Category: Academic Reportage

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Steven Sullivan, Director of the Hefner Museum of Natural History, Miami University

Your neighborhood is home to all sorts of amazing animals, from racoons, squirrels and skunks to birds, bugs and snails. Even if you don’t see them, most of these creatures are leaving evidence of their activities all around you.

Paw prints in different shapes and sizes are clues to the visitors who pass through. The shapes of tunnels and mounds in your yard carry the mark of their builders.

Even the stuff animals leave behind, whether poop or skeletons, tells you something about the wilder side of the neighborhood.

I’m a zoologist and director of the Hefner Museum of Natural History at Miami University of Ohio, where we work with all kinds of wildlife specimens. With a little practice, you’ll soon notice a lot more evidence of your neighborhood friends when you step outside.

What makes those animal tracks?

You can learn a lot from a nice, crisp paw print.

The dog family, including coyotes and foxes, can be differentiated from the cat family by the shape of their palm pads — triangular for dogs, two lobes at the peak for cats.

Both opossums and raccoons leave prints that look like those of a tiny human, but the opossum thumb is held at nearly right angles to the rest of the fingers.

Not all prints are so clear, however.

Invasive rats and native squirrels have prints that often look pretty similar to each other. Water erosion of a skunk print left in mud might connect the toe tips to the palm, making it look more like a raccoon. And prints left in winter slush by the smallest dog in the neighborhood can grow through freezing and thawing to proportions that make people wonder whether wolves have returned to their former haunts.

There are good reference books where you can learn more about track analysis, and it can be fun to go down the rabbit hole of collecting and studying prints.

Clues from holes and other animal excavations

Often, it’s easiest to figure out which animal left a paw print by correlating its tracks with other evidence.

If what look like squirrel prints lead to a hole in the ground, then it wasn’t a tree squirrel. Stuff a handful of leaves or newspaper in the hole. If it gets pushed out during the day, the hole is probably inhabited by a ground squirrel, such as a chipmunk. But if the plug is pushed out at night, you probably have a rat.

I once noticed a faint trail in the soil near my porch. Using the hole-stuffing method, I determined that something spent most days under the wooden stairs that people constantly, and often loudly, traversed. When I was pretty sure my newly discovered neighbor was home, I used a mirror and flashlight to investigate the opening without exposing myself to a protective resident. Sure enough, there was a cute little skunk staring back at me.

Skunks, and many other local animals, often leave obvious excavations in lawns.

Lawns are biological deserts where few species can live, but those that can survive there often reach high numbers. Lawn grubs – the milk-white, C-shaped caterpillars of a few beetle species – particularly love the lack of competition found in a carpet of grass. Polka dots of dead thatch are one sign of these grubs, but if you have a biodiverse neighborhood, many animals will consume this high-calorie treat before you ever notice them.

Skunks and raccoons will dig up each grub individually, leaving a small hole that healthy grass can refill quickly. Moles – fist-size insectivores more closely related to bats than rodents – live underground where they virtually swim through soil, leaving slightly raised trails visible in mowed lawns. In spring and fall, moles make volcano-shaped mounds with no visible opening.

Gophers, on the other hand, are herbivorous rodents – they eat plants rather than grubs. They also leave tunnels and mounds, but the tunnels are usually very visible and their mounds are crescent-shaped, often with a visible opening.

Voles, not to be confused with moles, are also herbivorous rodents. They’re mouse-size, with tiny, furry ears and short tails. They may dig small holes, but more obviously they leave thatch-lined runways on the surface.

Even the cicadas singing loudly in the trees in my yard this summer left pinky-size holes in the ground as they emerged 17 years after hatching. The boom-bust cycle of cicadas has brought more moles, squirrels and birds to my neighborhood this year to munch on the nutrient-rich insects.

The evidence left behind, including poop

Where there is food, there is poop. Though the subject of feces is taboo among polite human society, it’s a fundamental, though understudied, communication method for many mammals.

Think about a dog marking its territory. Sometimes it seems they can’t go for more than a few feet before reading the pee-mail left on every prominent post. Urine, feces and gland oil act like social media posts, conveying each individual’s identity, health, height and reproductive status, the availability and quality of prey, and the extent of their territory.

Though most of the smell communication is lost on humans, the contents of the feces can tell a lot about the inhabitants of a neighborhood.

