with archival work, Immigrants, Brokers, and Literacy as Affinity explores literacy’s entanglement in networks of economic and political forces. Ligia A. Mihut proposes and theorizes the figure of the literacy broker, embodied by those who help immigrants with reading and writing as they cross national, cultural, and linguistic borders. Whether these brokers use personal stories, language of empathy, or social connections, they collectively develop an emotional discourse repertoire that Mihut has coined as literacy as affinity. As such, literacy as affinity is explored in various locales where unequal power dynamics may emerge: local communities, schools, libraries, workplaces, or homes. Literacy brokers are intermediaries, advocating for those who, based on their economic, national, or political identity, find themselves reaching for the American dream.

Art, Architecture & Sculpture

Socially Engaged Public Art

Short reviews of recent releases.

A Monument to Blackness offers an in-depth excavation of Black murals across the United States, from interior murals in the South to street murals predominantly in the North and West.

Painting History: The Murals of Northern Ireland, 1908–2024 is the first book-length study of the oldest and most enduring tradition of political wall art.

Open Access, Care, and the Commons

Charlottesville's Black Freedom Struggle and the Making of the American High School