Joshua Alvarez
The Women’s March on Washington If the Republican National Convention—with its blood-chilling chants of “Lock her up!” reverberating off stadium ceilings, and vendors selling shirts reading “Trump That Bitch!” like hotcakes—was a revivalist megachurch concert from hell, Inauguration Day had the feeling of a quiet, solemn Easter Sunday. There were no chants, no celebratory posters. […] 
In 1840, soon after Napoleon Bonaparte’s spectacular rise and fall, the always-provocative Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle declared, “The History of the world is but the Biography of great men”: Individual heroes who changed the world through sheer willpower, charisma, or exceptional virtue. Carlyle’s pantheon included Napoleon, as well as Luther, Shakespeare, Cromwell, and others. The “Great Man” theory of history launched a public debate, one Carlyle would ultimately lose to Herbert Spencer and his enduring thesis that even “great men” must be understood as products of their society. This year’s Republican National Convention, perhaps more than any previous one, brought incongruous segments of American society into close quarters. I didn’t have much in common with most of the people I met, but I did have one thing in common with the folks below: All of us were, in our own ways, outsiders.