Domestic dog poop is usually just a big, homogeneous lump because they eat processed food, but wild canid feces is often full of bones and fur. Coyote feces is usually lumpy and larger than fox feces, which has pointy ends. Once it has weathered a bit, it’s easy to break open to find identifiable remains such as vole, rat and rabbit. Use care when inspecting feces, since it may transmit parasites.

Depending on time of year, the contents and shape of feces can vary considerably. Raccoon feces lacks the pointy ends and is often filled with seeds, but wild canids may eat lots of seeds, too. Deer feces is usually small, fibrous pellets, but those pellets may form clumps.

If you are lucky, you might find a pellet of bone and fur regurgitated by an owl near the base of a tree. Carefully break it apart and there’s a good chance you’ll find the skull of a vole or rat.

Look closely at living and dead trees to find evidence of even smaller neighbors. A fine, uniform, granular sawdust pushed from tiny holes in bark can indicate beetle larvae feces, or “frass.” A large mass of frass at the base of a tree likely indicates carpenter ants.

In contrast to dusty frass, aphids slurp sap so rich in sugar that their feces coats surrounding surfaces in, essentially, maple syrup.

All of these insects attract many species of birds. Woodpeckers are hard to miss as they loudly hammer holes into trees. But don’t blame them for tree decline – they eat the things that are killing the tree.

Look for dead trees

Dead trees are a key feature of wildlife habitat, like a bus stop, and host different occupants throughout the day and over the year.

For example, a tree buzzing with cicadas in my yard this summer is quite healthy but has one big, dead branch that has been an important way station for wildlife over the past 20 years.

A decayed cavity at the base of the branch is polished smooth with the activity of generations of squirrels, while the tip is a favorite perch of all the neighborhood birds. By night, it is visited by a great horned owl, who, I somewhat sadly note, may be scanning for my porch skunk.

Decomposers: The neighborhood cleaning crew

This brings us to the decomposers. Animal carcasses are evidence of the neighborhood’s wild population, too, but they typically don’t last long. Insects make quick work of dead animals, often consuming the soft parts of a carcass before it is even noticed by humans.

Long after most activity around the carcass has ceased, exoskeletons left behind by the decomposers will remain in the soil. Dermestids, including the carpet beetles often found in our homes, leave fuzzy larval exoskeletons. Fly pupae look like brown pills. And sometimes adult carrion beetles keep a home underneath partially buried bones for years.

Earthworms, feasting on nutrient-soaked soil, may leave a squirt of mud like a string of hot glue, while ants will leave piles of uniformly sorted sand. Snails will visit carcasses periodically to eat the bones, leaving trails that sparkle like thin, impossibly long ribbons in the morning sun.

From snails to skunks, squirrels to cicadas, most of our neighbors are quiet and seldom interact with us, but they play important roles in the world.

As we get to know them better, through their digging, eating and decomposing, and sometimes by watching them in action, we can better understand the animals that make our own lives possible and, maybe, understand ourselves a little better, too.

Steven Sullivan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How to identify animal tracks, burrows and other signs of wildlife in your neighborhood – https://theconversation.com/how-to-identify-animal-tracks-burrows-and-other-signs-of-wildlife-in-your-neighborhood-261937

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Ted Powers, Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of California, Davis

An antibiotic discovered on Easter Island in 1964 sparked a billion-dollar pharmaceutical success story. Yet the history told about this “miracle drug” has completely left out the people and politics that made its discovery possible.

Named after the island’s Indigenous name, Rapa Nui, the drug rapamycin was initially developed as an immunosuppressant to prevent organ transplant rejection and to improve the efficacy of stents to treat coronary artery disease. Its use has since expanded to treat various types of cancer, and researchers are currently exploring its potential to
treat diabetes,
neurodegenerative diseases and
even aging. Indeed, studies raising rapamycin’s promise to extend lifespan or combat age-related diseases seem to be published almost daily. A PubMed search reveals over 59,000 journal articles that mention rapamycin, making it one of the most talked-about drugs in medicine.

At the heart of rapamycin’s power lies its ability to inhibit a protein called the target of rapamycin kinase, or TOR. This protein acts as a master regulator of cell growth and metabolism. Together with other partner proteins, TOR controls how cells respond to nutrients, stress and environmental signals, thereby influencing major processes such as protein synthesis and immune function. Given its central role in these fundamental cellular activities, it is not surprising that cancer, metabolic disorders and age-related diseases are linked to the malfunction of TOR.

