Hope to heal the heartbreak

The powerful and vivid storytelling of the Annunciation Catholic School shooting in “A Sanctuary Shattered” was heartbreaking and raw. I think about that day daily. My family and I are friends with the Merkels. We attended Fletcher’s funeral and witnessed firsthand the close-knit community that exists within the school and parish. My husband and I also spent time at the Merkels’ residence. Seeing Fletcher’s bedroom with his school uniforms hanging in the closet, his books laid on his bookshelf just so, his plant he wanted to take to college with him one day, his toys dispersed about: “Heartbreaking” is the only word I can use to describe how it felt to stand in his room.

Several years ago, Fletcher and his family attended our wedding reception. There are pictures of Fletcher on the dance floor with his siblings and his parents; he is smiling and laughing in every picture. A beautiful memory of a child who experienced joy and laughter and the love of a mother and a father. We hold these memories close.

I appreciate the alumni who shared their firsthand accounts of the day and the weeks that followed. We can become desensitized to the endless tragedies we see on the news, but when an event as horrific as this affects our own, it hits differently. I hope the Annunciation community continues to feel the hope, support and love we extend to them.

Though on the periphery, I am forever changed by this event. Undoubtedly, having two young children also impacts my vantage point. For Fletcher, for Harper, and for the Annunciation community, when I pray, I will continue to move my feet.

Mandy Gonzales-Thompson ’09
Longmont, Colorado

Communities of saving faith

I read “Pillars of the Community” by Anthony DePalma with passionate focus and far more than a twinge of feeling. When I finished it, I spent time in meditation, recalling “This Side of Paradise” (Autumn 2020) by Miles Folsom, a student in the Moreau College Initiative at Indiana’s Westville Correctional Facility.

Prisons and inner cities are the places where many people find others they can despise, discard and forget. Prisons and inner cities are where one will find the lost sheep. I open my heart with deep gratitude to Our Lord that there are good believers who have found a way to evangelize the denizens of both places. They have introduced them to hope and community and have mastered the doctrine of St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, whether they know it or not.

Many of the Corinthians were also despised, discarded and forgotten. St. Paul melded them into a community of saving faith. There are others who are despised, discarded and forgotten. We need legions of evangelizers who are willing to look for lost sheep and touch them with love and feeling. Pray to the Lord of the harvest and do something!

Rev. Leonard Paul ’60
Suttons Bay, Michigan

Revealing — and concealing — history

James McKenzie’s “Selective Memory” was a trenchant story. We Minnesotans are proud of the 1st Minnesota, especially at Gettysburg (80-plus percent casualties). I never imagined this look behind the curtain — but even when our heroes disappoint us, they instruct us.

I was acquainted with neither John Gast’s not-to-be-missed 1872 American Progress nor the 1891 New Orleans lynching.

A pity there was not time or space to mention the Columbus murals. I was unaware that they were covered around 2020. Had I been paying attention, I might have suggested (and will now) that they be occasionally uncovered — because I found them instructive, and fear that selectively airbrushing our history is dangerous. The new kids deserve to see them.

Thanks for the good read.

John Wolff ’74
Seattle

Editor’s Note: The Columbus murals are periodically uncovered for instructional purposes, most recently for two weeks during the 2026 spring semester. Faculty whose course materials include the paintings are encouraged to bring their students to the Main Building to view them during those times.

Christian witness

“The Depths of the Heart” brought tears to my eyes, the thought of children living like that. The story of Jane, Sam and Esther — names among the thousands — really touched me.

I have sometimes wondered how news reporters and film crews keep going and why they don’t stop to help instead. I know documenting such terrible situations is critically important. The fact that in this case the author, Gerard Thomas Straub, could not just move on but instead brought food, water and medicine to these children shows the kind of action we would want to see from fellow Christians.

Jill Fahey Birkett
Stamford, Connecticut

The pride of Pikeville

I was pleasantly surprised to see the article on William Hambley ’39 (“The Man Who Moved a Mountain”). My twin brother and I grew up in Pikeville, Kentucky, with the Hambleys and spent a lot of time with the mayor, either hearing about Notre Dame or getting treated for sports injuries. He was the classiest man I’ve ever known, and so smart.

I vividly remember the Cut-Through project: the sirens, then the blast and the shaking of the earth. The large earth-moving equipment would take the dirt and dump it in a small valley until the valley was level with the main grade around it. Then new neighborhoods and businesses were built on the fill. It was a miraculous project that still draws attention today.

I’m so glad Margaret Fosmoe ’85 found this story and wrote about it. Pikeville is a little gem in the eastern Kentucky mountains. And Dr. Hambley is largely responsible for it. Kind of like a “What Would You Fight For?” episode. His vision and leadership reshaped an Appalachian community that is now an economic powerhouse in the state.

William Dawahare ’84
Naples, Florida

An inspiring writer

I wish to commend you for including Mel Livatino in your roster of regular contributors. Without fail, his essays leave me uplifted and filled with hope for humanity and sometimes with tears of joy. “Goodness Gracious” certainly lives up to those accolades.

In a previous essay Livatino wrote about the importance of storytelling and mentioned that he had composed a book through a company called Storyworth. He inspired me to do the same. This Christmas, after almost two years at it, I finished my Storyworth book of memories, stories and lessons and gifted it to my children and grandchildren. I am very proud of the work I did, and grateful to Livatino for the inspiration.

Michael Moore ’73
Halfmoon, New York

A capital letter

“Notre Dame Grows Its Mission in the Nation’s Capital” was of great interest to me as an alumnus who spent his career in government relations in Washington, D.C. Some additional historical context may be useful.

Long before establishing a permanent Washington office in 2012, Notre Dame exercised influence through a more personal and decentralized model. Father Ted Hesburgh, CSC, advised presidents and policymakers for decades, while Frank “Nordy” Hoffmann ’33 — later Sergeant at Arms of the U.S. Senate — served as a principal point of contact on Capitol Hill from the 1960s through the ’80s. Their efforts were reinforced by alumni in Congress and by influential alumni and friends in Washington and across the country.

When Hoffman died and Hesburgh stepped back from public life, that informal network naturally waned. Notre Dame’s voice was still heard, but institutionally the University chose to rely on contract lobbying firms rather than establish its own Washington office — a step many of us believed was overdue as peer institutions moved in that direction.

As your article suggests, the upgrading of Notre Dame’s Washington office represents more than continuity with the past; it marks a genuine institutional shift. With a full-time professional staff, the University is now operating in what is commonly understood as the lobbying business. This is not a criticism — it reflects the realities of modern policymaking and aligns Notre Dame with most of its peers.

Still, because “lobbying” can carry pejorative connotations, it is fair to ask how Notre Dame approaches this work. How are policy positions developed? What oversight and accountability guide the Washington operation? And how does the University sustain its commitment to nonpartisan engagement amid today’s deep political divisions?

Raising these questions does not diminish Notre Dame’s efforts. Rather, it underscores the seriousness of the responsibility the University has assumed. A full discussion of how this presence is governed would complete an important and timely story.

J. Denis O’Toole ’66
Alexandria, Virginia

Rock? Enroll.

Thank you for the photo of Decio Faculty Hall’s bulletin board (“Stillpoint”). I have not set foot on campus since I graduated. As a result, I study and enjoy all the photos of the campus and students. Both have certainly evolved. For instance, I never saw a female student in any of my classes, let alone a female professor, and could only dream of a Tuesday-Thursday class on “Rock Culture.” (Like, sign me up.)

Dan Wesolowski ’74
Goleta, California

Paola Bautista de Alemán was warned last spring that she was in danger in her native Venezuela.

“In March 2025, we received an alert from someone inside the regime, who told me that they were going to get me and put me in jail. So I had to leave the country,” says the Venezuelan political scientist, journalist and activist who is now a visiting fellow at the University’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies.

Bautista de Alemán hid at a friend’s house, then two days later flew to Spain. Her husband and their three teenage children remained in Venezuela. The family was reunited in August in South Bend, when she arrived to start her fellowship at Notre Dame.

She closely followed the news when the United States military conducted its January 3, 2026, raid in Caracas, capturing President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. The couple were flown to New York to face federal charges of narco-terrorism and drug trafficking.

For the scholar and author of The Transitions of Democracy: Between Freedom and Authoritarianism, their capture came as a welcome surprise. “I think that for all Venezuelans it was a relief,” she says, because the dictator will face justice. She is guardedly hopeful that Venezuela might be ready to begin its journey back to democracy. She longs for the day she can safely return home.

For decades, Venezuelans have endured an authoritarian government and high levels of crime, corruption and scarcity of basic goods. This year, their country suffers the highest inflation rate in the world, with projections exceeding 600 percent for 2026. Nearly 8 million people have reportedly left Venezuela since 2014; its current estimated population is 28.6 million.

Bautista de Alemán serves as national vice president of political education and programs at Primero Justicia (“Justice First”), a Venezuelan political party. She’s also president of the Institute of Political Studies FORMA, a center for political training and research.

After Maduro’s capture, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would govern Venezuela for an unspecified period and manage its oil reserves. Under pressure from the U.S., the Venezuelan National Assembly approved a measure to open the oil sector to private investment, a reversal of the country’s 50-year-old nationalization policies.

Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, whom Bautista de Alemán considers no more trustworthy than Maduro, was sworn in as the country’s interim president. Soon thereafter, Rodríguez announced a mass amnesty plan for political prisoners, a response to pressure from the Trump administration that she halt repression and demonstrate an effort to stabilize the country. By the end of February, more than 540 political prisoners had been released, but many others were still imprisoned or missing.

To understand current events in Venezuela, one must understand what has happened since 1999, the year Maduro’s presidential predecessor, Hugo Chávez, came to power. Running the nation on a self-described socialist model, Chávez remained president until his death in 2013.

The news portrays a single event, the U.S. raid, that happened on one day, “but what’s behind it is the struggle of a whole country,” says Bautista de Alemán, who was a young adult when Chavez came to power.

“All my adulthood has been fighting for democracy in my country. I grew up in a democratic system that was backsliding. Hugo Chávez was not the cause but was a consequence of the erosion of the democratic system,” she explains. The Venezuelan people believe in and formerly enjoyed democracy; for 27 years, they have been voting, organizing and speaking to international institutions in an effort to regain democracy — to no avail, until now, she says.

Roselis Díaz De Freitas is a Venezuelan student working on her master’s degree in international human rights law at Notre Dame Law School. Born after Chavez came to power, she says her life and professional decisions have been framed by the country’s political context.

As an attorney who, like Bautista de Alemán, earned her degree from Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas, she has represented victims of political persecution in Venezuela, as well as victims of human rights violations in other Latin American countries. She has often needed to keep a low profile to protect herself.

When she heard about the U.S. raid that removed Maduro, she called relatives in Caracas. She was relieved to hear they were safe. At least 75 people on the ground were killed during the raid, according to news reports.

“I had mixed feelings, because you’re not happy seeing your city is being bombed,” but at long last something is happening, she says.

Díaz De Freitas expresses cautious hope for democratic change but reports ambivalence among Venezuelans, who fear continued repression and worry their hopes for a democratic future may be dashed. “We’re used to worst-case scenarios,” she says.

“You have to see the whole context, which is a huge democratic crisis. We don’t have a democratic society. We don’t have a space to talk about this openly,” she says, noting the nation’s news organizations are controlled by the government, while some social media platforms are banned.

“We don’t have access to free information and free debates in a democratic space. If you talk against the government, you could be imprisoned, tortured, disappear or be killed,” she says. Venezuelans live in a society where masked police officers often approach people on the street and demand their cell phones. If an officer finds names or phrases or messages that show disagreement with the ruling government, the phone’s owner is likely to be jailed, she adds.

In 2023, former lawmaker María Corina Machado — the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize laureate — won a presidential primary with more than 90 percent of the vote, but the government barred her from continuing in the race to unseat Maduro. Bautista de Alemán’s political party was part of the coalition that supported Machado’s candidacy.

The election took place in July 2024. Maduro was declared the winner despite substantial evidence of a landslide victory for the opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia. Tally sheets from polling stations indicated that González won with 67 percent of the vote.

The Carter Center, an Atlanta-based nonprofit dedicated to advancing democracy and human rights, and a United Nations panel of experts concluded that the election lacked transparency and failed to meet international standards of integrity. Mass protests triggered a government crackdown with arrests of opposition figures. González fled to Spain.

“Where was the international community when this happened? How is it that a dictator can steal elections, violate human rights, kill and torture?” Bautista de Alemán asks. “Nobody was paying any attention. It’s like we were condemned to live under these circumstances.

“Sometimes good thoughts and prayers are not enough to solve this kind of problem,” she adds. “I’m Catholic and I do know that praying is very important, but it’s not the only thing that you can do.” Maduro was violating human rights and committing crimes against humanity, she says, and organized crime and terrorism had found a safe haven in Venezuela.

Before Maduro’s arrest, Bautista de Alemán had no chance of returning home. She has friends and colleagues who were jailed, killed or disappeared. Now she hopes she might be able to visit. While at Notre Dame, she is writing a book about the Venezuelan opposition movement.

Venezuela’s constitution calls for a new election when the presidency becomes vacant, while the vice president governs on an interim basis. However, on February 9, Jorge Rodríguez, the president of the country’s unicameral National Assembly and Delcy Rodríguez’s brother, ruled out immediate elections, saying the country must first go through a process of “stabilization.”

Bautista de Alemán remains optimistic. “It’s not as fast as we would like, but things are happening,” she says. Based on conversations with friends and family back home, she sees that some Venezuelans are cautiously losing their fear of speaking publicly about politics. “They support what the U.S. did in general,” she says.

She encourages Americans to learn about her nation’s history and its relationship with the U.S. “This is the story of a country that chose to move forward toward democracy and found in the United States a true ally along the way. We are profoundly grateful for that friendship and solidarity,” she says.

She also asks Americans for their prayers. “We feel them, and they give us strength,” she says.

Bautista de Alemán sees a strong likelihood that Machado will be elected president once democracy is restored. The former legislator has faced criticism for giving her Nobel medal to Trump as a gift. Bautista de Alemán and Díaz De Freitas agree this was a calculated move to strengthen political bonds between Venezuela and Washington, D.C.

“She gave the medal, not the prize,” Bautista de Alemán argues, calling the gesture “a sign of appreciation and brotherhood from the Venezuelan people to the U.S. people, represented by President Trump.”

To prosper, she says, Venezuela will have to establish new partnerships with U.S. and European companies regarding its oil reserves. Both women prefer that Venezuela seek out U.S. partners rather than firms from Russia, China or Iran.

Bautista de Alemán follows each day’s news, hoping conditions will improve enough for a visit. The help Venezuela most needs now, she says, is assistance in a transition to democracy, with free and fair national elections the most essential goal. “We need to be able to talk and express ourselves, and freely critique the government,” she says.

Díaz De Freitas doesn’t know where she’ll be after she graduates in May, but she knows what she’ll be doing. “Even if I’m outside of Venezuela,” she says, “I’m still going to be working toward the improvement of my country.”

Margaret Fosmoe is an associate editor of this magazine.

At her sewing machine, sitting beneath a framed photograph of her cat, Kote — an affectionate Russian word for “cat” — Nina Ansimova moves from garment to garment by hand: clerical vestments, athletic uniforms, commencement robes, coats in need of repair. There’s little she hasn’t been asked to alter, fix or create. She has even sewn Notre Dame-themed children’s clothing from scratch. In a typical month, Ansimova completes about 150 projects.

“I’m very happy,” she tells me as I shrug off my coat and scarf and sit down for our conversation.

Ansimova is Notre Dame’s sole full-time tailor and works at St. Michael’s Laundry, the University’s full-service facility north of campus. Though she’s quick to praise her coworkers for their contributions, she’s ultimately responsible for each project she touches, from beginning to end. It wasn’t always that way.

