As an expert on U.S. democracy, Theda Skocpol gets invited to speak at conferences all over the country.
Organizers, take note: She’ll more eagerly accept the invitation if the event happens to sit in close proximity to an antique shop where she can search for badges from America’s earliest fraternal groups, membership associations, and labor unions.
“Once I discovered these, I became obsessed with them,” said Skocpol, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology, whose collection of 2,100 badges spans all 50 states. “I decided that they were little works of art and that I needed to find them. These are beautiful badges that communicate the symbols of the overall group and usually, but not always, the state, the locality, and the name of the particular lodge or chapter, so I get to see how they named them.”