Despite being so ubiquitous in science and medicine, how rapamycin was discovered has remained largely unknown to the public. Many in the field are aware that scientists from the pharmaceutical company Ayerst Research Laboratories isolated the molecule from a soil sample containing the bacterium Streptomyces hydroscopicus in the mid-1970s. What is less well known is that this soil sample was collected as part of a Canadian-led mission to Rapa Nui in 1964, called the Medical Expedition to Easter Island, or METEI.

As a scientist who built my career around the effects of rapamycin on cells, I felt compelled to understand and share the human story underlying its origin. Learning about historian Jacalyn Duffin’s work on METEI completely changed how I and many of my colleagues view our own field.

Unearthing rapamycin’s complex legacy raises important questions about systemic bias in biomedical research and what pharmaceutical companies owe to the Indigenous lands from which they mine their blockbuster discoveries.

History of METEI

The Medical Expedition to Easter Island was the brainchild of a Canadian team comprised of surgeon Stanley Skoryna and bacteriologist Georges Nogrady. Their goal was to study how an isolated population adapted to environmental stress, and they believed the planned construction of an international airport on Easter Island offered a unique opportunity. They presumed that the airport would result in increased outside contact with the island’s population, resulting in changes in their health and wellness.

With funding from the World Health Organization and logistical support from the Royal Canadian Navy, METEI arrived in Rapa Nui in December 1964. Over the course of three months, the team conducted medical examinations on nearly all 1,000 island inhabitants, collecting biological samples and systematically surveying the island’s flora and fauna.

It was as part of these efforts that Nogrady gathered over 200 soil samples, one of which ended up containing the rapamycin-producing Streptomyces strain of bacteria.

It’s important to realize that the expedition’s primary objective was to study the Rapa Nui people as a sort of living laboratory. They encouraged participation through bribery by offering gifts, food and supplies, and through coercion by enlisting a long-serving Franciscan priest on the island to aid in recruitment. While the researchers’ intentions may have been honorable, it is nevertheless an example of scientific colonialism, where a team of white investigators choose to study a group of predominantly nonwhite subjects without their input, resulting in a power imbalance.

There was an inherent bias in the inception of METEI. For one, the researchers assumed the Rapa Nui had been relatively isolated from the rest of the world when there was in fact a long history of interactions with countries outside the island, beginning with reports from the early 1700s through the late 1800s.

METEI also assumed that the Rapa Nui were genetically homogeneous, ignoring the island’s complex history of migration, slavery and disease. For example, the modern population of Rapa Nui are mixed race, from both Polynesian and South American ancestors. The population also included survivors of the African slave trade who were returned to the island and brought with them diseases, including smallpox.

This miscalculation undermined one of METEI’s key research goals: to assess how genetics affect disease risk. While the team published a number of studies describing the different fauna associated with the Rapa Nui, their inability to develop a baseline is likely one reason why there was no follow-up study following the completion of the airport on Easter Island in 1967.

Giving credit where it is due

Omissions in the origin stories of rapamycin reflect common ethical blind spots in how scientific discoveries are remembered.

Georges Nogrady carried soil samples back from Rapa Nui, one of which eventually reached Ayerst Research Laboratories. There, Surendra Sehgal and his team isolated what was named rapamycin, ultimately bringing it to market in the late 1990s as the immunosuppressant Rapamune. While Sehgal’s persistence was key in keeping the project alive through corporate upheavals – going as far as to stash a culture at home – neither Nogrady nor the METEI was ever credited in his landmark publications.

Although rapamycin has generated billions of dollars in revenue, the Rapa Nui people have received no financial benefit to date. This raises questions about Indigenous rights and biopiracy, which is the commercialization of Indigenous knowledge.

Agreements like the United Nations’s 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity and the 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples aim to protect Indigenous claims to biological resources by encouraging countries to obtain consent and input from Indigenous people and provide redress for potential harms before starting projects. However, these principles were not in place during METEI’s time.

Some argue that because the bacteria that produces rapamycin has since been found in other locations, Easter Island’s soil was not uniquely essential to the drug’s discovery. Moreover, because the islanders did not use rapamycin or even know about its presence on the island, some have countered that it is not a resource that can be “stolen.”