At 17, while still in high school, she began working in a garment factory in Kislovodsk, the spa city where her family lived in southern Russia, between the Black and Caspian seas. There, she learned the basics of operating a sewing machine. She sat at her station, sewing a single seam, then passed the item to the next worker in line and repeated the steps.

The task was quick and efficient, designed for output alone, not for care or creativity. Ansimova was expected to work “fast, fast, fast.” Each garment passed through her hands and disappeared, and she was completely detached from the person who would wear it.

“It was a little bit boring,” she says, then corrects herself: “Not a little — a lot.”

After she graduated from high school, Ansimova’s family moved back to her hometown of Novosibirsk, Siberia, and she noticed a small tailor shop advertising for help. The work would be different there: one tailor per garment, full responsibility from beginning to end. She didn’t think she was qualified, but she inquired anyway.

The shop hired her on the spot. For her first six months, she apprenticed as a seamstress and learned the fundamentals of tailoring and mending. She was content with her work, but after six years, another tailor who had become a friend asked her why she hadn’t moved on to a bigger shop.

“Oh my God,” Ansimova replied. “Who will take me?”

The friend pushed her to try. Ansimova enrolled in a one-year sewing program that required at least six years of professional experience — factory work didn’t count. She just made the cut. The program taught her how to construct garments from start to finish, and how to repair them.

Once Ansimova completed her training, she found a shop that had just opened. It was, she says, perfect. Everyone there was new and young, so there were no established social circles to break into. She enjoyed the work, loved her coworkers and stayed for 13 years.

By then, tailoring had become something entirely different for her. She liked meeting customers, learning what they needed and transforming fabric into clothes made to their specifications.

Then life changed drastically. Her husband, Alex Komor, found work in a research laboratory at Notre Dame, and the two moved to South Bend in 1997. Ansimova was 39. She had never been to America. She didn’t speak English. She had left behind her family, her friends and the city where she had built her professional life.

I ask her if the move was difficult.

“We came here for what?” Ansimova says. “To complain about life, or to make a life?” She shrugged, as if it were obvious. “Who knows what’s around the corner? You turn the corner and deal with it.”

Ansimova learned English through a program at the public library. A volunteer tutor, also from Russia, helped her bridge the language gap. The elderly woman invited Ansimova to her home to teach vocabulary by pointing to household objects.

“This is a chair,” the woman would say. She encouraged Nina to “talk, talk, talk” in English.

After six years of learning English, Ansimova found work at a local tuxedo shop, and soon began on-call tailoring for the University. When Notre Dame’s longtime lead tailor retired in 2015, Ansimova was asked to take over the role and move her practice to St. Michael’s.

“Every day is a little adventure,” she says. That’s what she likes. The garments and tasks may sound repetitive to an outsider — another dress, another coat, another hem. Ansimova insists they aren’t.

“I’m not lying,” she says. “Every item is unique. The fabric is different, the people are different, and what needs to be done is also different.”

That attention to detail makes it hard to describe her work as technical. Sewing is often viewed as a skill to be learned, practiced, mastered. Ansimova doesn’t disagree. But for her, technical proficiency comes second to artistry. “Without art you can’t do anything,” she says. “Even before you start sewing, you have to see what it will become.”

She has lived the alternative. She knows what it is to work quickly, mechanically, without ownership, when speed matters most and the finished product is never truly yours. Now, she works deliberately, trying to make it just right for the person who will wear it.

Pride in her work isn’t optional. “If I’m not happy with it,” she asks, “how can the customer be happy?”

I’ve felt that degree of care myself. Before I got married, Ansimova altered my wedding dress. She greeted me each time with warmth and turned our final fitting into a celebration, complete with applause from her coworkers.

When we finish our January interview, she walks me to the door, where we see snow falling in the bitter cold. She pauses when she sees my coat not quite closed, and before I can protest, she kneels and snaps the bottom buttons. She apologizes for fussing several times, laughing at herself. But I don’t mind. I feel much warmer on the walk back to Grace Hall — and not just because of my coat.

Michelle Cuneo is an associate editor of this magazine.

Source: Meruelo Family Center for Career Development

Reginald Dillard, a client of Notre Dame Law School’s Exoneration Justice Clinic, walked out of prison in February, exonerated 27 years after his conviction for a crime he did not commit.

The release came after several years of work to challenge Dillard’s case and present new evidence on his behalf, an effort led by adjunct professor and lead defense attorney Elliot Slosar and law students at the clinic.

In 2000, Dillard was convicted of murder in the 1998 shooting in Elkhart, Indiana, of Christopher Thomas, a confidential informant of the Elkhart County Drug Task Force. Dillard was sentenced to 65 years in prison. In February, a special prosecutor concluded that his constitutional rights had been violated through the withholding of material exculpatory evidence and agreed to vacate his conviction. A judge then signed an order dismissing the criminal charges against Dillard, who is 57.

“There was a time when I was the voiceless, and now I’ve become a voice for the voiceless, and I plan on being that voice,” Dillard said after his release. His exoneration is the fourth achieved by the clinic since it was established in 2020, and the clinic’s third in a row obtained with the agreement of prosecutors in the case.

A record number of students prepared this year to receive Catholic sacraments through the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults offered through Notre Dame’s Campus Ministry. With 76 participants in the year-long OCIA course, 60 in the spring short course and 27 in the fall short course, the OCIA class of 2026 easily surpassed last year’s high mark of 123 total
participants, The Observer reported in February.

The OCIA process is designed to help students discern the next steps in their faith journey and prepare those who wish to join the Catholic Church to receive baptism, the Eucharist and confirmation.

“The message of Jesus is ever-ancient, ever-new, right? It’s the message that the world always needs, that always points to ‘You are here for a purpose,’” said Brett Perkins ’01, ’11M.A., Campus Ministry’s assistant director for evangelization and religious education. “That is a message that is compelling for every person, for all people, for all places, all times.”

As an undergraduate, Missy Conboy ’82 was a varsity basketball player. Now a 39-year veteran employee of the Notre Dame athletic department, Conboy will retire June 30.

Currently senior deputy athletic director for industry and campus engagement, she is the longest-tenured female administrator in the department.

After college, Conboy earned a law degree at the University of Kansas and was hired by the University in 1987 to set up its inaugural NCAA compliance program. She’s served in leadership roles covering nearly every facet of the athletics enterprise from legal affairs to community outreach. She is liaison to the Board of Trustees’ athletic affairs committee and the Faculty Board on Athletics and is the University’s primary representative to the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Conboy also led renovations of the Purcell Pavilion, Rolfs Athletic Hall and Notre Dame Stadium and oversaw the planning and construction of numerous varsity facilities. To mark the 50th anniversary of Title IX in 2022, she worked with the Monogram Club to honor more than 200 women from Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s College who founded the first women’s club sports at the University.

The History Museum in South Bend has topped off its ongoing “Rockne: Life & Legacy” exhibit with an addition: Knute Rockne’s hat. Fans will recognize the light gray fedora that Notre Dame’s famous head football coach appears to have worn in several often-republished photos.

The hat’s backstory begins when Rockne and a man named Maurice Vennet met at a South Bend Elks Club meeting, where a mix-up led to their accidentally switching hats. The coach’s fedora remained with Vennet, and the family says the hat was passed down to the eventual possession of Vennet’s great-great nephew and nieces. Its inner band indicates its purchase at Renfranz-Rasmussen, once a prominent men’s clothing store in South Bend. The Rockne-Vennet hat is now on display in the exhibit, which continues through May 31.

Students have a new way of sharing greetings, encouragement or romantic overtures. Residents of Farley Hall now sell “Potatograms” before Valentine’s Day.

Each customer who places an order, $2 per potato, writes their message in permanent marker on the raw tuber, which is delivered by dorm residents to the designated recipient on campus, explains Farley junior Theresa Lalli, who helped organize this year’s sale.

The idea follows traditional conversation heart candies, minus the pastel colors and sugar. Some people scribble potato puns — “You’re the tater to my tot”; “I only have eyes for you” — while others compose more romantic sentiments.

The two-year old fundraiser, suggested by former hall president Meghan Lang ’26, peddled some 1,500 spuds this year, raising more than $3,500 for Our Lady of the Road, a local homeless outreach and service center.

Notre Dame and the city of South Bend are moving ahead with plans to develop Colfax Corner, a 202,000-square-foot research and innovation hub downtown.

Situated on Colfax Avenue between Lafayette Boulevard and Main Street, Colfax Corner is the first phase of a city-designated “tech and talent district.” It will feature renovation of the vacant former South Bend Tribune building and construction of an adjoining facility. The two will connect on the second floor, frame an outdoor public plaza and offer classroom, research and event space. Work is slated to begin this summer and take two years to complete.

The project, funded in part by a $30 million grant from the Indiana-based Lilly Endowment, is expected to support more than 400 high-tech jobs and have a $750 million impact on the local economy over the next 10 years.

Notre Dame acquired the century-old building in 2023 to preserve it from demolition.

In February, Professor Susan Ostermann declined an appointment to lead an academic institute in the Keough School of Global Affairs after widespread criticism of the appointment was prompted by her outspoken advocacy for abortion.

Ostermann’s appointment as the director of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, announced in January and scheduled to take effect July 1, produced a series of dueling op-ed columns in campus and national publications and resulted in Keough Dean Mary Gallagher’s announcement in late February that Ostermann had withdrawn from the appointment.

A political scientist and an attorney with expertise in comparative politics in South Asia, Ostermann joined the Keough faculty in 2017 and will remain a faculty member.

The objections concerned a series of op-eds she co-wrote in recent years with former Keough sociologist Tamara Kay and published in the Chicago Tribune, Salon and elsewhere, in which they argued that contemporary abortion politics in the United States cannot be understood apart from longer histories of race and demographic change.

Rev. Wilson Miscamble, CSC, ’78M.A., ’80Ph.D., ’87M.Div., a professor emeritus of history, wrote in the Catholic journal First Things that the University’s commitment to its Catholic character was “explicitly repudiated” by Ostermann’s appointment.

Bishop Kevin Rhoades of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend issued a statement objecting, for instance, to Kay and Ostermann’s assertion that “the pro-life position has ‘its roots in white supremacy and racism’” and urging Notre Dame’s leaders to rescind the Liu directorship. At least 15 bishops and two cardinals joined campus voices in calling for the same. Diane Desierto, a professor of law and global affairs, and Robert Gimello, a professor emeritus of theology, resigned as fellows of the Liu Institute, citing Ostermann’s support for abortion rights in opposition to Catholic teaching.

“My only goal in accepting the Liu Institute Directorship was to serve as a steward for the Institute’s world-class faculty, students and staff; it is not a position I applied for, but I was truly honored to take it on,” Ostermann wrote in a statement.

“At present, the focus on my appointment risks overshadowing the vital work the Institute performs, which it should be allowed to pursue without undue distraction. At the same time, it has become clear that there is work to do at Notre Dame to build a community where a variety of voices can flourish. Both academic inquiry and the full realization of human dignity demand this.”

Legendary football coach Lou Holtz, who led Notre Dame to the 1988 national championship, died at age 89 on March 4 — the anniversary of Knute Rockne’s birth — just days before the magazine went to press. Read longtime sports reporter Malcolm Moran’s remembrance, classic magazine stories from Holtz’s triumphant Notre Dame tenure, and coverage of the campus services that celebrated the coach’s life and legacy ​here.

As a high school English teacher in the 1990s, Ernest Morrell started using rap songs to draw his students into the work of long-ago writers. The goal, he said years later, was to use hip-hop culture “as a bridge linking the seemingly vast span between the streets and the world of academics.” The approach worked.

Morrell, the Coyle Professor of Literacy Education, died February 4 at age 54. A member of the English and Africana studies faculties and director of the Center for Literacy Education in the Institute for Educational Initiatives, he had also served five years as a College of Arts & Letters associate dean.

As a literacy scholar who urged teachers to reimagine the relationship between students and texts, Morrell saw literacy as a means of social justice, empowering young people to access information and participate in civic and cultural life. His experience as a teacher and coach in Oakland, California, focused his interest in classroom practices and shaped his commitment to supporting teachers and students, particularly those underserved by the educational system.

A California native, Morrell attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, and earned master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the Notre Dame faculty in 2017 after teaching at Michigan State University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Columbia University.

Morrell “cultivated a true ‘family tree’ of scholars whose work began with his guidance,” said Maria McKenna ’97, a professor of the practice in Africana studies and in education, schooling and society. He served his doctoral students as a mentor then welcomed them as peers when they got jobs at other institutions. “They learned his lessons well about the importance of building and strengthening communities that support equity and justice,” she said.

His 17 books include Critical Literacy and Urban Youth: Pedagogies of Access, Dissent, and Liberation. Morrell and his wife, Jodene Morrell, a teaching professor and associate director of the literacy center, found inspiration in the late Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, and recounted their experiences as classroom teachers and educational researchers in a 2023 book, Freire and Children’s Literature.

Morrell was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Education and the American Educational Research Association. He received the James R. Squire Award from the National Council of Teachers of English for his lasting impact on English language arts education. He will posthumously receive the President’s Award, which recognizes leading achievements that advance the University’s goals.

He is survived by Jodene, his wife of 31 years, and their three sons.

Reginald Bain ’57 didn’t believe actors should remain behind an artificial fourth wall. In the plays and musicals he directed, scene entrances and exits might happen through the back of the playhouse. A soliloquy could be delivered from the Washington Hall balcony. In his view, a gymnasium could be a theater, as could a school corridor.

Bain, a professor emeritus of theater, died January 30. He was 91.

When Bain retired in 2001 after 35 years on the film, television, and theatre faculty, he had directed more departmental productions than anyone in the history of Notre Dame’s theater program. “He was the soul of the theater program at Notre Dame for decades,” said Mark Pilkinton, a professor emeritus who worked alongside Bain for more than 15 years. “It was always about the students with Reg.”

Born in Los Angeles, a first-generation college student, Bain studied theater and literature at Notre Dame, and immersed himself in campus productions, participating as an actor, director and stage crew member. He and his future wife, a Saint Mary’s College student, first appeared together on stage in a spring 1956 production of Antigone at Saint Mary’s.

After college, Bain served in the U.S. Army Medical Service Corps, then earned a master’s degree at the University of Arizona and taught theater at Regis College in Denver. He joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1966 while pursuing a doctorate at the University of Minnesota, which he completed in 1972.

In those early years, Bain served as department chair and ran the Notre Dame Summer Theatre program, providing immersive experiences for students while bringing plays and musicals to the South Bend community.

His original works included the liturgical dramas The Way of the Cross and The Story of Jonah, as well as Clowns’ Play and Balloon! Balloon! for young audiences. The dramatist and director earned many honors for outstanding teaching and the Alumni Association’s Rev. Arthur S. Harvey Award, which recognizes graduates for achievements in the performing arts.

An enthusiastic Chicago Cubs fan, Bain enjoyed discussing sports, politics, theology, music, art and science. He traveled extensively and loved spending time with family.

His wife of 42 years, Georgia Bain ’78M.A., died in 2005. He is survived by two daughters, a son and 10 grandchildren.

A respected scholar in the male-dominated field of theoretical physics, Kathie Newman is remembered as an academic pioneer and a fierce advocate for students.

Newman, a professor emerita of physics and astronomy, died December 31. She was 73.

Born and raised in Maryland, Newman earned a bachelor’s degree at Michigan State University and advanced degrees at the University of Washington, where she met her future husband, Bruce Bunker. The couple held postdoctoral research and faculty positions at the University of Illinois before coming to Notre Dame in 1983.

Newman was the first female professor in Notre Dame’s physics department and the first to achieve tenure. She taught, published more than 40 articles in scientific journals and served in several administrative positions, including 15 years as an associate dean in the College of Science and another 11 directing graduate studies and admissions in the physics department, before retiring in 2020.

“Kathie did so much behind the scenes work. She had an impact on thousands of students, both undergraduate and graduate,” said Mitchell Wayne, a professor of physics and astronomy.

