In the introduction to Firebrands: Portraits from the Americas, by the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, Taylor Sparrow writes, “If you don’t learn history, and I mean learn it like the way you learn to love music, poetry, and kissing, then the world will always be a mystery to you, and you’ll have to stumble through your days without being able to make any sense of what’s happening, or what you could possibly do differently.”
Before reading this, I thought that I had a pretty good handle on history. Most people who have been through high school and some college would probably feel the same. I had heard it all: the Bill of Rights, the Civil War, Reaganomics, and even some acts of heroic activism. Boy, was I missing out!
As I flipped through Firebrands, I was shocked when I realized how few of its entries I was familiar with. Sure, there was Rachel Carson, Eugene V. Debs, Geronimo, and Helen Keller, but as I read more and more about all of the brave, wonderful activists and revolutionaries throughout history, I realized that my public-school education (and even college years) had neglected to cover many of them.
For every widely known entry like Sojourner Truth or Sacco and Vanzetti, there is one like the story of Angelina and Sarah Grinké, well-off sisters in the antebellum era whose disgust for slavery led them to become fiery abolitionists and suffragists. Even the Quakers were a little afraid of them. And then there is Justin Dart, Jr., a polio-ridden son of industry who fought for disability rights in the USA and eventually received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998.
Even entries on figures like Woody Guthrie add new depth to old stories. For instance, “This Land is Your Land” was originally “a critique of working-class plight and private property,” a small fact that would surely never be taught in standard education and that changes the entire meaning of a well-worn cliché.
Besides being the almost-perfect accompaniment to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (his influence and inspiration are noted in the foreword), Justseeds has made in Firebrands a gorgeous and readable text as well. Each one-page summary of an activist comes with an artful and dynamic drawing by the Cooperative, a “decentralized community of artists who have banded together both to sell their work online in a central location and to collaborate with and support each other and social movements.” Appropriately enough, many entries open with a quote from the revolutionary emphasizing the meaning of their works.
“Firebrands,” Bec Young and Shaun Silfer say in the foreword, “is a short primer on people we admire for their tenacity and courage — people who fought for their dreams of freedom and equality and some who fight still.” The book itself is clearly revolutionary in purpose, as Young and Silfer note. “It’s for all our ancestors, especially those misrepresented in those school books, left out because they were too brown, too female, too poor, too queer, too uneducated, too disabled, or because they daydreamed too much.”
When Justseeds says that these are portraits “from the Americas,” they mean North and South America, but also all of the various Americas that exist in society — America for the poor, for the rich, for the black and white, for the disabled, and for the LGBT. The publicly approved and sanitized story of America has been told over and over; Firebrands would rather tell all of the other stories that were swept under the rug.