However, the discovery of rapamycin on Rapa Nui set the foundation for all subsequent research and commercialization around the molecule, and this only happened because the people were the subjects of study. Formally recognizing and educating the public about the essential role the Rapa Nui played in the eventual discovery of rapamycin is key to compensating them for their contributions.

In recent years, the broader pharmaceutical industry has begun to recognize the importance of fair compensation for Indigenous contributions. Some companies have pledged to reinvest in communities where valuable natural products are sourced. However, for the Rapa Nui, pharmaceutical companies that have directly profited from rapamycin have not yet made such an acknowledgment.

Ultimately, METEI is a story of both scientific triumph and social ambiguities. While the discovery of rapamycin has transformed medicine, the expedition’s impact on the Rapa Nui people is more complicated. I believe issues of biomedical consent, scientific colonialism and overlooked contributions highlight the need for a more critical examination and awareness of the legacy of breakthrough scientific discoveries.

Ted Powers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. A billion-dollar drug was found in Easter Island soil – what scientists and companies owe the Indigenous people they studied – https://theconversation.com/a-billion-dollar-drug-was-found-in-easter-island-soil-what-scientists-and-companies-owe-the-indigenous-people-they-studied-250586

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Ernest Freeberg, Professor of History, University of Tennessee

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com.

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Who invented the light bulb? – Preben, age 5, New York City

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When people name the most important inventions in history, light bulbs are usually on the list. They were much safer than earlier light sources, and they made more activities, for both work and play, possible after the Sun went down.

More than a century after its invention, illustrators still use a lit bulb to symbolize a great idea. Credit typically goes to inventor and entrepreneur Thomas Edison, who created the first commercial light and power system in the United States.

But as a historian and author of a book about how electric lighting changed the U.S., I know that the actual story is more complicated and interesting. It shows that complex inventions are not created by a single genius, no matter how talented he or she may be, but by many creative minds and hands working on the same problem.

Making light − and delivering it

In the 1870s, Edison raced against other inventors to find a way of producing light from electric current. Americans were keen to give up their gas and kerosene lamps for something that promised to be cleaner and safer. Candles offered little light and posed a fire hazard. Some customers in cities had brighter gas lamps, but they were expensive, hard to operate and polluted the air.

When Edison began working on the challenge, he learned from many other inventors’ ideas and failed experiments. They all were trying to figure out how to send a current through a thin carbon thread encased in glass, making it hot enough to glow without burning out.

In England, for example, chemist Joseph Swan patented an incandescent bulb and lit his own house in 1878. Then in 1881, at a great exhibition on electricity in Paris, Edison and several other inventors demonstrated their light bulbs.

Edison’s version proved to be the brightest and longest-lasting. In 1882 he connected it to a full working system that lit up dozens of homes and offices in downtown Manhattan.

But Edison’s bulb was just one piece of a much more complicated system that included an efficient dynamo – the powerful machine that generated electricity – plus a network of underground wires and new types of lamps. Edison also created the meter, a device that measured how much electricity each household used, so that he could tell how much to charge his customers.

Edison’s invention wasn’t just a science experiment – it was a commercial product that many people proved eager to buy.

Inventing an invention factory

As I show in my book, Edison did not solve these many technical challenges on his own.

At his farmhouse laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison hired a team of skilled technicians and trained scientists, and he filled his lab with every possible tool and material. He liked to boast that he had only a fourth grade education, but he knew enough to recruit men who had the skills he lacked. Edison also convinced banker J.P. Morgan and other investors to provide financial backing to pay for his experiments and bring them to market.

Historians often say that Edison’s greatest invention was this collaborative workshop, which he called an “invention factory.” It was capable of launching amazing new machines on a regular basis. Edison set the agenda for its work – a role that earned him the nickname “the wizard of Menlo Park.”

Here was the beginning of what we now call “research and development” – the network of universities and laboratories that produce technological breakthroughs today, ranging from lifesaving vaccines to the internet, as well as many improvements in the electric lights we use now.

Sparking an electric revolution

Many people found creative ways to use Edison’s light bulb. Factory owners and office managers installed electric light to extend the workday past sunset. Others used it for fun purposes, such as movie marquees, amusement parks, store windows, Christmas trees and evening baseball games.