That service included the direction of eight doctoral dissertations and leadership toward the establishment of a maternity policy for Notre Dame faculty and staff.

Newman’s research interests included the mathematics of semiconductors and exotic phases of ice crystals. She twice won the President’s Award, which recognizes visionary achievements in research, public impact or creative endeavors.

Newman enjoyed gardening, cooking, hiking, travel and fiber arts, interests that sometimes took a whimsical, scientific turn such as the sewing of Penrose tiles and the knitting of a Klein bottle. A ravenous reader, she was a member of several book clubs.

She is survived by her husband, two sons and three grandsons.

Fighting Irish softball players are wearing “LM” stickers on their gold helmets this season in honor of former varsity coach Liz Miller, whose teams never won fewer than 30 games in a season.

Miller, who coached the team from 1993 to 2001, died December 5 at age 78.

The softball program’s second head coach — and first female coach — Miller won conference coach-of-the-year honors after five of her nine seasons. Her teams, meanwhile, won nine conference regular-season titles en route to a collective 376-156 win-loss record; she coached 10 All-Americans and 14 Academic All-Americans; her 2001 team set the bar for Irish softball, winning a school-record 54 games while losing just seven, reaching No. 8 in the national rankings and earning the program’s first No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament.

Born in Kendallville, Indiana, Miller grew up in the era before Title IX made competitive sports widely available to girls and women. She participated in intramural sports at her Michigan high school and played field hockey and volleyball at Western Michigan University.

After college, Miller taught all physical education classes for the Galien, Michigan, school district, where she founded and coached the first girls’ programs in basketball, softball, track and volleyball. In 1973, she created the women’s athletic program at Lake Michigan College, coached softball, basketball and volleyball, and was later named athletic director.

“She had high expectations. You wanted to play well to please her. She was a total mentor for all of us. She’s the reason I got into coaching,” said Kris (McCleary) Ganeff ’99, a standout catcher for Miller’s teams. That mentorship yielded Miller’s successor as softball head coach, Deanna Gumpf — now Notre Dame’s winningest head coach in any sport. When Gumpf retired in 2024, she handed the reins to Ganeff, who had coached under her for 23 seasons.

With a sense of humor and a warm personality, Miller was also an extremely competitive person, Ganeff recalled. Even during friendly card games on road trips, Miller played to win. And when women’s varsity sports weren’t getting the funding or attention that men’s teams routinely received, she pushed for more. “For her, ‘no’ was not an answer,” Ganeff said.

In retirement, Miller frequented Irish softball games. She volunteered as a coach and hosted impromptu practices for anyone who showed up at a field or court, and her achievements were honored by inductions into several halls of fame. A gardening enthusiast, she served for many years as president of Buchanan, Michigan’s garden club.

Lloyd, her husband of 54 years, died in 2023. She is survived by a daughter, a son and four grandchildren.

As the country approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I’ve been asking myself a question that might seem odd for a professional historian to ponder: What was the American Revolution? Was it, for instance, a rejection of monarchy and embrace of popular sovereignty? The birth of a nation? Or yet another in a series of global imperial wars?

When I teach my course on the Revolution, I pose this query on the first day. The answers I hear vary widely among the students. We spend the whole semester considering it, and usually their answers will still be multiple at the end of the course.

I am struck by the Revolution’s complexity both as a historical event and as a national origin story. At this intensely polarized moment in our country, this history feels highly political, but that is precisely why thinking historically about the clash that led to the creation of the United States is so important. Doing so helps us to see that its history has always been political, while allowing us to grasp the kaleidoscope of perspectives and possibilities within that revolutionary moment.

Asking what the Revolution was entails myriad matters of historical interpretation, which makes the event especially fruitful as an opportunity to teach the historical method — the way historians analyze the past and evaluate evidence with an eye for contingency and specific context in order to advance our understanding of what happened and why.

The first matter to settle may be chronological: When did the Revolution start, and when did it end? In celebrating the 250th anniversary this year, we’re marking the beginning as the moment the 13 colonies declared their independence, severing ties with the British Empire and officially launching a war to make that independence a reality. You could just as well push the starting point back deeper into the history of the colonies; I’ve had students suggest it began as soon as English settlement started in North America in the early 17th century.

Depending on when you start the story of the Revolution, your view of what caused it will shift. Like changing the lens on a camera, different details come to the forefront with each adjustment. If you pinpoint the battles of Lexington and Concord in the spring of 1775 as the origin of revolution, you might note the centrality of rumors and fear to the outbreak of the war. Going further back to the British victory in the Seven Years’ War, also known as the French and Indian War, you might determine that struggles over westward expansion or imperial taxes were what caused many colonists to revolt.

Defining the end of the American Revolution is even trickier. Was it when the British surrendered at Yorktown in 1781? Or perhaps when they recognized American independence in signing the Treaty of Paris in 1783? Cases may be made that the Revolution didn’t truly end until the states ratified the federal Constitution in 1788, becoming the United States of America; or even until they tested their sovereignty by fighting the British again in the War of 1812. In my course, I bring the story all the way up to the Civil War, which I suggest is when many of the unresolved tensions of the Revolution came to a head.

Chronological framing, I remind my students, is one of the primary ways historians build their interpretations of the past. I urge them to think about how the end point you choose suggests a great deal about what you think the Revolution was and what its outcomes were. Focusing on the end of the war and the signing of the peace treaty highlights independence as the primary motivation for and outcome of the Revolution. Choosing the ratification of the Constitution suggests the Revolution was about the creation of a new nation, the founding of a republic. Going even further into the 19th century highlights some of the Revolution’s deeper social, economic and cultural stakes and outcomes — intended or otherwise.

We may also ask what we as Americans want the Revolution to be and to mean. Though this is not inherently a historical question, it is useful to ask because it allows us to consider how responses vary based on who is answering and when they are answering, given how the country itself has evolved. Every time I teach the subject, Notre Dame students respond in new ways.

Despite the frequent projection of contemporary political divides onto our past, the truth is that modern allegiances and convictions do not map neatly onto the realities of the revolutionary era. Though it is important to be aware of the political uses to which this history is being put at present — the celebration of founders as heroes, for example, or the attempted erasure of the persistence of slavery and other paradoxes of American liberty — approaching the past historically is in itself liberating. When we realize the world was not always as it is now, that the United States was not always or even inevitably a country, it’s possible to step outside the present, to be aware of our place in it, and to think beyond its strictures.

The value in investigating the past using different methods of historical inquiry is the appreciation one gains for the complexity and contingency of how things unfolded.

Inspiration may be found around all corners, if you lead with curiosity and humility: in the men who signed their names to the Declaration of Independence; in those who picked up guns to fight the redcoats; even in those who wore the red coats and the policymakers in London who ran the empire that broke down; in the women who spun their own yarn to uphold boycotts; in the enslaved people who ran toward British lines in pursuit of freedom; in the Native American negotiators who struggled to maintain their own sovereignty through the imperial struggle. Any serious effort to understand the American Revolution necessarily involves considering them all.

The truth is that the Revolution meant something different to all these people. It can mean something different to all of us today. And yet it unifies us, because the place where we live was shaped in fundamental ways during the revolutionary moment. Recognizing that fact does not require critiquing or celebrating, settling whether the Revolution was good or bad; historians, after all, don’t ask those kinds of judgment questions. But thinking historically about the Revolution can, I believe, help us better understand our past, navigate our present and imagine possible futures.

Katlyn Carter is an associate professor of history at Notre Dame and the author of Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions.

With some intercessory help, I am sure, from Notre Dame, Our Mother, we got the jobs, and I have been teaching and writing about the First Amendment and other things at Our Lady’s law school ever since.

I have now been to well over 100 home games. The Alma Mater tradition is still a teary highlight, but right there with it is the earnest and endearing pregame patriotic pageant: the national anthem, “God Bless America,” the flag raising, maybe a fighter-jet flyover . . . and also a money-quote mashup of the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Constitution of the United States. (Given my day job, I particularly welcome public address announcer Chris Ackels’ rendition of this civics-education service.)

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Then, no doubt to avoid killing the vibe, the recollection jumps over the lengthy litany of complaints about England’s King George III — “He has . . . sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out of their substances” is one of my favorites — and lands instead with the Declarants’ stirring and deadly serious “pledge to each other” of their “Lives . . . Fortunes and . . . sacred Honor.”

Among the rarely remarked counts contained in the indictment that launched our nation is one that contemporary readers probably need explained: King George, they charged, had signed off on various “Acts of pretended Legislation,” including one for “abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies.”

It turns out that the backers of American independence were specially incensed by the Quebec Act of 1774, which among other things extended to Roman Catholics in Britain’s Province of Quebec the religious toleration that the British Empire otherwise denied and, unlike the “free System of English Laws” that Americans mostly liked, permitted Catholics to hold public office and participate in political life. No surprise, I suppose, that Notre Dame fans are not reminded that the Declaration laments a relaxation of the persecution of “papists.”

It is an uncomfortable fact, but still a fact, that anti-Catholicism is among America’s oldest prejudices. From the Puritans to the Framers and beyond, anti-“popery” was thick in the cultural air breathed by colonial Americans, who were raised on tales of Armadas and Inquisitions, Puritan heroism and Bloody Mary, Jesuit schemes and gunpowder plots, lecherous confessors and baby-killing nuns. Doubts were widespread that, as John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson, “a free government [can] possibly exist with a Roman Catholic Religion.” “In a certain sense,” as the University’s provost and prominent historian John McGreevy ’86 has observed, “anti-Catholicism is integral to the formation of the United States.”

Throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, these suspicions prompted fights — not just political and electoral ones, but riots and street clashes like the 1924 violence chronicled in Class of 1990 alumnus Todd Tucker’s Notre Dame vs. The Klan. Matters great and small could touch things off: immigration and parochial-school funding, Prohibition and policy in the Philippines. Paul Blanshard’s 1949 runaway bestseller, American Freedom and Catholic Power, warned that the Catholic Church posed as grave a threat to the nation’s values as did Soviet communism, and in 1960 would-be President John F. Kennedy had to promise a group of Protestant ministers in Houston that his administration would not be a puppet of the Holy See.

It might be tempting, in light of this history, to join those — some progressive, others conservative — who allege a tension, even a clash, between Catholic commitments and the Constitution. This temptation, though, should be resisted, as the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray insisted in his 1960 classic, We Hold These Truths. To be sure, the City of God is not the City of Man; this side of Heaven, we are all pilgrims; no earthly nation is our permanent home; no political community can claim our ultimate allegiance. At the same time, America’s is a constitutional experiment that, although incomplete and in progress, warrants our support and, especially this year, our celebration.

Remember what else is included in the Stadium’s pregame pageant: the preamble to our Constitution, which launched the political community toward which the Declaration could only aspire. Echoing the Quebec Act, it insisted that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office.” A few years later, the First Amendment protected religious freedom through its complementary requirements that Congress respect religious exercise and stay out of churches’ affairs. Our revolution, unlike the French Revolution, was not a secularist attack on religious faith or the role of religion in public life. Quite the contrary: As James Madison hoped it would, our embrace of religious freedom under law brings a “lustre to our country.” And as Jesus told those trying to trip him up over taxes, there are things that are not Caesar’s.

Richard Garnett is Paul J. Schierl Professor of Law and director of the Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame Law School.

We can’t say we weren’t warned.

America’s founders, steeped in classical thought and wise in the vagaries of human behavior, worried as they pondered how best to establish a constitutional republic. From studying faraway countries and civilizations that long predated their own revolutionary era, they feared that rambunctious electoral politics might endanger the representative democracy they envisioned.

Even before the last rifle shots of the War of Independence were fired, John Adams wrote to a friend, “There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties. . . . This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.”

Adams was referring to the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which he drafted and saw ratified in 1780, the year he sent his letter. Later that decade, the document — underscoring popular sovereignty, checks and balances, and a bill of rights — served as a model for the United States Constitution.

As the new nation’s leadoff vice president and second president, Adams wasn’t alone in fretting about the hazards of parties. After eight years as America’s first chief executive, George Washington devoted a major portion of his farewell address in 1796 to “the baneful effects of the spirit of party.”

Washington, who didn’t campaign against an opponent either time he sought the presidency, counseled the citizenry of nearly 5 million people that “the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.”

Adams and Washington foresaw that undue party loyalty could undermine national unity and poison the possibility of officeholders and citizens working together to solve critical problems. They weren’t alone. Instead of targeting parties, writers of The Federalist (now commonly known as The Federalist Papers), which circulated in 1787 and 1788 to support ratification of the Constitution, cautioned readers against forming “factions.” Like parties, factions emphasized group solidarity and interest rather than the more encompassing and worthwhile public interest.

In Federalist No. 10, James Madison argued that the causes of faction were innate in human nature, but that people possessed the potential to keep a faction from pushing too far for its own benefit to the exclusion of the nation’s common purpose. Madison referred to “the mischiefs of faction” in two different parts of his essay, a possible inspiration for Washington’s phrase about the “mischiefs of the spirit of party” nine years later.

Interestingly, Washington, Adams and Madison all won presidential elections. Washington, independent of party affiliation, was twice the unanimous choice of the Electoral College. Adams, a Federalist, and Madison, a Democratic-Republican, became standard-bearers of the two major parties in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They — and like-minded politicos — knew American elections were destined to be spirited, interparty contests. But the amount of power a party or faction exerted served as a lingering concern.

Fast forward to 2026, and it’s legitimate to consider whether the extreme partisanship we currently witness makes it impossible for our constitutional system to operate in the orderly, albeit intricate, manner the founders created.

Since 1995, Americans have seen eight shutdowns, either complete or partial, of the federal government, one lasting 43 days last year. These prolonged interparty gambits of Washington, D.C., brinksmanship are a flashing warning sign of paralyzing gridlock caused by out-of-control partisanship.

The push and pull of different opinions and approaches triggers healthy debates. However, what’s increasingly unhealthy is debilitating disagreement and discord. Consensus through compromise becomes unlikely as steadfast adversaries glower at each other across a yawning chasm.

Until relatively recently, each major party featured a large-tent spectrum of political convictions. The Democratic coalition included big-city liberals and conservatives from Southern states. The Republican side combined conservatives from the Midwest and Far West with liberals from the Northeast.

No more.

These days, in a profound and undeniable realignment, those on the Democratic right or the Republican left are politically homeless, meaning disputes always tend to occur between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. Without what used to be an internal variety of thought that blunted ideological excesses, arguments now take place from opposite ends of the pole. In the evocative words of Irish poet W.B. Yeats, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

During the past three decades, Democrats and Republicans have battled with such regularity and intensity that the “spirit of party” Washington considered harmful has taken hold not only among those professionally engaged in politics but also among each party’s most fervent supporters. You might say contemporary “base politics” has made our politics base — as in vile or nasty.

Last fall the Pew Research Center conducted a survey of 3,445 adults inquiring about the state of the parties. Respondents showed remarkable consistency: 44 percent of both Democrats and Republicans accept it when elected officials from their own party call their counterparts from the opposing party “evil.” Substantial majorities — 72 percent of Republicans and 71 percent of Democrats — thought that their party governs “honestly,” but only 16 percent of Republicans believed Democrats govern honestly and just 10 percent of Democrats said Republicans do.

These findings reflect what political observers call “negative partisanship” — disdain for the opposing side so passionate that it frequently becomes more influential than an ardent attachment to one’s own camp.

In this hyperpartisan environment, polarization flourishes, making it difficult to find any middle ground for working together. Moreover, the media — both mainstream and social — have an inherent attraction to conflict that often exacerbates contentious quarrels.

The viciousness of this period can be seen most dramatically — and regrettably — in the rise of political violence. The U.S. Capitol Police investigated 9,474 cases involving threats to the 535 members of Congress and their families in 2024. That’s nearly 18 threats per senator or representative.

