Hamilton

James Madison is consistently forgotten. Admittedly, many of the Founding Fathers are forgotten. The average American could probably name two of the forty or so founders in Howard Chandler Christy’s Capitol painting “Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States.” But while Washington and Jefferson get imposing monuments in DC and Hamilton gets a musical, the father of our beloved Constitution hardly has a memorial. Asking Google why will pull up an article from the Harvard Law Bulletin quoting Professor Noah Feldman. “Unlike George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, no monument was built to honor Madison in the nation’s capital. You have to see the Constitution as his monument,” said Feldman. “His influence is hidden in plain sight.

Sarah Karim-Cooper first came to public attention at the cosmetics counter. Her book on makeup in Renaissance theater, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama, was published in 2006. Its enduring popularity is not so much a testament to her scholarly insights on powdered hogs’ bones mixed with poppy oil — the old stage recipe for pale skin — or Shakespeare’s sardonic references to the kind of beauty “purchased by the weight” in The Merchant of Venice, as to Karim-Cooper’s celebrity: for more than a decade she’s been one of the leading racializers of Shakespeare’s work. Perhaps the key moment in her rise to fame was her 2018 curation of the Globe Theatre’s first “Shakespeare and Race Festival,” now held annually.