WE THE PEOPLE!

A graphic-novel history of the democratic ideal and its slow, difficult progress toward realization in the United States.

Following the practice of the three previous Big Ideas titles, Brown chooses a historical figure to conduct his tour, and he outdoes himself here by picking Abigail Adams—a brilliant, self-educated woman whose famous dictum to her husband, John, to “Remember the Ladies” positions her well to remember Native Americans, immigrants, and people of African descent as she chronicles the long struggle to build a “more Perfect Union,” from the principles of equal rights for all and government through “consent of the governed.” If her opening review of prehistoric linkages between the inventions of agriculture, cities, and governmental systems has been challenged recently, it holds in broad outline and sets up subsequent surveys of empires worldwide, of Athenian democracy, of republics from Rome to the Iroquois Confederacy, and of significant documents about rights such as the 13th-century Manden Charter in West Africa. She addresses the outrageous racist compromises built into our Constitution (“No, I’m not making it up”) and subsequent watermarks both low, like the Dred Scott Decision, and high, up to Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream of an equitable future. In the loosely drawn panels, dark- and olive-complexioned men and women are steadily present to reinforce the message that, yes, they, too, belong in this aspirational, still unfinished story.

Engagingly informal, more cogent than ever, and rich in rare facts and insights.