Vastly more troubling are the two assassination attempts on Donald J. Trump, the murders of Minnesota state legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband and of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, and the firebombing of the Pennsylvania governor’s residence with Governor Josh Shapiro and his family inside the home.

In a poll of 5,547 people age 18 and older released this year by the Public Religion Research Institute, 67 percent of respondents expressed the belief that politicians’ failure to condemn violent rhetoric contributed significantly to violent actions. Assessments of blame for the violence were nearly identical across party lines: 73 percent of Democrats said right-wing groups were at fault, while 72 percent of Republicans identified left-wing provocateurs as the cause.

Both sides have made up their minds about responsibility, and the divide is stark and alarming. No wonder civil communication and collaborative projects rarely take place among die-hard partisans nowadays.

The founders designed a system of government that broadly distributed duties and responsibilities to those either making or executing or interpreting laws. They realized that explicit, constitutional checks and balances were needed to prevent extreme, undemocratic actions.

Doubtlessly for just reasons, the words “party” and “faction” never appear in the Constitution. The writers of its original seven articles wanted government to operate in a deliberate and understandable way without regard to partisan or factional motivations.

In the classic description of the late political scientist Richard Neustadt, the Constitution established a system of “separated institutions sharing powers.” The three distinct branches came together in a sturdy tree rooted in ideas and principles that, ultimately, became a model for many other countries.

Today’s extreme partisanship is vigorously shaking that tree to the point that the founders’ system is in serious jeopardy. When the politics of cross-party combat trumps governing, winning the next election takes precedence over responsibly serving the people. The arrangement inverts the original ideal of democratic campaigning that leads to the exercise of republican government by those who’ve been elected.

With today’s worrying conduct, the forthright anxieties of Adams, Washington and Madison are far from being the bygone concerns of an era remote from our own. The “mischiefs” of party or factional allegiance they deplored continue to threaten the national unity that the Declaration of Independence aspired to achieve 250 years ago.

Robert Schmuhl is the Walter H. Annenberg-Edmund P. Joyce Professor Emeritus of American studies and journalism at Notre Dame and author of Mr. Churchill in the White House: The Untold Story of a Prime Minister and Two Presidents. He’s completing work on a new book about Churchill and Eleanor Roosevelt.

After Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Reeves returned to Arkansas as a free man — and farmer, rancher, church deacon and occasional preacher. He signed on as a deputy U.S. marshal in 1875, when the government was recruiting men to bring law and order to the wilds of western Arkansas and the lands that would become Oklahoma in 1907. On that frontier of 75,000 square miles, where more than 120 fellow deputies would be killed before Oklahoma reached statehood, Bass Reeves became a legend.

In his 32 years as a peace officer, he brought to justice some 3,000 outlaws. He was a tenacious and artful tracker, and lightning quick with a gun.

Because of his gunfighter proficiencies, his code of honor, his habit of handing out silver dollars and his riding the range with a Native American partner, he is widely believed to have been the inspiration for the Lone Ranger, fictional star of radio, movies, novels and comic books. As a kid, I watched The Lone Ranger on television. I was enthralled by the adventures of the masked avenger and Tonto, his faithful companion.

I also watched The Rifleman, Wagon Train, Have Gun – Will Travel, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Maverick, Rawhide, Bonanza, and Wanted Dead or Alive with Steve McQueen. Gunsmoke was on the air for two decades. It was my father’s all-time favorite show; we watched it together every Saturday night.

In 1958, when I was 6 years old, eight of the 10 most popular shows were Westerns, with more than a dozen airing during prime time. Nine years later, when I was 15, the three major networks were still showing 18 hours of Westerns each week.

America’s appetite for tales of the Wild West is as old as the cowboy era itself, a relatively brief period in our country’s history with an outsized impact on our national consciousness. Already in the late 1800s, pulp fiction writers captivated readers with stories of cowboys and Indians, villainous gunslingers and heroic lawmen. The 20th-century writer Louis L’Amour published almost 100 Westerns, selling more than 200 million copies. And Larry McMurtry’s 1985 epic, Lonesome Dove, could make the short list of great American novels.

Eastern newspapers of the time followed the adventures of notorious outlaws, reporting on bank robberies, train heists, shootouts and getaways, romanticizing the daring, deadly feats of Frank and Jesse James, Cole Younger, Bloody Bill Anderson, the Dalton Gang, John Wesley Hardin and Billy the Kid along with those of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson and Wild Bill Hickok — men given badges but who often blurred the line between good guy and bad.

But no medium could tell the cowboy story as boldly and as richly as film, because only giant screens in darkened theaters could give a Western’s most essential character its due: the land itself.

To storytellers largely dismissive of the peoples who had inhabited the continent for 20,000 years or more, the American narrative is the saga of taming and developing the wild and bounteous expanses of a newfound world. So, the panoramic views of Monument Valley, snow-capped mountains and arid seas of sagebrush and cactus were not just beauty shots. The cowboy story, specifically, decluttered America’s post-Civil War vision of itself and restored its sense of wide-open promise. Few images of the American hero are more evocative than the distant lone rider dwarfed against a majestic backdrop of empty space, loping alone and unencumbered, leaving behind some undisclosed past, drifting bravely into an unknown future.

Cowboy life was the subject of almost 400 silent films, including The Great Train Robbery of 1903, based in part on Butch Cassidy and the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang’s holdup of the Union Pacific Railroad near Wilcox, Wyoming, just a few years before. More than 4,000 Westerns were made between 1926 and 1967 — one-fourth of all the movies produced during that time.

Like any culture’s storytelling, the Western was instrumental in weaving together reality and myth to shape, define and convey our national identity, playing all the right notes in our subconscious hymn of place and destiny. The gist is this: A stranger rides into town, highly skilled at gunplay but of uncertain history, and evil is afoot. Bad guys are threatening the earnest, law-abiding community: weaponless farmers and merchants, schoolmarms and ineffective sheriffs. Perhaps there’s a personal vendetta, a score to settle from some dark past. The mysterious yet honorable stranger takes care of the problem — always by shooting and killing — earning the respect of the townsfolk and the affectionate admiration of a woman, always left behind as the hero-stranger rides off again. Evil is vanquished, as it must be vanquished for civilization to dig its roots securely into the soil of tomorrow.

Along the way, other cultural messages are deftly transmitted and reinforced. Problems are best, most easily negotiated through violence. Street smarts are favored over book smarts. Americans should be wary of city folks and city slickers, outsiders not rough and brawny enough to be at home on the range or in the local saloon.

“To breathe free on the land,” writes Garry Wills in John Wayne’s America, “the real American must shake off the weight of institutions — not only of laws and government, but of schools and libraries.” Significantly, the cowboy hero is not an official lawman, not a member of any agency, alliance or established organization. He is outside the system. Our American hero is a freewheeling outlier, a renegade, a maverick. He is a rule-breaker dispensing justice beyond the constraints of legalisms and social norms. He travels alone, on horseback, with no inclination to settle down.

If emotion exists within the heart of a cowboy, it is buried deep within. He is stoic in the face of danger, death, brutality and a woman’s love. Women are secondary players in the Western movie. They always play supporting roles, and the hero cowboy treats them as such. Weak, domestic, fawning, in need of saving. He remains aloof and distant from their amorous seductions, unless they be dance-hall girls with a room above the saloon. “Love ’em and leave ’em” was the code of the West.

The cowboy is a man of few words; he communicates through action. Or by staring, expressionlessly, gazing off into the distance, seeing what others cannot. He is rugged, whiskered and slightly unwashed. He is quick on the draw, decisive in trouble, kind to his horse, reclusive from the ways of society. Relationships are like a wolf pack — lots of growling, sparring and jousting to determine the alpha male.

Generations of American boys — flashing toy six-shooters and Winchester rifles — played cowboys and Indians and saved their neighborhoods from rustlers, outlaws, bank robbers and swarthy desperadoes preying upon innocent victims in need of some macho savior. By watching Gary Cooper, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, American boys learned what manhood looked like. Those who wanted to be real men emulated the tough guy, the solitary hero whose fears and feelings were sealed.

While Hollywood does not turn out Westerns like it once did, the genre persists even now as filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, John Sayles, Jane Campion and the Coen brothers have used the Western to explore the perennial human themes of vengeance, morality, courage and redemption — and the human propensity for violence. The setting and storylines lend themselves to tensions between good and evil, the individual and society, freedom and constraints, and the archetypal garden, fall and sins of human civilization.

That period of American history — roughly 1860 to 1890 — is deeply embedded in the American psyche and its power persists today, from cowboy hats to foreign policy.

Of course, stereotypes come from real life, and the cowboy stories were drawn from the lawless days of a very wild West. By 1865, several million head of cattle roamed Texas, needing to be rounded up and delivered to northern markets depleted by the Civil War. The work was grueling and dangerous. There were long days in the saddle driving feral herds through Indian Territory, shepherding weekslong migrations to train depots in Kansas. A good many of these cattle drivers were Mexicans, freed slaves and Civil War veterans. At boomtowns along the trail, and certainly by the time they reached Abilene or Dodge City, the cowhands had money in their pockets, drank and got rowdy, shooting their pistols and challenging each other in foolish games of bravado.

The expanding West offered plenty of space to evade the law, and many cowpokes found it more appealing and profitable to steal livestock and rob stagecoaches than to drive cattle. In 1880, a newspaper in Tucson, Arizona, reported, “Cowboy is a name which has ceased in this Territory to be a term applied to cattle herders. The term is applied to thieves, robbers, cutthroats and the lawless class of the community generally.” A year later the Arizona Star wrote vividly of cowboys and the times: “They are worse than the Apache and should be treated as such — wherever they are found, let them be shot down like an Apache.”

For several decades the West was a melting pot of trappers, miners and mountain men, Indians and Indian fighters, homesteaders and cowboys, lawmen, outlaws and self-appointed vigilantes as mean, brutal and reckless as the culprits they hunted down. Little effort was made to bring a gunfighter before a judge; it was much easier to shoot to kill or to simply hang one on the spot. Deadly frictions arose between cattlemen and sheepherders, between those putting up fences and those wanting open range. When gold was discovered in the Black Hills in 1874, the U.S. government sent troops to claim that land and to build a series of forts through Indian country to clear a path and to exterminate or confine to reservations the original inhabitants.

Some of the era’s most colorful characters became folk heroes, exposing an American fascination with bad guys, with taking vicarious pleasure in those who defied custom, code and convention — even the deadly among them. In a country that only a century before had been forged in rebellion and war, and suffering the fresh wounds of a devastating national conflict, a tolerance for violence was ingrained into our national disposition.

There is myth and there is reality. It is hard to know where one leaves off and the other begins. We are still shaped by both.

Kerry Temple is a former editor of this magazine.

Notre Dame’s service to the nation has taken many forms, from Rev. Theodore Hesburgh’s presidential appointments to the countless alumni who serve today at every level of public life. To name a few: Justice Amy Coney Barrett ’97J.D. of the United States Supreme Court, CIA Director John Ratcliffe ’86, Solicitor General

D. John Sauer ’02M.A., Admiral William Houston ’90, retired Admiral Christopher Grady ’84 and retired U.S. Army General Bryan Fenton ’87, plus local leaders like mayors James Mueller ’04 in South Bend and Lauren McLean ’97 in Boise, Idaho. Graduates working on nuclear deterrence and the bipartisan engagement of the University’s federal affairs office in Washington, D.C., have also received recent coverage in our pages.

Here we look back at Sorin’s initial act of patriotic outreach and accounts of military service and sacrifice from the Civil War to Iraq and Afghanistan. They are just a few stories of the many people who enshrined and reinforced that aspect of the University’s character etched in stone above the basilica’s eastern door: “God, Country, Notre Dame.”

July 4, 1845

The doors of the University were opened to the public, and the students and faculty presented an evening of entertainment, commencing with a reading of the Declaration of Independence.

Read the full story at magazine.nd.edu/1845.

Corby and his compatriots

Hundreds fell within minutes and Rev. William Corby, CSC, dismounted to hear the confessions of the dying men. “I shall never forget,” he wrote, “how wicked the whiz of the enemy’s bullets seemed as we advanced into that battle.”

Read about Chaplain Corby and others who contributed to “Notre Dame’s rich and multifaceted involvement in the Civil War” at magazine.nd.edu/civilwar.

Soldiers of the Great War

After the United States entered World War I in April 1917, some 350 members of that year’s graduating class enlisted. In total, about 2,500 Notre Dame men — students, faculty, alumni and priests — performed military service during the war.

Read about the sacrifices that inspired the World War I Memorial Door and the mysteries it holds at magazine.nd.edu/greatwar.

Barry at Bloody Ridge

The petrified soldiers of the 45th Infantry Division knew they could count on one man to be there for them through their peril: their unit chaplain, Father Joseph D. Barry, CSC, ’29, who crawled down a dry creek bed during the fighting on Sicily to reach the injured. The Army soon awarded Barry the Silver Star.

Read the full story at magazine.nd.edu/barry.

Father Boland in the Pacific

Shortly after noon on February 19, 1945, the troop transport USS Highlands moved within two miles of Iwo Jima to begin receiving the first casualties from the fighting on that South Pacific island. Until then, Rev. Francis J. Boland, CSC, Class of 1918, who had left his post as dean of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters at age 47 to serve as a Navy chaplain, had been an observer. Now his work took on a grimmer reality.

Read about Boland’s World War II service at magazine.nd.edu/boland.

Colonel Kelly Cook ’47

Many other fliers were shot down in Vietnam, but few could lay the same claim as Cook — he had jumped into American aircraft to fight for his country in three separate wars.

Read about Air Force pilot Kelly Cook ’47 at magazine.nd.edu/cook.

Fallen, not forgotten

A heartbreaking story may be told about each Notre Dame man who died during the Vietnam War. Darrell Katovsich, who researched these stories, doesn’t want them or their sacrifices to be forgotten.

Read about Katovsich’s efforts at magazine.nd.edu/vietnam.

‘What can I do for my country?’

“September 11, 2001, was the end of the ‘peacetime Army’ we knew. Terrorists had declared war on our country. I prayed for peace. In General Douglas MacArthur’s words, ‘The soldier above all other people prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.’”

Read the account of Amanda (Dodd) Miller ’99 deploying — alongside her twin sister, Lacy (Dodd) Miske ’99 — to the Middle East in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks at magazine.nd.edu/dodd.

Tending to the dead

“I routinely assisted my mortuary affairs personnel when they were handling casualties. After all, these soldiers worked for me. If they had to expose themselves to the gruesome things that can happen when a person is killed in a war, I needed to stand at their side, leading by example.”

Read Andrew DeKever’s story of his service as a support operations officer for a brigade of 3,500 soldiers in Afghanistan at magazine.nd.edu/dekever.

At the dinner table, my father preached integration, not in sermons exactly but in short bursts more like sermonettes, 25 words or less. My mother supported integration, too, but she was terrified that the violence we saw on TV would visit Beaufort, that white Southerners were so riled up the Klan would target Catholics, too. Oh, for goodness’ sake, my father said. They’re not after us.

My sister and I did witness three or four men dressed in Klan robes, but from our hiding perch we only laughed at the silly men playing dress-up. Then, because it was the Klan, we skedaddled. We later learned in the local paper that they’d been waiting for their fellow Klansmen to march through downtown. During my childhood, that show of white supremacy was the only demonstration or sit-in in our little town — and white folks wanted to keep it that way. We were shocked when the owners of the two drugstores, where we loved to watch the counter girls portion out syrup and fizz, dismantled their soda fountains. One after the other, they remodeled. To make more room for cosmetics, our druggist said. In the car, my father scoffed. Cosmetics. You can’t have a sit-in if there’s no place to sit.

The whole family tuned in on that June night when President Kennedy appeared on TV to appeal for a collective examination of conscience, a phrase that made our Catholic ears ring. He was proposing new civil rights legislation. The president spoke to us calmly and forcefully from the screen — so like the way my father spoke, I was sure Beaufort would come around to their way of thinking. The whole country was bound to come around, even South Carolina. I was filled with self-satisfaction that my family was on the right team.

