The serious people-watcher is not entirely serious as they observe their quarry and essay an idea about the fashionable woman walking by or the older man with his book. It may be the most casual of humanities disciplines, a kind of seeking without findings, as we register the presence of others and imagine what private dramas they contain.
The great American impressionist Mary Cassatt painted many a people-watcher. And people-watching may be an apt, though incomplete, description of her approach to picture making, as Angelica Aboulhosn shows in a probing essay about the first major exhibition of Cassatt in years.
Beatrix Potter was a remarkable observer in her own right, whose drawing skills as a girl were praised by the pre-Raphaelite painter and family friend John Everett Millais. Letters she wrote to another family friend became the basis of her first book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, as Hannah Stamler explains in a pleasurable look at the life, writing, and legacy of this inimitable children’s author turned land preservationist.
The Atlas of Drowned Towns is an NEH-supported digital project preserving the memory of lands, homes, and towns sacrificed in the name of progress. Its subjects, writer Anna Webb tells us, include those lost places flooded to construct dams and other large-scale public works. Now under water, those towns have sometimes become the victim of myth or been forgotten.
NEH Public Scholar Samantha Barbas is the author of Actual Malice, a new history of the landmark First Amendment case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. In an essay for Humanities, Barbas shows how modern press freedoms were rooted in the Civil Rights Movement. As the digital age gives rise to new concerns about defamation and misinformation, this rich preamble to press freedoms as we know them deserves fresh consideration.
Private detectives are nothing if not people-watchers. NEH Research Fellow Gregory Steirer writes about Dashiell Hammett’s fictional protagonist Sam Spade of Maltese Falcon fame and how this literary character became a point of legal contention between Hammett and Warner Bros. studio. The so-called Sam Spade case asked a question that scribes of all kind may want to ponder: Do writers still own their characters once the movie rights are sold?
Also in the issue, stories of the Cane Ridge Revival in 1801, the Dorr Rebellion in 1842, and people-watcher extraordinaire Walter Iooss Jr., the legendary sports photographer.