Theater directors and photographers adapted the light to their arts. Doctors used small bulbs to peer inside the body during surgery. Architects and city planners, sign-makers and deep-sea explorers adapted the new light for all kinds of specialized uses. Through their actions, humanity’s relationship to day and night was reinvented – often in ways that Edison never could have anticipated.

Today people take for granted that they can have all the light they need at the flick of a switch. But that luxury requires a network of power stations, transmission lines and utility poles, managed by teams of trained engineers and electricians. To deliver it, electric power companies grew into an industry monitored by insurance companies and public utility regulators.

Edison’s first fragile light bulbs were just one early step in the electric revolution that has helped create today’s richly illuminated world.

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Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

Ernest Freeberg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Who invented the light bulb? – https://theconversation.com/who-invented-the-light-bulb-255822

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Beverly Moran, Professor Emerita of Law, Vanderbilt University

Not long after U.S. housing prices reached a record high this summer – the median existing home went for US$435,000 in June – President Donald Trump said that he was considering a plan to make home sales tax-free.

Supporters of the idea, introduced by U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as the No Tax on Home Sales Act in July, say it would benefit working families by eliminating all taxes on the sales of family homes.

But most Americans who sell their homes already do so tax-free. And the households that would gain most under Trump’s proposals are those with the most valuable real estate.

As a legal scholar who studies how taxes affect racial and economic inequality, I see this proposal as part of a familiar pattern: measures advertised as relief for ordinary families that mostly benefit the well-off.

Most families already sell their homes tax-free

Right now, according to the Internal Revenue Code, a single person pays no tax on the first $250,000 in gain from a home sale, while married people can exclude $500,000. All told, about 90% of home sales generate less than $500,000 in gains, so the overwhelming majority of sellers already owe no tax.

The minority who would see new benefits from the proposed tax change are those with more than $500,000 in appreciation – typically owners of high-priced homes in hot real estate markets. Yale’s Budget Lab estimated the average benefit for these tax-free sales was $100,000 per qualifying seller.

Homeownership itself isn’t equally distributed across the U.S. population. About 44% of Black Americans are homeowners, compared with 74% of white Americans. That racial gap has only widened over the past 10 years. Similarly, single women – particularly but not exclusively women of color – face additional barriers.

A broader trend of upward wealth transference

Though still just a proposal, the tax-free home sales bill is part of a broader set of Republican tax plans that would have regressive effects – that is, where the vast majority of benefits go to high-income people and very few to low-income people – under a pro-worker banner.

Trump floated the tax-free home sales idea less than three weeks after he signed a large package of tax and spending measures in July 2025. That bill generated strong public criticism because of its emphasis on tax savings for the rich at the expense of almost a trillion dollars in cuts for federally funded health care for the poor and disabled.

The home sales idea follows the same script – and echoes the distributional pattern established by his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. That tax reform increased racial wealth and income disparities and provided 80% of its benefits to corporations and high-income individuals. In fact, my research shows that white households received more than twice as many tax cuts as Black households from that law.

The same dynamic plays out in this new tax-fueled housing policy. Eliminating capital gains taxes on home sales would primarily benefit the 29 million homeowners who already have substantial equity – a group that skews heavily white, male and upper middle class. Meanwhile, America’s millions of renters, disproportionately people of color and women, would receive no benefit while potentially losing access to social programs Congress must cut to fund these tax breaks.

Beverly Moran is a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, and Paulus Endowment senior tax fellow at Boston College.

– ref. Ending taxes on home sales would benefit the wealthiest households most – part of a larger pattern in Trump tax plans – https://theconversation.com/ending-taxes-on-home-sales-would-benefit-the-wealthiest-households-most-part-of-a-larger-pattern-in-trump-tax-plans-264959

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Susanna Ashton, Professor of English, Clemson University

From the ages of 12 to about 22, Harriet Jacobs lived under the watch of her enslaver, a wealthy physician named James Norcom Sr. During that decade, as Jacobs grew from a child to a young woman, Norcom psychologically and physically terrorized her.

Once, when she was a teenager, he threw her down the stairs of his Edenton, North Carolina house. He swore it would never happen again. But as Jacobs later wrote, “I knew that he would forget his promise.”

Jacobs’ injuries took weeks to heal. Even after they did, she made sure nobody would forget what happened by including this harrowing moment in her 1861 autobiographical novel, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself,” one of the most important testimonies of captivity and survival ever written.