But the very next morning the Today show brought us the assassination of Medgar Evers, the young NAACP leader in Jackson, Mississippi. Waves of shame that I was a Southerner washed over me. Maybe my mother shouldn’t have been as scared as she was, but she wasn’t crazy to fear the Klan. They were out for blood.

School had just begun that year when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Over the weekend, when TV rebroadcast King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, my father sat in the armchair to take it in, his eyes brimming.

I had just started junior high, where one of my new friends counted a signer of the Declaration of Independence among her ancestors. We both came from families where politics was served with supper, but the politics couldn’t have been more different. Our friendship was based on our mutual fascination with how the other could be so utterly wrong — neither of us budged a quarter inch. One day our loud recess argument about integration attracted a little crowd under the basketball hoops. When we trooped back into social studies, the teacher asked us to continue our debate for the class.

My fervor, I’m afraid, mainly involved my fondness for the sound of my own voice. Luckily, all my father’s dinner-table phrases tumbled out: simple justice, moral courage, human dignity. For a moment, the clarity of those phrases made me believe I held the class in the palm of my hand. But when my friend said that the inevitable result of integration would be INTERMARRIAGE, the teacher wrote the word “miscegenation” on the board and a shiver ran through the room.

At the end of our debate, the class voted by secret ballot whether schools should be integrated, and the teacher announced the results dramatically: Integration lost badly, as I’d known it would. Still, my friends’ voting for segregation was hard to fathom. We’d seen fire hoses on TV, kids herded into paddy wagons. We lived in a town where inequality was visible, ramshackle cabins a few blocks from grand mansions built by the enslaved.

A few weeks later, the same teacher had us write essays arguing for or against the institution of slavery. Now I was downright bewildered — some of my friends chose the affirmative. They said Beaufort’s climate resembled western Africa’s and defended the generosity of slaveholders (the doctors they provided, the gospels they taught). They’d spent their whole lives hearing this remarkable fiction, that slavery was actually a charitable endeavor that had bettered the lives of poor Africans.

In 1963, the shocks kept coming: It was also the year of the Birmingham church bombing that killed four little Black girls and the assassination of President Kennedy. The killing would continue throughout the ’60s: voting rights activists Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney; Malcolm X; King himself. But by the end of the ’60s, moral outrage, civil rights legislation and education about the injustices so many Americans had suffered under Jim Crow had finally nudged us along a crooked path toward integration. We made slow but visible progress.

Today, however, demagogues once again stoke fear, distort history and challenge human and civil rights. As Americans celebrate a momentous birthday, we need to remind ourselves of grave injustices, not suppress those memories. And we need to remind ourselves of the courage and clarity of the Civil Rights Movement. Remembering both the tragedies and the triumphs of a year like 1963 will honor the truth and make us stronger.

Valerie Sayers, professor emerita of English, is the author of seven books. Her essays and stories appear widely.

Liberty Weekend, 1986: the national celebration of the Statue of Liberty’s 100th birthday. I was nearly 13 then, so what I recollect now is how brilliantly on that Fourth of July the largest fireworks display in American history lit up New York Harbor and Operation Sail, the grandest international assemblage of wooden sailing vessels ever known.

It was, for me, a moment of awe and wonder simply watching it on television.

The opening ceremonies on July 3 were something, too. The French president dropped in to check on his country’s colossal gift. Hollywood royalty spoke. José Feliciano sang, and Mikhail Baryshnikov danced to Gershwin after being sworn in as a U.S. citizen. Neil Diamond belted out the money-line chorus to his immigration anthem — “they’re coming to America!” — over and over again.

It was a celebration of immigrants and immigration by a nation formed from the very same. During his well-received remarks, President Ronald Reagan spoke of the statue as “Miss Liberty,” as “the mother of exiles” in homage to poet Emma Lazarus, as “everybody’s gal.” His portrait of the United States elided Native Americans, as it often did — apart from mentioning those who had worked on the statue’s five-year restoration alongside French craftspeople and Americans of African and European descent — but his core question struck no less resonant a chord: “Which of us does not think of . . . grandfathers and grandmothers, from so many places around the globe, for whom this statue was the first glimpse of America?”

Welcoming the stranger is one of three great American traditions regarding the immigrant that are as old as America itself. Of course, welcomes are fraught with peril before trust is established — a lesson cruelly learned by those Taino Indians who, in the words of a recent Smithsonian magazine piece, so “impressed Columbus with their generosity.”

Columbus represented a civilization that at least paid lip service to hospitality and xenophilia as among the greatest virtues. God’s injunction to take care of the foreigner, the traveler, the exile who appears at your door is repeated dozens of times in the Pentateuch. Abraham and Sarah are rewarded for doing it; the Israelites are admonished not to do unto others as the Egyptians had done unto them. Christ, that divine self-exile among humans, identifies himself with the stranger in Matthew 25, and lists the manner of the stranger’s welcome as a leading criterion in the judgment of nations.

By then, displays and failures of such welcome could be said to drive much of the action — and the tragedy — of Greek and Roman plays and epic poetry. In the classical world, wisdom generally lay in cautious welcome, with strong emphasis on both words, lest one incur either the treachery of the wayfarer or the ire of the gods.

A pious man, George Washington understood such wisdom, even if as a slaveowner he practiced it in the breach. “I had always hoped that this land might become a safe & agreeable Asylum to the virtuous & persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong,” he wrote to a Dutch political exile in 1788, the year the United States ratified the Constitution and held its first presidential election.

The two main waves of European immigration delivered more than 30 million people to our shores in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and one way or another, it might be said of their descendants that they “made it.” So, if welcome is one time-honored American custom, being the stranger is another. The botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer offers this humbling contemplation of a creation myth from her Potawatomi tradition in Braiding Sweetgrass.

“It is good to remember that the original woman was herself an immigrant,” she begins.

She fell a long way from her home in the Skyworld, leaving behind all who knew her and who held her dear. She could never go back. Since 1492, most here are immigrants as well, perhaps arriving on Ellis Island without even knowing that Turtle Island rested beneath their feet. Some of my ancestors are Skywoman’s people, and I belong to them. Some of my ancestors were the newer kind of immigrants, too. . . . And here we all are, on Turtle Island, trying to make a home. Their stories, of arrivals with empty pockets and nothing but hope, resonate with Skywoman’s. She came here with nothing but a handful of seeds and the slimmest of instructions to “use your gifts and dreams for good,” the same instructions we all carry.

The third great American tradition of immigration — and here the adjective indicates magnitude, not laudability — is rejection. Fear. Closed doors. Exclusion. The reception afforded the 400,000 unwilling Africans transported to what is now the U.S. during the 330-year span of the transatlantic slave trade could not be called a welcome in any humane sense of that word: centuries of enslavement followed by social segregation and economic and political oppression for their descendants.

Hardly anyone escaped what would come to be called, ironically, “nativism,” which could be defined as simply as the aggressive resentment of the foreign-born, or as specifically as the fearful gatekeeping of the rights and privileges of citizenship against those who must not be entrusted with it. Before 1776, when colonists along North America’s Atlantic seaboard were subjects of the English king, legal repression, animosity and vigilante violence were all-too-frequently visited upon Jews and Catholics, Quakers and Anabaptists. Benjamin Franklin, for one, expressed misgivings about the alienness and incompatibility of the Pennsylvania Dutch.

During the largely anti-Irish, anti-Catholic nativist hysteria of the 1850s, Americans who viewed themselves as “old stock” formed the Native American Party, more readily remembered as the Know-Nothings for their official policy of keeping their politics secret. Less discreet were urban street gangs like Baltimore’s Plug Uglies, who played leading roles in a series of election riots in the city in 1856 that involved open gun battles and left dozens dead and scores injured. The following year, chanting about “a foreign band” led by a “servile priesthood” that would pollute “this Eden-land,” the Uglies disrupted local elections in Washington, D.C., with a bloody street melee quelled only when President James Buchanan deployed two companies of U.S. Marines to intervene.

Nothing, it seems, is new under the American sun. Historian Jill Lepore dedicates her illuminating 2019 book-length essay, This America: The Case for the Nation, to her father, “whose immigrant parents named him Amerigo in 1924, the year Congress passed a law banning immigrants like them.” During a 1920 House of Representatives debate that yielded an earlier round of such restrictions, one Oklahoma Democrat recounted his visit to Ellis Island, where he could see only reasons to “protect” American citizens from these new arrivals, who were, to a man, woman and child, “weak, small of stature, poorly clad, emaciated, and in a condition which showed that the environments surrounding them in their European homes were indeed very bad . . . not the kind of people we want as citizens in this country.”

These efforts were so successful at all but locking the U.S. immigration door that in 1939 the U.S. Coast Guard prevented the German ocean liner St. Louis from making land with more than 900 Jewish refugees aboard. The first concentration camps were then six years old. Nazi Germany invaded Poland three months later.

Ellis Island finally shuttered as an immigration portal in 1954, by which time officials stationed at international airports were performing most of the comparatively light work of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The dark chapters of U.S. immigration history seemed forgotten in 1986. That November, Reagan signed what by most measures is the last major piece of immigration legislation U.S. lawmakers have fashioned. It targeted employers who hired undocumented, foreign-born workers and offered amnesty to nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants who had lived in the country at least since 1982 — or had been working seasonally in agriculture through May 1986. Strangers were welcomed.

Soon, however, those who hoped to enter our borders would have a much harder time of it. American amnesia shifted to block out our immigrant past wholesale.

Since then, calls to overhaul the U.S. immigration system have fallen deep down the political cracks. Our rhetoric about immigration has sunk deeper still.

“We are saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants,” the U.S. Catholic bishops, speaking with near-unanimity, said in an official statement last fall. Cataloging grievances that had risen to their ears, and acknowledging the nation’s responsibility to regulate its borders, they spoke of the “enormous contributions to the well-being of our nation” that contemporary immigrants make, whatever papers they do or don’t hold. “Human dignity and national security are not in conflict,” they said. “Both are possible if people of good will work together.”

Asked his opinion, Pope Leo XIV deplored the “extremely disrespectful” treatment of America’s undocumented immigrants and affirmed the bishops’ appraisal of the “climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement.” He added: “No one has said that the United States should have open borders.” Instead he called for due process and recognition that people aren’t the problem; rather, the broken system is.

I paid my own visit to New York’s Castle Garden and Ellis Island three years ago, the fulfillment of a lifelong yearning to discover something of my family’s — mostly opaque, I’m sorry to say — immigrant past: the Brits who arrived in the first-wave 1850s and the Hungarians and Dutch at the turn of the 20th century.

I found that America in 1900 had an exacting and remarkably well-organized system for welcoming strangers and putting them on the long path toward citizenship. It put travel-weary people through what were typically a few scrutinous, anxious hours or days, but on the whole it treated them fairly. In 2 percent of cases — and these stories were often heartbreaking — it sent would-be migrants back because of criminal records, questionable behavior or matters of physical or mental health. I read about bad attitudes and bad days and stern treatment, but also about kindness, humanity, patience and steadfastness. The country needed a self-replenishing workforce for agriculture, manufacturing and service jobs, and the system worked.

Great hardships pushed those migrants to pack their trunks and board ships in Bremen and Liverpool, Naples and Rotterdam, Antwerp and Le Havre, ceding control of their lives to sea captains and the open ocean. It strikes me as no different than what pushes people today to take their chances on makeshift rafts, the Mexican desert and U.S. law enforcement. Their first glimpse of America? Not the Statue of Liberty or even Neil Diamond in black sequins, but angry faces, detention centers, family separations, beatings in the streets, arrests.

Yet they’re still coming. Despite our fears and the failure of American ingenuity to come up with a smart, sensible system of welcome, we still have something here the world wants to be part of.

“What has made us a nation is our love of liberty and our realization that we’re part of a great historic venture, an experiment in freedom to test the ability of people to live together in freedom, respecting the rights of others and expecting that their rights, in turn, will be respected.” Ronald Reagan spoke those words when he announced the formation of the Statue of Liberty — Ellis Island Centennial Commission in 1982, one year after a fellow American citizen tried to kill him at close range in violation of those high-minded ideals.

Like their nativist forebears, many today question the capacity of this generation of newcomers to understand that “great historic venture,” to embrace that “experiment in freedom” and live out that mutual respect. Perhaps it’s time Americans ask whether we still believe in those values and habits ourselves.

John Nagy is managing editor of this magazine.

My high-jumping teammate, Bob Rudrow, and I were talking late at night in a tiny pub inside the Sandringham Hotel in London — just a little room off the lobby. It was 1969. We were both 19 years old and touring the United Kingdom with the Jersey Shore Athletic Club. Bob’s eyes had lit up as he recognized the man standing behind me and asked that question. I turned around, and there approaching the bar was this older gentleman with a million rings under his eyes. He smiled slightly and replied, “Well, I’ve been accused of that!”

Ellington was one of the creators of jazz, that uniquely American art, and a master composer, writing songs and scores that blurred boundaries between the improvisational and the written. He was a pioneer on the musical frontier, his music an undeniable celebration of freedom in racist America. As jazz pianist and educator Billy Taylor summed up Ellington’s life and music, it’s “what we’re about as Americans.”

And it was Duke Ellington, right there, standing in the same old hotel he had probably stayed in many times before. We got to talk with him for 20 minutes about music and sports, about his upcoming concert, about our track team’s travel to the Edinburgh Highland Games.

I had seen Ellington perform on television but regretfully did not know much about his music in that moment. As I became familiar with it, and became a musician myself, I wished I could have a do-over of that chance meeting. Little did I know that night how much my own future in sports and music would intersect with American originals, people who bodied forth an America that celebrates a learn-as-you-go freedom.

The next winter, feeling frustrated with my lack of improvement in the high jump, I switched to a new style that was changing the sport: the Fosbury Flop. I had only seen it on TV in 1968 when Dick Fosbury won the gold medal and set an Olympic record at Mexico City, astounding the world by sailing over the bar on his back. I wasn’t sure exactly how it worked but gave it a try, against my coach’s wishes. I improved almost 8 inches in two months, clearing 7 feet.

The following summer I attended an Olympic training camp at Duke University. I worked with Fosbury’s coach at Oregon State University, Berny Wagner, and trained and became friends with Fosbury’s teammate John Radetich, who would go on to set a world record. I learned why adding a J curve to the approach added torque, and why the greater “bilateral symmetry” of the flop, as Wagner put it, made it a simpler technique to learn than previous styles.

Two years later, I met Fosbury at the NCAA championships in Eugene, Oregon. He lived a few blocks from the Hayward Field stadium and knew of me as an early adopter of the flop. He generously invited me to stay at his house for the next month and a half, when I would be competing in the 1972 Olympic trials in Eugene, aka Track Town USA. We got to be friends.

Fos described to me how the flop had evolved over his high school years. The most common way of high jumping then was known as “the straddle,” which involved approaching the bar from about a 30- to 45-degree angle, jumping from the foot closest to the bar, kicking the other foot high and rolling over the bar face down. But Fos had begun with the older and outmoded “scissors” style, which involved approaching from the other side, taking off with the foot farthest from the bar, and kind of sitting over it with alternating legs swinging scissorlike. I knew that he began bending backwards just to avoid having his backside hit the bar, but I didn’t yet know that he had first tried the flop — half-scissors, half-backbend — during a track meet as a high school sophomore. Though not a particularly good jumper or even athlete — “the worst high jumper in the state,” as he put it — he improved his best mark that day by 6 inches. He said, “I didn’t change my style. It changed inside me.”

Over the next few years, he faced ridicule from fellow jumpers as well as coaches for his unorthodox way of jumping. Yet he persisted, silencing his critics over time with his improvements, especially in the lead-up to the ’68 Olympics, when he improved another half-foot. Biographer Bob Welch called the new method “Dick Fosbury’s One-Man High-Jump Revolution.” The last world record set using the straddle technique was in 1978, almost 50 years ago — and only 10 years after Fosbury won his gold medal. Since then all world records and Olympic medals have been won by floppers.

