Hottentot Venus

The Curious in Ecstasy or Shoelaces, by Louis François Charon, 1815. Satire of English fascination with South African-born Saartjie Baartman who was exhibited under the name Hottentot Venus. The British Museum, London.

Foreigners

Volume VIII, Number 1 | winter 2015

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Preamble

Them

By Lewis H. Lapham

When we talk about the foreign, the question becomes one of us versus them. But in the end, is one just the opposite side of the other?

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Map

Us

Means of Inclusion

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Miscellany

While on his American lecture tour in 1882, Oscar Wilde drank elderberry wine with Walt Whitman; saw Niagara Falls, later noting, “Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life”; read aloud passages from Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography to miners in Colorado; and witnessed a lynching in Louisiana.

Of troubles none is greater than to be robbed of one’s native land.

- Euripides, 431 BC

Lapham’sDaily

U.S. secretary of agriculture Sonny Perdue meets with German minister of food and agriculture Christian Schmidt, 2017.

DÉjÀ Vu

Equal Climates

2017:

U.S. Department of Agriculture bans words related to climate change.

-350:

Aristotle denies that the climate is changing.

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The 7th New York Militia Regiment marches down Broadway, an illustration from Harper’s Weekly, 1861.

LQ Podcast

#11 John Strausbaugh

Lewis H. Lapham talks with John Strausbaugh, author of City of Sedition: The History of New York City During the Civil War. More