In July 2025, we stumbled across the staircase during a visit to the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, an institution known for its preeminent collections of paintings, pottery, furniture and fine exhibits on Southern artisans and early American craft.

We’d gone there to see a table that belonged to a formerly enslaved writer named Samuel “Aleckson” Williams. But our attention was ultimately drawn several rooms away from the table, where we encountered woodwork – including the staircase Jacobs had written about – from the house where Norcom had enslaved her.

As scholars of 19th-century U.S. literature who regularly teach Jacobs’ “Incidents,” we were stunned to realize that the staircase had survived.

It caught us even more off guard because Jacobs’ life has been receiving a lot of attention from scholars. For decades, Jacobs’ book was read as a work of fiction, if it was even remembered at all. But in recent years, historians have recovered her papers and confirmed a number of biographical details. In 2024, a narrative written by her brother, John Jacobs, was republished.

For us, the experience highlighted the importance of these small, regional museums. The staircase hadn’t originally been salvaged due to its connection to Jacobs. But it had nonetheless been conserved and cared for, which allowed new meanings to slowly emerge.

A daring escape

In 1964, the Jacobs staircase – along with a door, a mantle and paneling – were taken from Norcom’s house in Edenton not because of their connection to Jacobs or her enslaver, but because of their significance to Revolutionary-era craftsmanship.

We weren’t the first to realize the staircase’s connection to Jacobs. Roughly 15 years ago, curator Robert Leath brought it to the attention of Anthony Parent, a history professor at Wake Forest University. Parent publicized the story of these material objects through local outreach and some scholarship.

But like many histories that emerge from unexpected places, the story of the staircase hasn’t gained much traction in broader conversations among Jacobs scholars, much less in popular memory and national history.

Across “Incidents,” Jacobs chronicles many moments of physical and psychological abuse. But the assault on the stairs stands out among the many acts of terror she endured.

“He had pitched me down stairs in a fit of passion,” she writes, “and the injury I received was so serious that I was unable to turn myself in bed for many days.”

Jacobs eventually fled her bondage and exchanged her life in captivity under Norcom for a life of quasi-freedom: She spent seven years hiding in a nearby attic. Eventually she made her way to the North, where she claimed her freedom and published her book.

Rediscovered in the 1970s, Jacobs’ story was so astonishing that some readers doubted its autobiographical accuracy. But historian Jean Yellin was able to verify many aspects of her narrative, including the fact that she had hidden in an attic for seven years.

Yellin’s revelations of Jacobs’ life and work – in addition to the harrowing experiences of other women held in captivity – helped change the way Americans have been able to learn about how women, both enslaved and free, survive coercion and sexual violence.

Hidden in plain sight

At the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, the staircase appears in between two separate galleries. On the wall along the steps to the first landing, a framed photograph of Harriet Jacobs and a framed copy of the first edition of “Incidents” hang. Though visitors are allowed to ascend the stairs, they don’t lead anywhere. In the next room are the mantel and wood paneling from the Norcom house.

The museum’s website doesn’t include a write-up of the Jacobs staircase, nor does it showcase an image of the impressive installation, although it’s cataloged with care – and, thanks in part to Parent’s advocacy, generations of students have visited the museum to see what survives of Jacobs’ house.

The museum staff recounted the story of the staircase to us in the course of a conversation about Williams. They, too, believe that the stories behind objects have a way of enduring, even as the importance and meaning of artifacts change over time.

Stories that unfold in surprising ways

The installation at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts demonstrates the power of regional museums to preserve artifacts whose stories unfold over generations – whose meaning may not rest on the reasons they are salvaged, purchased or preserved, and whose significance might seem to be an accident in hindsight. These stories matter, even – and especially – when they played a role in the most violent chapters in U.S. history.

Jacobs’ staircase was valuable when it was acquired; it was understood then as an example of fine 18th-century craftsmanship, and that’s a story worth preserving and learning. And yet its story now has more chapters that enrich the narrative.

As the Trump administration is reassessing “troubling” ideological content at the Smithsonian and elsewhere – slashing grants and budgets and even advocating for the removal or reconstruction of exhibits that tell difficult stories – we think it’s important to look anew at how museums preserve objects and the acts of survival they carry forward.