In the late 1970s Fos visited me in Chicago, where I was a graduate student. A colleague of mine was writing a book on the Olympic movement, and we arranged for Fos to talk to him.

During the interview, Fos mentioned how, when he was 14, he and his younger brother were hit by a drunken driver while bicycling. Dick was uninjured, but his brother was killed. He also described his mixed emotions in Mexico City, receiving his gold medal at a time of great political turmoil in the United States and Mexico. He had just set the Olympic and American records in front of 80,000 spectators who had stayed for this last event, and he described how he had felt and absorbed their energy. Later, as “The Star-Spangled Banner” began, he said, he was flooded with the faces of his family and people from his hometown of Medford, Oregon, who had believed in him and had sent a telegram from the whole town. He smiled, and when the anthem finished, as Welch put it, he “flashed a quick peace sign, then spontaneously raised his right fist in solidarity with his friends Tommie Smith and John Carlos,” Black sprinters and medalists from the U.S. who had raised their gloved fists in protest of American racism four days earlier.

I felt that Fos was revealing to us, though he did not say so, the driving energies that had propelled him to transform high jumping and win gold. His turn to the flop began only a year and a half after his brother’s death, a very troubled time for him and his family. His parents divorced, and he never cried or spoke about his brother’s death then, or for years afterward.

That trauma had lived in him and driven him, and perhaps it partially explained why he felt exhausted and depressed for some time after the Olympics. His greatest strength was mental focus, without which his jumping lagged. But he also wanted more than high-jumping celebrity and took stands for racial justice and against the Vietnam War, devoted himself to completing his degree in civil engineering and became a lifelong supporter of the Special Olympics.

Fos passed away in 2023. He was a warmhearted, modest guy who lived a life of learn-as-you-go freedom.

As a blues harmonica player, I was fortunate enough to be able to perform with many of the musicians who created the Chicago Blues, and who had made their way up from the Mississippi Delta during the Great Migration while fighting poverty and racism. And I got to know and perform with a South Bend musician, Billy “Stix” Nicks, a drummer born in 1934 in Greenwood, Mississippi, not far from where 14-year-old Emmett Till would be murdered in 1955. Billy had founded the band that would later become Junior Walker and the All Stars, drumming on many Motown hits such as “How Sweet It Is to Be Loved by You.”

In 1956, South Bend’s WNDU-TV hired Billy Nicks and the Rhythm Rockers — with Junior Walker on saxophone, Fred Patton on keyboards and Willie Woods on guitar and vocals — for a regular Saturday dance show called Club 46. This began connections between Nicks and Notre Dame that lasted over 50 years, including his stints as a radio disc jockey and drum teacher in the music department. After two years in the U.S. Army, Billy returned home from Germany in 1959 to play jazz with pianist Jackie Ivory, recording for Atlantic Records. In 1966, he rejoined Junior Walker with a tour that began at the famed Apollo Theater in Harlem. The two became bandmates for another 10 years.

One of Billy’s many compelling stories recalled a train trip from the Deep South to South Bend when he was in the Army. He boarded an empty coach in uniform. At some point, a white conductor told him he needed to leave that car, as it was for whites only. Billy refused to get up. He realized later the conductor could have stopped the train at the next stop and had him beaten — or worse. This is how things were, and Billy was well aware of it.

He explained why his family had moved to South Bend in 1943. His father had been a sharecropper, that system of economic exploitation that subjected African Americans to the racist whims of white landowners. One day the family’s landowner threatened to beat his father, and his father stood up to him, forcing the man to back off. Billy’s parents understood they needed to leave immediately or risk his father’s being beaten or killed.

Billy also recalled traveling to Mississippi for family reunions as a child. The train departing from Chicago was segregated — not because of Illinois law, but because of the rigid Jim Crow system they entered once they crossed the Mason-Dixon Line. But racism was also local, as he said elsewhere: “Back during that time, I don’t care who you were. If you were a congressman, if you were African American, you were not allowed to stay in a hotel in downtown South Bend.”

I once did a gig with Billy at Rosa’s Lounge in Chicago. After we finished a song, our singer asked Billy if he knew “Caldonia,” the song Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five first recorded in 1945. I leaned over between them and joked, “Yeah, he knew her personally.” To which Billy replied, “Yes, I toured with her in 1960; did about 15 gigs with her.”

What the. . . ? I wondered. But it was time to start the song, and I had to play the intro on harmonica. I was familiar with the tune from touring with piano legend Pinetop Perkins but had never imagined that “Caldonia” was an actual person. Now I was realizing that, yes, of course, a lot of tunes with name titles are about real people.

After we went on break, Billy elaborated. Caldonia was a singer and contortionist named Estelle Young who had performed with Jordan. The bandleader had started calling her Caldonia on stage. Young had her own touring band on the chitlin circuit called “Caldonia’s Review.”

She was about 65 when Billy knew her, and she could still sing on one leg with the other wrapped behind her head, he said. “The guy that wrote the song had broken up with her and was still angry about it.” Billboard record reviewer Maurie Orodenker once described “Caldonia” as “rock and roll,” one of the first print uses of the term. My jest had turned into a fantastic music history lesson for me.

Billy once invited my family and me to his Olivet African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Bend, where, at one point, he performed an amazing version of the gospel song “Wade in the Water” as a solo on the trap drum set. As the jazz trumpeter, music professor and Olivet member Charles Ellison said of Billy, “He loved everyone. His life was a model of love.”

That was Billy, always fully present, alive in the encounter, always glad to see you. He died in 2017. I remember his story now as the Trump administration attempts to erase the history of racism in the military and in the country, to cancel American voices from speaking freely. I will not forget these American originals who lived and voiced that freedom and refused to be silenced.

Eugene Halton is an emeritus professor of sociology at Notre Dame and the author of The Great Brain Suck: And Other American Epiphanies.

Fighting Irish fans will remember that as an exultant day. A win over Florida State propelled Notre Dame to No. 1, a status the program had become accustomed to at the height of the Lou Holtz era.

What happened the next week also became an indelible memory. That deflating loss to Boston College foreshadowed a future unlike anything Notre Dame had known in its hundred-odd years of football to that point.

For that breathlessly hyped Florida State game, ESPN’s six-year-old College GameDay aired from Heritage Hall inside the Joyce Center, the pregame show’s first on-site broadcast. Only fitting that the Fighting Irish, the undisputed grand dame of college football as we knew it, would host such a momentous occasion. But claims to that mantle would be contested like never before as the national television cameras widened their focus.

GameDay’s touring road show soon trained its klieg lights on Tuscaloosa and Eugene, Ann Arbor and Lincoln, State College and Norman, nationalizing interest in a sport built on regional identities. Each Saturday became a showcase for the host school, but also for the sport as a whole, wrapping into a single broadcast all the hot takes and human interest a college football fan could handle.

The primary local effect was that Notre Dame would no longer be the only collegiate team of coast-to-coast consequence. College football had started to pursue a destiny manifested in a Big Ten that today sprawls from Maryland to Oregon and an Atlantic Coast Conference that reaches the Pacific. The breathtaking breadth of that evolution might’ve been unforeseeable on November 13, 1993, but in retrospect, that moment feels to me like the big bang of the fast-expanding modern football universe.

In professional football, 1993 was a transformative year, too. The NFL instituted unrestricted free agency for players, restructuring the economics of a game that had not yet swallowed the country whole, but would soon consume a disproportionate share of the lucrative sports media market. Back then, baseball’s World Series still commanded better head-to-head TV ratings than midseason NFL matchups.

That changed in 2010, when an ordinary October Sunday night game between New Orleans and Pittsburgh drew more viewers in the same primetime slot than Texas and San Francisco attracted for Game 4 of the World Series. With only a few exceptions, that has been the ratings rule ever since. So far this decade, NFL regular-season games have attracted 5 million more viewers on average than the typical World Series game — this despite two consecutive championships for the dynastic, major-market Los Angeles Dodgers, who boast a modern-day Babe Ruth (maybe better) in Shohei Ohtani.

Then this: The first round of the NFL Draft — in which reading names from a podium is the main action — routinely beats NBA playoff games for total eyeballs. Back in 2010, the draft’s TV audience more than doubled that of the high-stakes pro basketball games played the same night. Last year, some 350,000 people attended the draft in person. That’s more than three times the population of the host city, Green Bay, Wisconsin.

As for college sports, I’ll cherry-pick this stat: The 2024 First Responder Bowl between Texas State and North Texas suffered a nearly 40 percent ratings decline from the previous year. That still amounted to an average of 1.7 million viewers, at least half-a-million more than a bunch of regular-season NBA games that week.

All this leads to one irrefutable conclusion: Football has become America’s national pastime.

That’s hardly a revelation. Football’s a big deal? Thanks for the insight.

Here’s the thing, though: The sport’s ascendance says something about us — as a culture, as a country — that reflects larger changes in public life over the past half century. The bicentennial summer of 1976 belonged to Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine of Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan. Baseball still occupied the center of the American athletic consciousness.

George Will liked it that way. The political commentator and baseball bard waxed on about the sport’s relationship to the national character in a 1994 Ken Burns documentary. A win-some-lose-some game, played every day, with outcomes decided on the smallest of incremental differences — that, to Will, aligned baseball with our very system of government. “It’s a game that you can’t like if winning’s everything,” he said, “and democracy’s that way, too.”

Football, in Will’s estimation, showcased the worst aspects of American life: “violence, punctuated by committee meetings.” A great line, but juuuust a bit outside of the trajectory of public opinion.

Baseball’s languid tempo was already falling behind the accelerating pace of modern life. With a pitch clock and other rules changes in recent years, the sport’s leaders have attempted — successfully — to rev up games, but the stigma of “boring” does not wash off easily.

What’s a little strange is that football isn’t exactly in a rush. Games last at least as long on the gridiron as they do on the diamond. Action happens in intermittent bursts of a few seconds at a time with the teams still huddling for their committee meetings in between.

Why not hockey? Or soccer? Those perpetual-motion sports have pockets of popularity across the country, but they’re niche by comparison, as if an attention tariff has been imposed on them as imported products. Constant flow is their paradoxical glitch: the extended, trained focus necessary to appreciate the games asks too much of modern attention spans. An ill-timed bathroom break or beer run or buzzing phone and — goal! — the moment’s gone.

So how has the game the rest of the world knows as “American football” come to nestle itself so deep into our national consciousness? I have half-baked theories about that, too.

One involves the sport’s unique combination of aggression and agility. Any given play has the potential to produce a tooth-loosening collision worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster or a display of graceful athleticism akin to ballet. Often both in the same instant. Transfixing stuff.

Other sports possess those characteristics to varying degrees, but none as concentrated as the bracing belts football delivers in shot-glass quantities. The game pauses just long enough between plays for everyone watching to weigh in on what just happened, to revisit with awe or anger in multiangled slo-mo, to reset for the next one.

Both the nature of football and its pace fit neatly into our tech-captured minds. It’s the TikTok of sports. Watch a play. Like or comment. Scroll on.

The seasonal cadence taps into a similar dynamic. Even though football’s inexorable popularity has bled into routine weeknight games, each team plays no more than once a week, most still on Saturdays and Sundays. Then we spend the time in between arguing, parsing highlights and speculating about what’s to come — ample fertilizing manure for talk shows and internet message boards.

Counterintuitive as it sounds, other sports play too often. The outcome of any given game matters too little, the schedule is too crowded to gin up the life-giving oxygen all sports need: hype. A casual fan can’t keep up. Interest then remains stubbornly regional, the city hall and statehouse of the sports world, important in local terms but drowned out in the noise of national conversation and controversy.

Our once-upon-a-pastime baseball, basketball and hockey suffer from those structural disadvantages. Like American manufacturing, they’re still robust industries full of workaday professionals producing at high levels for loyal customers, but they have long since ceded their claims to cultural and economic hegemony. The ebb and flow of their seasons and daily thrum of competition demand patience, an even-keeled awareness that no given outcome means too much. These have not been widely appreciated public virtues for some time.

George Will equated the systemic limits of the democratic process with the inherent checks-and-balances of baseball, “a game that you can’t like if winning’s everything.” The modern American infatuation with football flips that formulation like a safety upending a leaping wide receiver.

Vince Lombardi, whose name adorns the Super Bowl trophy, put it this way: “Winning isn’t everything, but it’s the only thing,” the legendary Green Bay Packers coach said. “In our business, there is no second place. Either you’re first or you’re last.”

In retrospect, Lombardi came to regret that statement. He wished he had emphasized that he didn’t mean the final score, but the individual effort toward that end, whatever the outcome. Give your all, and you’ve won.

Our cultural relationship to Lombardi’s words tracks far more with the folk interpretation than with his clarification, on the gridiron and off. Football mirrors our all-or-nothing national mood. And with apologies to Will, it’s the sport that best embodies American democracy as it’s now practiced with its zero-sum passions.

If the give-and-take of dealmaking once defined governing — like the art of the sacrifice bunt — now it’s the exercise of raw power against unrelenting resistance. Who’s on offense and defense depends on which way the volatile electoral winds blow, but the constant is a political tush push.

Debate has come to mean something closer to open conflict than sober deliberation. Compromise? For suckers. We have plenty to say, but little interest in listening.

Football and the culture it feeds on have given us a dialogue-dousing expression to punctuate this phenomenon. Victory offers the privilege of dismissing the opposition with one winning-is-the-only-thing word that the internet has elevated to the height of rhetoric:

Scoreboard.

Jason Kelly is editor of this magazine.

The Bicentennial in 1976 was for me, as an African American teenager, a time of optimism. It was a moment to reflect upon our national history, and my first conscious celebration of what it means to be a citizen, a part of the polis larger than myself. Even at that age I was not naive about our country’s often-problematic past, yet I was profoundly encouraged by the progress of the Civil Rights Movement and by the social and economic gains of my own family.

I had also witnessed how legal and constitutional guardrails, the rule of law, reined in the crimes and misdemeanors of President Richard Nixon and his cohort during the Watergate scandal. Closer to hand, I was looking forward to finishing high school, going on to college and making my way into the wider world. I felt great hope in my future as an American citizen.

What I could not have imagined was that in 50 years, during the run-up to the nation’s next big birthday celebration, I would be carrying my United States passport every day in the fear of having to ward off potential search and seizure by government agents. It is disorienting to face the prospect that, 60 years after the Civil Rights Act and 160 years after the 14th Amendment, I must now carry my “papers” as I go about my daily round in Maine. I must do this because of the color of my skin, because I am African American and because I might be taken for an immigrant, a wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time, illegal or otherwise.

Whenever I allow myself to think about these circumstances, I am reduced to incredulity, because I am forced to admit that, yes, this is America, the America I spent my young life believing in and wanting to help build.

Who can say how much has been lost in the past 50 years? How much constitutional ground, goodwill and civic faith? What does that loss portend for the next 50, 100, 250 years? These concerns may seem like hyperbolic overstatement, but I don’t think they are. Wherever one looks — through lenses of gender relations, income inequality, elite impunity, book banning, conspiracy theories, environmental degradation, political polarization — our nation seems to be fraying at the seams. I fear that we Americans are living off and have taken for granted the capital that our parents and grandparents built and compounded and, in a lazy, self-satisfied, near-narcissistic haze, have lost sight of that inheritance, which previously enabled our progress and prosperity.

“Same as it ever was,” one might say, but I think the conditions are different this time, for three reasons. The first is the Faustian bargain we have made with technology, which has started to accumulate manipulative force — human and mechanical — beyond anyone’s ability to control or fully understand it. I am mostly but not only referring to social media, artificial intelligence, facial-recognition software and other forms of surveillance, though we might also add a general notion of speed. Consider how such inventions enable people to act, often impulsively, geometrically expediting the transmission of misinformation and false or bad ideas.

