I Discovered America Through Japanese Eyes
“Scarlett, Scarlett!” I waved pleadingly. Across the red carpet she sauntered, her eyes invitingly meeting mine. There I stood—a 24-year-old Jewish kid from Chicago decked out for the 77th Annual...
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Finding Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Thrift Store
I have always been a picker. When I was a kid, this meant searching the desert near my home in Douglas, Arizona, for old bottles and interesting rocks. Later in life, after I moved to Phoenix, my...
View ArticleHome Is Where the Border Is
As soon as I spot the rows of palm trees lining Highway 77, I know I’ve arrived home. That’s the point where I roll down my windows to feel the humid and hot winds of the Lower Rio Grande Valley. When...
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Creating a Mexican-Afro-Cuban-American Beat
The annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival was in full bloom on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in late June. Audiences flocked to different stages and exhibits that shared the finest music...
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The United States of Ribs
It was all about the food. To be honest, it always has been, and probably always will be. It was all about the food when I was growing up in a small mining town in the north of England, distracting...
View ArticleInside the Coney Island ‘Freak Show’
A day trip to Coney Island, once the largest amusement park in the United States, led me to the photograph. In the black-and-white image, a group of tribesmen, women, and children squats around a...
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What’s More American Than Skydiving?
When I quit my first real job, I didn’t have a plan. I just walked out with the recklessness of a Harvard graduate who had come of age during the Clinton era Internet bubble. I was barely out the door...
View ArticleWhen Louisiana Creoles Arrived in Texas, Were They Black or White?
Actor Taye Diggs recently raised eyebrows by declaring that he hopes his young son—who has a white mother of Portuguese descent—identifies as “mixed” instead of black. Diggs, who is African-American,...
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The Native Americans Who Drew the French and British Into War
When a young George Washington approached the forks of the Ohio River in the spring of 1754, he was nervous. The previous year, as he scouted the area that would become Pittsburgh to contest French...
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Why We Keep Rediscovering the Flamboyant Godmother of Rock
More than 40 years after her burial in an unmarked Philadelphia grave, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, gospel’s first superstar and its most celebrated crossover figure, is enjoying a burst of Internet...
View ArticleHow the Lowly Mosquito Helped America Win Independence
In recent months, millions of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes have been at work spreading the Zika virus in South and Central America. This summer, millions more, all capable of conveying the virus, will flit...
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When the World Came to My South L.A. Door
I remember most clearly the things that aren’t here anymore, the things that I saw as a child in our neighborhood in South Los Angeles. In 1937, when I was seven, we lived in a white, wood frame house...
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In Choosing to Be Cherokee, She Was Forced to Renounce the U.S.
Mixed couples in the United States—those who crossed boundaries between Indian Nations and the European newcomers—left permanent legacies well beyond the families they created. They also shaped the...
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Recovering the Stolen Histories of American Slaves
For the past eight years I’ve been living with 72 people. These 28 men, 25 women, 12 girls, and seven boys are long dead—they were Africans sold into captivity and shipped to America in the mid-1700s....
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Garage Parties in Hawaii Aren’t Just Any Party
Growing up in Hawaii in the 1970s, my family and our neighbors spent New Year’s Eve roasting a pig in our driveway. We set up the spit and used corrugated tin metal sheets to block the wind and contain...
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Hawaii’s Pacific Centuries
Long before Hawaii was a U.S. state, it was a Pacific nation. Though the U.S. has only recently embraced a shift from emphasizing its relationships across the Atlantic to those across its western...
View ArticleHandle Your Presidential Debates With Care
Today, presidential debates between candidates are considered fixtures of our political scene. Though they generate the occasional dust-up—like Donald Trump complaining that some of this year’s debates...
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The Untold Story of the Presidential Candidate Once Named “Our Other Franklin”
A populist desire for “reform” runs deep in the psyche of American voters. Every few decades, a presidential candidate channels this rebellious spirit. Andrew Jackson was such a candidate in 1828. So...
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How Herbert Hoover Skirted Scandal to Win the White House
It was not the craziest election of the 20th Century, but it might have been the strangest. One candidate was a natural politician, affable and gregarious, a true man-of-the-people who favored flashy...
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Think The Press Is Partisan? It Was Much Worse for Our Founding Fathers
It is a common complaint that the drive for traffic at news sites in the digital age has debased our political dialogue, turning a responsible press into a media scramble for salacious sound bites. But...
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