This isn’t a story of discovery and recovery. Instead, our experience simply demonstrates why museums, archives and libraries matter. These institutions require space to play the long game, in ways no one can anticipate, so they can continue doing what they do best: collect, preserve, document and curate.

In doing so, they allow stories like Jacobs’ to unfold in remarkable and utterly unforeseeable ways.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. A staircase in a small, decorative arts museum tells a harrowing story of terror, abuse and enslavement – https://theconversation.com/a-staircase-in-a-small-decorative-arts-museum-tells-a-harrowing-story-of-terror-abuse-and-enslavement-263976

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Sally Jane Brown, Curator, West Virginia University

When American artist Dorothea Tanning painted “Birthday” in 1942, she announced her arrival – an artistic birth, as she later described it – into the surrealist movement.

Surrealism is an avant-garde art and literary movement that began in Paris in the 1920s and sought to unleash the unconscious mind. Women artists within the movement often drew on its dreamlike language to counter male surrealists’ idealized and objectifying portrayals of women, reclaiming their own agency and identity.

The movement’s centennial will be celebrated during the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s “Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100” exhibition, which opens Nov. 8, 2025, and runs through Feb. 16, 2026.

As an artist, writer and curator who focuses on feminism in art history, I’m excited to see Tanning’s “Birthday” displayed in Philadelphia alongside works by canonical male surrealists such as Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró. This juxtaposition invites viewers to reexamine surrealism through the contributions of women like Tanning, as well as Leonora Carrington and perhaps Remedios Varo.

These women brought radical innovations to the movement. Their depictions of female experiences of sexual awakening, domestic entrapment and psychic resistance added new depth to the dreamscapes envisioned by their male contemporaries.

A steady, unseductive gaze

In “Birthday,” the artist paints herself bare-chested and wearing an elaborate skirt composed of flowing, vinelike forms that intertwine with female figures, evoking an organic world somewhere between vegetation and the sea. She stands tall in a corridor lined with doors that seem to recede endlessly. Is she trapped in domesticity, or do the doors represent infinite ways out? She stares off, seemingly at the painter, not the viewer. At her feet is a fantastical winged feline creature, its presence both companionable and uncanny.

The composition has many hallmarks of surrealism, including dream logic – the strange, flowing and often illogical progression of images reflecting the unpredictable nature of dreams – metamorphosis and psychic ambiguity. Psychic ambiguity refers to an open-ended emotional or psychological meaning. It invites multiple interpretations and exudes the complexity of the subconscious.

But what distinguishes “Birthday,” in my view, is its insistence on agency.

Many surrealist artists cast women as muses or dream figures conjured for the male gaze. Tanning, however, places herself at the center. Her steady, unseductive gaze confronts the viewer and demands recognition of her authorship.

French writer and poet André Breton’s 1924 “Manifesto of Surrealism” urged artists to liberate thought from rational constraint. Breton aimed to access the unconscious through dream and automatism, a surrealist technique of creating art without conscious control, allowing spontaneous expression from the subconscious mind, free from rational thought or aesthetic rules.

A fascinating array of doors

Beyond her self-portrait, “Birthday” depicts a seemingly unending series of doorways. Tanning wrote about taking inspiration from her New York apartment:

“I had been struck, one day, by a fascinating array of doors – hall, kitchen, bathroom, studio – crowded together, soliciting my attention with their antic planes, light, shadows, imminent openings and shuttings. From there it was an easy leap to a dream of countless doors.”

The “dream of countless doors” could represent the perpetual potential for change and renewal, or the ability to leave doors open for the imagination, or opportunities beyond domesticity for women.

Tanning refused to be confined by the label of “woman artist,” even as her work bore feminist depth. Nonetheless, her paintings modeled a form of self-determination that continues to resonate in the work of contemporary artists such as South African photographer Zanele Muholi and American mixed-media artist Mickalene Thomas.

Ultimately, “Birthday” is not just a surrealist self-portrait; it is a threshold work. It situates the artist between known and unknown, rational and subconscious, constraint and liberation. For Tanning, it marked her own artistic birth. For viewers today, it marks a reminder that self-representation is not static but always in motion, transforming.

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Sally Jane Brown does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How Dorothea Tanning’s ‘Birthday’ painting challenged male-dominated surrealism – https://theconversation.com/how-dorothea-tannings-birthday-painting-challenged-male-dominated-surrealism-264958