Second, climate change. Or global warming or “global weirding” as the scientists probably should have called it to make it more meme-able. We are living within an accumulating increase of warnings that something is off: more violent storms, increasing wildfires, melting polar ice, species loss, ocean-current disruptions, heat waves, droughts, dying coral, changing patterns. And we seem as a society to have convinced ourselves that we can safely — blithely — ignore the mathematical likelihood that when these trends culminate it will go climactically (near-pun intended) bad all at once, and we will not then have the time to build or improvise solutions. Or even to diagnose or to recognize what is happening.

My third reason for grave concern has to do with what we can put under a general rubric of “race.” We don’t talk about the issues provoked by and the threats looming from AI and social media, or the frightening and cruel realities of climate change, because we are too busy overtly and covertly arguing about racial conflict, which in many ways has become the theme of the nation: Who belongs, and who doesn’t? Who is a citizen, and who isn’t? Is this a nation solely for white people? For white men? I believe the current frenzy over immigration is self-defeating in so many ways. After all, who is going to ease our demographic crisis, including caring for our expanding elderly population, or do many other jobs — meatpacking, agriculture, construction, hospitality, food services, cleaning — that most Americans don’t want or refuse to do?

This, I think, goes all the way back to “three-fifths of a person,” the constitutional compromise on political representation in Article I, Section 2, that designated Black people as “debased by servitude,” James Madison’s term in Federalist No. 54. Black Americans were thus stipulated into a caste framework that inheres to this day. Too many of us cannot get past the lingering mythic fantasy of a white nation, where only certain people have full value, and it has caused us as a nation to lose track of what we have accomplished and what we have left to do. And causes me to carry my passport.

America is at a crossroads. We risk undoing 300 years of development, and — depending on how you want to count it, from the Emancipation Proclamation or, alternatively, from Brown v. Board of Education — generations of progress toward the more perfect union, the peace and predictable stability that we all crave and treasure. It takes hundreds of years to build a society. It takes far less time to endanger and destroy it.

One might say that this unraveling, driven by short-sightedness, xenophobia, selfishness and ordinary greed, is to be expected, that it is simply how we humans are. Benjamin Franklin famously warned that the republic he and his coevals had gifted us was ours “if we could keep it.” In my judgment, we are mindlessly close to realizing the founders’ greatest fear, what they worked so hard and risked their lives to prevent: the tragedy of our being undone by ourselves and our all-too human nature.

Anthony Walton is senior writer-in-residence at Bowdoin College. His most recent books are The End of Respectability and 1968, a chapbook of poems.

As an architecture student in the early 1970s, I felt the sky was the limit — literally. I would look out the expansive windows of my 10th-floor Brooklyn apartment and watch the construction of the World Trade Center. It was mesmerizing. Walking from room to room, I had a clear view — Statute of Liberty to the south, the downtown and midtown skyscrapers framed by approaching bridges and, at the center of it all, the rising Twin Towers. Every part of that dynamic skyline, every bridge, every building, every park and every street had an interesting story, and here was this brash newcomer, the architectural wunderkind, elbowing in without any sense of deference. And why not? This was New York.

In the half dozen years I lived in that apartment, I never lost that awe. Changes of season and weather ensured that the view was constantly different.

I always had my camera loaded with film, and I probably took hundreds of pictures. Sometimes the towers disappeared into the clouds like the legendary beanstalk. Other times only their tops could be seen floating in the sky. Occasionally they were the only buildings visible on the horizon, spotlighted by dramatic shafts of light from the heavens. I would often catch the fire-red glow of sunrise shimmering off their metal skin and run for my camera. One year the Goodyear Blimp circled lower Manhattan, and I patiently waited by the window for the precise moment when it appeared to be tethered to the towers. I needed great shots like that to justify the considerable expense of my new telephoto lens.

Even before the structures were completed in 1973, the Twin Towers offered strong validation for my career choice. There was no limit: We could change the face of the earth. The buildings were so structurally advanced they were designed to sway in the breeze. To move thousands of people through them required both express and local elevators. And those views were dizzying, whether you were looking up or looking down. While we students had many heated discussions about their aesthetic implications, such musings were mostly silenced by a visit to the site. We were looking at the future. A thousand years of architectural history led to lower Broadway, and it was very difficult to take issue with anything so awe-inspiring.

My perspective on the World Trade Center evolved after I moved out of my Brooklyn apartment. Awe turned into a more comfortable and even blasé familiarity. I mostly thought of the towers as a reassuring compass point when emerging from the subway, but occasionally they would find an important place in my memory. My first date with my future wife was at the River Café under the Brooklyn Bridge, where we had a magical view of the Towers across the East River. While new architectural wonders would inspire and challenge me, I still enjoyed bringing out-of-towners to the observation deck and sharing in their wonderment at the view. Special occasions still warranted an elegant dinner at the Windows on the World restaurant. But without really thinking about it, I had moved on to other touchstones.

I last saw the World Trade Center in late 2000 while visiting New York with my wife and four children from our new home in Minnesota. Now we were the tourists on the observation deck. But for me it was going home; I could look down on nearly 60 years of my life, see the hospital where I was born, the South Street Seaport where I had worked, the old apartment in Brooklyn where I had lived, and the River Café. The towers were now a place for looking into the past and not the future. Of course, I had my trusted camera and posed our children for the usual tourist pictures. I also took individual portraits. Maybe I hoped that each photograph would someday provide them a personal connection to this remarkable place.

When the buildings were toppled 10 months later, killing nearly 3,000 people, our 16-year-old daughter placed her picture from the observation deck on the bulletin board in her room. The wind had swept her hair as she peered down on the city from what was now a hole in the sky. It was impossible for me to walk into her room without being drawn to that image, much as I had been 30 years earlier to the view outside my window.

Brian McMahon is a retired architect and architectural historian who studied communications at Notre Dame and architecture at Pratt Institute. He resides in Stillwater, Minnesota.

“. . . So nature deals with us, and takes away / our playthings one by one . . . ”

Sinnett’s students — four in all — sit listening at their desks. Medora Junior-Senior High School, tucked among the hills and hollows of southern Indiana, is one of the smallest in the state, with about a dozen kids per grade.

The teacher finishes the poem and asks his students, who are midway through their senior year, “What is this about?”

“I think it’s about growing older, and changing. We were all kids once,” says Angel Chan-Cux from the front row. On the chalkboard before him is a list of poetry terms: iambic pentameter, rhyme scheme, quatrain, couplet. An assortment of student drawings on a bulletin board includes a pair of skeletons in fancy dress, an angry Batman, a duck wearing a hat.

The teacher nods and urges the kids to think about how the poet draws a comparison between a child going to bed and nature leading us to our final rest. The class falls silent. “It’s about death, how nature takes us to death,” Sinnett suggests. “When people live a long life, we go to it reluctantly, like a little kid goes to bed. We’re reluctant, but at the same time, we need the rest.”

Sinnett teaches Medora’s Advanced Literature class for dual credit, meaning students who pass it can get credit for it at participating colleges and universities. A Notre Dame initiative, the Advanced Placement Teacher Investment Program (AP-TIP), helped establish college-level courses such as this one at Medora last fall and provides teachers with training and support.

In a remote town of 650 people surrounded by miles of farm fields, such classes — and the dedicated teachers who teach them — are opening a door to a world of opportunities. They’re also helping the tiny school and its district survive in a challenging environment for small schools across the state.

On an early November afternoon, the streets of Medora are mostly quiet. A sign on Indiana 235 announces, “Medora: Town of Harmony,” illustrated with musical notes. A man cruises down the main road, Perry Street, on a riding mower, pulling a push mower. A cat crosses Perry behind him. The handful of local businesses includes a cafe, a tavern, a pet “spa,” and a feed mill with a trio of towering grain silos. A mural depicts historic local scenes, such as a cluster of kilns from a former brick plant and a covered bridge built in 1875, which still stands and is believed to be the longest of its kind in America.

John Mellencamp shot his music video for “Hurts So Good” here in 1982, parading through Medora with a pair of women in black bodysuits and fishnet tights. The musician grew up in Seymour, Indiana, about 20 miles down the road.

The school building, which houses the junior and senior high schools and an elementary school, sits near the center of town, with a replica of the covered bridge on one side and a row of maple trees on the other, their red leaves shading a neighborhood food pantry. A sign on the front lawn lists dates for fall events, including school pictures and “Gravy with Grands,” a breakfast for kids and grandparents featuring biscuits and gravy. A few blocks away, a freight train rattles by.

The school is the heart of the town. “It brings life to the community,” parent Tessa Stickney says while watching her son play in a fifth- and sixth-grade basketball game against Lutheran Central. Ada Reynolds, a school board member, is also sitting in the bleachers to support her son, a fourth grader who plays on the fifth-grade team because it was short on players.

Students in Indiana may apply to attend any school in any district. Reynolds and her husband, Medora graduates who run a lumber business, sent two of their kids to a bigger school and two to Medora, where they could benefit from individualized attention. “I felt like the teachers at Medora were really involved with the kids,” she says. “They really cared and wanted to watch out for them.”

Indeed, teachers play an important and deeply personal role in the lives of their students here. In Medora, as in small towns across America, many families struggle to make ends meet. The employment rate is 48 percent, according to the Census Bureau, and 7 percent of residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher.

“My main purpose in getting into teaching was to help in places where I felt like kids were being underserved,” says Sinnett, the literature teacher. “I wanted to do what I could to help in those environments, to bring what I felt was a unique background and unique tools to these situations.”

He recalls his own difficulties growing up in rural eastern Kentucky. “I grew up poor and from a rough household and abuse and things like that — things that typically, because of the impact and the traumas they have on kids, keep them out of the high-ability environments. These are kids I feel like we miss.”

He became a teacher through Teach for America, an organization that works to expand opportunities for kids in vulnerable settings, and spent a couple years teaching in Indianapolis, the state capital, before coming to Medora seven years ago. While attending a 2024 conference, he learned about AP-TIP.

Launched in 2012 with federal funding, the program, which is a nonprofit outreach of Notre Dame’s Institute for Educational Initiatives and its Center for STEM Education, aims to help teachers create challenging learning environments for students. Now funded by the Indiana Department of Education and a private foundation, it trains and supports teachers who offer college-level classes, including dual-credit and advanced-placement, or AP, classes. In the dual-credit program, schools partner with a local college to offer a course. The AP program, administered by the New York-based College Board, offers credit at many colleges to students who achieve above a certain score on a standardized test.

AP-TIP offers guidance for three years, including professional-development events and conferences where teachers can connect and share wisdom. “Everything that our organization does is to the benefit of students, but the teacher is really the primary change-agent in a classroom,” says Stephanie Kucsera, the program’s director of academics. The program currently works with 21 public schools in urban, suburban and rural areas of Indiana.

At the time Sinnett learned of the Notre Dame program, he was teaching a dual-credit English Composition class, the only college-level class at the school. He wanted to offer additional advanced classes; Medora’s principal, Kara Hunt, and the district superintendent, Roger Bane, agreed. But they worried that Medora was too small to be considered.

Certainly not, says Karen Morris, AP-TIP’s director for operations. It’s not about size, she says, but rather about “dedication and earnestness and wanting to do the best for students.” Medora now offers AP classes in math and biology, as well as the dual-credit classes in literature and composition.

Such classes help Medora compete in a fraught environment for small schools in Indiana. The state wants consolidated administration, Bane says. “It gets brought up every legislative session.” He says “consolidation” is code for closing small schools. If only one administrator is tasked with running several schools, the smaller schools inevitably would be shuttered.

But a bigger picture needs to be considered, he says. For starters, he cites the individualized attention kids get from teachers and administrators at a small school like Medora. Bane himself makes a point of getting to know the students and even fills in for the bus drivers as needed. “I feel like the kids need to know me,” he says.

Further, the school offers internships with local businesses such as the feed mill, as well as training for a commercial driver’s license, which can lead to work for businesses like the local farm that’s one of the biggest egg producers in the country.

Sitting at her desk, beneath a poster with a Nelson Mandela quote about the power of education to change the world, Principal Hunt cites additional specialized benefits of small-scale, community-based education, such as a locally funded program that provides a free pair of shoes to kids who need them at the beginning of the school year. The majority do. Another initiative delivers free outfits or coats at Christmastime, she says. People who “really, really care about these kids, in this school, in this community,” she adds, have enabled us “to do the things we’ve done.”

Medora Junior-Senior High School is the community’s largest employer. “If the school would close,” Bane says, “I think this would become just like a ghost town.”

In AP math class, Kade Wright sits beside Angel Chan-Cux, facing a chalkboard covered with equations. Motivational phrases dot the classroom walls — advice about overcoming fear, having a positive attitude. A toy dinosaur head pokes out from a wall near the teacher’s desk, a bead necklace around its neck. The boys are the only two students in the class. They appreciate this, they tell me, because they feel comfortable asking their teacher questions.

“It’s like a conversation, almost like a family,” says Chan-Cux, 17, describing the dynamic. “The teachers here, they really like helping students. They’re always asking, ‘Do you guys understand? If not, we can go over it again.’” He adds that the small classes make the relationships personal: “We’re close to each other. Any problems, like, whether it’s school or just personal problems, we can, you know, reach out and talk a little bit about them.”

Wright, 18, nods and notes that the courses are markedly more challenging.

The boys, who are good friends, speak openly and thoughtfully about their experience at the school. Wright had only vaguely heard of AP classes. Chan-Cux didn’t know what they were. “I was excited to see what it was,” he says, and he was, maybe, “a little nervous.”

Both boys want to go to college and plan to apply for federal student aid, which they learned about through the school; both would be the first college graduates in their immediate families. Wright, who grew up in Medora, is interested in cybersecurity. “It’s really needed because everything is advancing superfast,” he says, “and it makes good money.”

In the longer term, he sees himself living in Seymour, a town of 21,000 people. “I love Medora. I’ve learned how to build relationships here,” he says. “But I would think a bigger place like Seymour is probably more where I want to go, just because it has more diversity, and I would get to meet a lot more people. In Medora, I know everything.”

Chan-Cux moved to Medora with his family from a world away — Los Angeles — when he was in the eighth grade. “We lived in, like, the big old city,” he says with a smile. His father, who works in construction, fell in love with southern Indiana after visiting an uncle. Moving to the rural town was a massive change, and while he misses some things about L.A., he also appreciates country life: His California middle school had more than 500 students in his grade — nearly the population of his adopted hometown.

Chan-Cux wants to study engineering, maybe mechanical, agricultural or environmental. After college, he says, “I’m thinking about maybe going to the big city, living there for a while, and then, you know, coming back to the little town of Medora.”

Kyle Derheimer, the AP math teacher, spent nine years in the United States Navy as a nuclear energy specialist, then a few more years supervising operations for a Duke Energy power plant in the state before transitioning to teaching through a program at Indiana University. “Training and teaching have always been a very big part of my professional career and life; I’ve always enjoyed it,” he explains. He has been teaching at Medora for the past five years, and his wife, Bobbi, whom he met in the Navy, teaches special education at the school.

A native of Bedford, Indiana, just a half-hour west, Derheimer offers his life experience as an example for the students, often describing how he and his wife pursued an education and career.

“I tell them, ‘We didn’t come from money, but we were able to use our brains. We happened to go the Navy route. Go do something; make yourself marketable. It doesn’t have to be college — go get a technical certificate. Pursue something worth pursuing. If you want to come back here, that’s fine, but go get out of here and do something.’ I try to instill as much of that as I possibly can,” he says. “But it is pushing uphill for sure.”

He adds, “I tell people this is like inner-city country, working here. It’s high poverty, a lot of broken homes, a lot of just kids that have gone through a lot of crap.”

Advanced classes help his students gain confidence that they can handle college. “They’re not growing up in a family that’s talking about their own college experiences,” Derheimer says. He learned in his first year of teaching at Medora that when the kids saw that he cared about them, they started to care more about school. “It’s a good feeling, knowing you can make a difference,” he says. “We’re doing the best we can and pouring it into these kids.”

He took students on a field trip to see the power plant he worked at in Edwardsport, about an hour and a half away. “I was shocked by the positive feedback I got from so many of the kids. Because, I mean, it’s not like it was a fun day of goofing off, right? But they had never seen anything like that. Some of them hadn’t even been out of the county for crying out loud. So I try to do stuff like that. When I can, I bring in people that I trust and know to tell their stories, because they’re real.”

Among them: Derheimer’s brother, who told how he racked up a hefty college debt getting an art degree, joined Navy special operations forces to pay it off and later became an entrepreneur and artist in Colorado. “You can find ways to do the stuff that you enjoy doing,” Derheimer says, pointing to one of his brother’s paintings: a boy blowing bubbles filled with galactic images. Also on the wall is a photo of the Blue Angels, the Navy flight-demonstration squadron, which Derheimer asked the pilots to sign for his students.

“After a while, they probably get sick of hearing about Bobbi and me,” he says with a laugh. “I just like to give real-world examples.”

A graduate of Medora’s class of 2017, Dalea Johnson, who teaches AP biology, also uses her experience to inspire. She earned her chemistry degree at IU with the help of the GI Bill after her father, a Navy machinist’s mate, died in a rafting accident. “The kids can see that I . . . got a rather difficult degree,” she says. “I’m like, ‘Guys, I promise, it is possible! You just have to put in the work.’”

Johnson has known some of her students from the time they were grade-schoolers. “I remember when they were little, 10-year-old boys running around my front yard doing crazy stuff,” she says, referring to longtime friends of her brother, who is now a senior at the school. “We have a really good relationship where they can feel like they can talk to me, ask me a question if they’re confused, not feel embarrassed. There’s still a bit of a learning curve where it is college level.”

The students must pass the AP test at the end of her class to qualify for college credit, but whether they pass or not, she sees them benefiting. “They’ve developed reading comprehension; they can look at these big words and be able to break them down. There are so many skills that they’ll use in their everyday lives, even if they don’t go to college. What I’ve been telling them is, ‘At the end of the day, I just want you to do your best. Just learn something new that you wouldn’t have known before.’”

The three students in her class aren’t yet sure about college. “I’m debating on it,” says Ethan Smith, 17, who is also weighing the military and trade school. Waylon Burrell, 16, says he isn’t sure if he prefers to go to college or “straight to the workforce.” Winnie Thompson, 16, is interested in cosmetology. All three say their teacher encourages them to stick with the class. “She pushes us to challenge ourselves,” says Smith. “We need a little challenge.”

After watching a short, animated film about modern cell theory, they are a bit shy about talking with me. I tell them that I went to a tiny elementary school, with about 10 kids per grade, a few miles away in Vallonia. It closed years ago. Smith asks if I liked going to such a small school. I tell him that, as a kid, I didn’t think much about it; I just wished we lived closer to a mall. But now, having lived around the world, I can say that the friends I made in that little school have lasted a lifetime.

“Yeah,” he says. “I get that.”

As the students head to the cafeteria for lunch — chicken nuggets — Johnson tells me the Notre Dame program has been “unbelievably helpful” to her in learning to teach the class. The training began with a weeklong summer institute in Indianapolis, where she, Sinnett and Derheimer met teachers from across the state. “Working with the other teachers, working with this more difficult content, has made me a better teacher in general,” she says.

Sinnett agrees but admits he went into the training with a degree of skepticism. Professional development for teachers can sometimes miss the mark. “So much of it is not relevant to the practice that we’re actually doing, and especially not relevant to the context,” he says. But this training — and the connections he made with other teachers — proved invaluable. Says Derheimer, “That was honestly the best teacher professional development I’ve ever had.”

All three teachers remain in touch with AP-TIP, whose representatives come to observe their classes and offer advice and resources. “They’re trying to figure out how best to help us,” says Sinnett. “They’re not approaching this like a one-size-fits-all kind of thing.”

Nick Medich, the principal of another small school, Argos Junior-Senior High School near South Bend, began working with AP-TIP more than a decade ago and has seen the difference advanced classes can make in students’ lives. “We have a bunch of kids that go to Purdue,” he says, many of whom say they would have been “lost” in college without the AP classes. Argos urges all students to take the classes, regardless of their plans. “We don’t care if you’re going to college, or going into the military, or going to work as a welder,” Medich tells them. “We want you to take on the challenge of the rigor of AP.”

In Medora, the personal attention the teachers give — and the difference they strive to make in students’ lives — is clear.

“Some of the kids still can’t quite grasp what is possible for them,” says Sinnett. “They still struggle to believe, can that really be me? Can I go to college and do whatever I want?” He provides practical encouragement, he says, the kind that tells students “you can do difficult things, impossible things, that life is going to be hard, but you have to push through that.”

Bobby Baughman, 17, wants to go to college to study criminal justice and become a defense attorney. He notes that he knows people who have served time in jail. “I’ve seen people get put away for something that’s not that bad, and I’ve seen people who get out early for something that’s way worse,” he says. Miley Howell, 17, wants to pursue child psychology. “I like helping others,” she says, “but in a different way than doctors and surgeons.”

Medora’s advanced classes aren’t just about college credits, Sinnett says, but about learning how to handle the challenges of adult life — including how to think critically. “We live in an age where we’re inundated with so much information, and so much of it is false. We’re being manipulated. Everything is trying to push you in one direction or another,” he says. “I don’t think kids realize how much they’re being manipulated.” He believes kids in rural areas can be especially vulnerable because “their environment is so small outside of social media.”

“I’m not saying let’s ban it all,” he clarifies. “Let’s figure out how to be thoughtful about using it.”

He’s convinced classes in composition, rhetoric and literature are more important than ever in the digital age. The students describe reading and discussing novels like Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and Indiana native Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. They have written poetry, and they tease Baughman for writing a poem inspired by Dr. Seuss. “I guess it wasn’t college-level,” Baughman laughs. When I tell him it’s his artistic license, he says, “I like this lady!”

The classmates say they’re ready but anxious about graduating, and they joke that Sinnett will cry when they leave. He also taught them in junior high.

Their teacher doesn’t deny it. “It will be an emotional breakup,” he admits, cracking a smile. “These kids are part of the inspiration for me, for pushing to have these dual-credit and AP classes. They’re the reason why we have that door now.”

He knows it needs to open wider. “We’re going to need to work harder to get their minds on other things,” such as books in a generation growing up on screens. “The kids don’t read books, but I’m not giving up on it. I’m not sure how to win this war, but I still think it’s worth fighting.”

Abby Pesta is an award-winning journalist and author of The Girls, which Library Journal in 2019 called perhaps ‘the most important sports title of the year,’ and co-author of How Dare the Sun Rise — a ‘gut-wrenching, poetic memoir,’ according to The New York Times. Learn more at AbigailPesta.com.

Joyce worked as a student photographer for The Observer, the Dome yearbook and Notre Dame Magazine, publishing hundreds of images during his years as an undergraduate and graduate student in biological sciences. He took some iconic pictures, including an often-republished snapshot of Mary Blazek ’80 dancing with Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, CSC, then Notre Dame’s president, at a 1977 campus picnic. And a photo of Daniel “Rudy” Ruettiger ’76 making that famous tackle near the end of the 1975 Notre Dame-Georgia Tech football game.

Shown on these pages are several dozen examples from the photographer’s archive. Joyce, a Massachusetts resident, figures he has about 35,000 photographic negatives from his Notre Dame years and maybe a thousand 8-by-10-inch prints that he made from those images.

He kept those negatives in binders in his basement for decades. During the past year, he combed through and scanned many of them for digital storage. He agreed to share his work with Notre Dame Magazine, and the images we selected are a community photo album of sorts — a window into campus life in the 1970s.

Seen here are athletic events, classroom scenes, Masses, pep rallies, the An Tóstal mud pits, Mardi Gras, the Blizzard of 1978, student clubs and long-vanished campus hangouts, including The Huddle grill in LaFortune Student Center and the old Fieldhouse when it served as studio space for art students. Joyce captured shag carpets, long hair, bell-bottoms, students on rooftops, dining hall meals and celebrity visitors.

He took up photography as a hobby and worked on the yearbook while attending Brother Rice High School in Chicago. He says it felt natural to continue that work in college.

“It wasn’t just me taking pictures,” he says, recalling the four or five other student photographers active during his college years. “We helped each other and pushed each other to be better. It was just a great environment.”

Photography by Paul Joyce, who earned a doctorate in oceanography from the University of Rhode Island and retired in 2021 after a long career in marine science. He now works as a photographer for his local newspaper and teaches photography at a private secondary school.

The walls of his studio showcase 10 years of images: New York City streets. Firefighters in Brooklyn. Teammates in locker rooms. Musicians under stage lights. Ordinary people caught in unguarded moments. Okwara is assembling them into a book now, searching for the through lines.

“I finally had time to look back,” he says. “To make sense of the work I’d been making alongside football.”

After 18 years structured by his sport — as a teenager, at Notre Dame, in the NFL — Okwara retired in 2024. Every hour of his life had been predetermined by football: meals, training, rest. Now, it’s different. He still wakes up early. He still trains. But that discipline is also translating into long studio hours, revisiting images until patterns emerge.

“That ‘chop wood, carry water’ mindset,” Okwara says. “I had to figure out what that looked like in art.”

He remembers holding photographic negatives up to the light when he was a child in Lagos, Nigeria, turning them in his hands, fascinated by how an image appeared when you learned to see it. Even after two decades devoted to football, art’s pull hasn’t diminished.

Okwara’s American story began when he was 10. In 2005, he boarded a plane for a 29-hour journey from West Africa to Charlotte, North Carolina. When he stepped into the autumn air of his new home, he saw his own breath for the first time.

The move wasn’t quick or easy. His mother, older brother and younger sister had gone first. Romeo and his younger brother Julian ’20 stayed behind in Nigeria for two years, living with their housekeeper while their father traveled between continents, holding the family together.

America was exciting. It was also disorienting. At his new school, Okwara was two years younger than most of his classmates due to the strength of his Nigerian education. But he spoke a form of West African pidgin. His accent drew attention.

“I didn’t really know where I fit in,” he says.

Then there was football. He found the sport through his older brother, who had joined his middle school team a few years earlier. “That was sort of my intro to the game,” Okwara says. “I just tried to follow in his footsteps.”

On the field, language mattered less. Sport offered him a team, a way to belong. It also gave him structure and a role. But his first season playing organized football — in seventh grade — didn’t go well. He wasn’t very good, he says. Then his father pulled him from the team to focus on academics. Okwara tried out again in eighth grade, but he didn’t make the cut.

As a seventh grader, Okwara also enrolled in an art class. The first piece he made — the bust of a pirate — earned a grade of 90 percent. It sits today on a desk in his studio.

Even before taking art classes, he had been drawing instinctively, filling notebook margins with sketches. His mother’s brother, Emmanuel Isiuwe, is a painter and photographer in Nigeria.

“I was fascinated by him,” Okwara says. “I thought it was really cool that you could just paint for a living and that could be your life.”

As he matured, football and art both grew in importance. He made his high school team and took classes in drafting, graphic design, theater programming and AutoCAD, gravitating toward the technical side of creativity. Architecture felt like a natural destination in college — until football intervened.

At Notre Dame, the demands of the sport clashed with the demands of the architecture school, particularly the required year in Rome. Okwara chose to study accounting instead, a practical decision that allowed him to stay on the field. He set art aside as a career goal, but he refused to let it disappear from his life.

He enrolled in art history and studio art classes, especially ceramics and drawing. And in his free time, he carried a camera. He photographed teammates, mostly. When he studied in Greece during the summer of 2015, he became the unofficial documentarian of the trip. Not everyone understood. Back on campus, one coach told him to put the camera away and focus on football. Okwara refused: It wasn’t affecting his performance. The other players took photos on their phones “all day long,” so what was the difference if he used a real camera?

Football carried Okwara, a defensive end, further than he imagined. The Irish played Alabama for the national championship when he was a freshman. After graduation, he played in the NFL for the New York Giants and the Detroit Lions. Over eight seasons, he recorded 25 sacks, including a standout year in 2020 with 10 sacks and a reputation for consistency and discipline.

But his football career was often interrupted by injuries. Whenever football paused, art surged back into focus. In 2017, Okwara sprained his knee during a Giants practice. He didn’t need surgery, but he couldn’t practice for months. The rigid structure of his life vanished overnight.

“I had all this time,” he recalls. “I’d do rehab for a couple of hours, and then the rest of the day was mine.”

He bought a camera and walked the city. Photography wasn’t new, but with that time and solitude, it became a more serious pursuit. He visited museums, met other photographers and took photos of people he saw.

During his recovery, members of the New York City Fire Department’s elite Rescue Company 2 visited a Giants practice to speak about resilience. Okwara attended and later took a firehouse tour. One visit became many. He would spend more than 20 nights at the Brooklyn firehouse, quietly observing the rituals, the humor, the intensity. He listened. He earned trust.

Out of that trust grew a photo project documenting the behind-the-scenes rhythms of Rescue 2. The images captured brotherhood and the unspoken understanding among people who depend on one another — something Okwara recognized immediately.

“It mirrored football,” he says. “That sense of structure. Of being part of something bigger than yourself.”

His work caught the attention of Leica Camera executives. In 2019, Okwara mounted his first solo exhibition at the Leica Store SoHo, timed to open before September 11 to honor New York’s firefighters.

Photography, he saw, was a way to tell stories. His camera has since brought him into rooms with well-known musicians and public figures. Most recently, he was invited to photograph The Black Keys in Memphis, Tennessee. But celebrity isn’t what most interests him.

“I think the work I enjoy most is just kind of the everyday person,” he says. “Even if there’s a famous person, what I try to do is humanize them. It’s more about the sheer humanity.”

Okwara’s desire to capture these human stories didn’t come out of nowhere: His family lost all their photographs and memorabilia during the move from Nigeria. Years later, a computer crash erased his early college images. Those losses helped him see how meaningful pictures could be for an individual or a family.

“Storytelling is the basis of everything I do,” he says. “Family stories. Locker room stories. Even the first film I made — it was a self-portrait of a certain time in my life.”

Okwara was 28 when he retired from football. He felt the loss of structure anew. He wanted to commit himself fully to his art. Graduate school offered both structure and permission to slow down and devote himself to the work. He enrolled at Cranbrook Academy of Art outside Detroit, studying under its artist-in-residence and head of photography Chris Fraser.

“It felt like the right place to figure out what my practice looks like when it’s the main thing,” he says.

Surrounded by serious artists, Okwara brought less in terms of formal training, but he had his archive: nearly a decade of work compiled in the margins of another career.

“What originally attracted me to Romeo’s photography was a sense of quietness, a sense that the world was organized and poised and about to reveal something to you,” Fraser says. “I think that he has a way of finding the outsider within a crowd. He has this lovely way of making loud scenes feel very quiet.”

Fraser pushes Okwara to experiment across mediums, to find the right form for each story he wants to tell. Football, inevitably, resurfaces — especially in his sculptures. In a favorite piece, he uses a concrete base, purple Nigerian fabric his mother gave him, and a Gatorade towel to speak about memory and his layered identities: Nigerian, American, athlete, artist.

“I don’t always know why I’m drawn to something in the moment,” he says. “But when you look back, the through lines are there.”

He has founded Middle Gray, a Detroit nonprofit that grants visual artists studio space, equipment and stipends so they can develop their work. The project seeks to build community among artists and strengthen the city’s arts landscape. Okwara is also working on a short film with a former high school teammate, revisiting the place where his American story began.

“It feels full-circle,” he says. Like the negatives he held up to the light as a boy. The work now is to create art that lets others see what he sees, too.

Michelle Cuneo is an associate editor of this magazine.