The Feed Archives | Page 28 of 33 | What It Means to Be American

Comics Are Full of Endless Possibilities

‘New Yorker’ Art Editor Françoise Mouly Says Cartoonists Can Learn a Lot From Responses to Their Work

April 22, 2016

Françoise Mouly is the art editor of the New Yorker. From 1980 to 1991, she and her husband, the cartoonist Art Spieglman, published the comics magazine Raw. Before joining a Zócalo/Smithsonian “What It Means to Be American” panel discussion about creativity in America—“What Does American Ingenuity Look Like?”—she talked in the green room about scars, novels by Émile Zola, and being knighted by the French government.

Q: Who’s your favorite cartoon character?
A: It’s not so much a character, but an approach. …

How ‘Bambi’ Hoodwinked American Environmentalists

The Sentimental Disney Cartoon Cemented the Myth That Man and Nature Can’t Coexist

By Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann
April 19, 2016

Perking up her ears, the dog was the first to notice them, just a few blocks from our homes in east-central Illinois. One-by-one the does strolled from the woods into the meadow. They eyed us without lifting their tails, seemingly habituated to this neighborhood. Their appearance awed us but also prompted different responses. Joseph recalled long past hunting trips four miles south in a tree stand overlooking a soybean field and tried to pick out the fattest doe in the …

Director of ASU’s School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies Matt Garcia

One Side of My Family Were Fruit Pickers, the Other Side Worked for Sunkist

April 15, 2016

Matt Garcia is director of the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. He is the author most recently of From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement. He was also the outreach director and co-primary investigator for the Bracero Archive Project, which collects and makes available oral histories and artifacts related to the program that allowed guest workers from Mexico into America between 1942 and 1964. …

The Mad Men Who Invented the Modern Political Attack Ad

Since 1964, Advertising Agencies Have Sold Presidential Candidates As If They Were Cars or Soap

By Robert Mann
April 12, 2016

On September 7, 1964, a 60-second TV ad changed American politics forever. A 3-year-old girl in a simple dress counted as she plucked daisy petals in a sun-dappled field. Her words were supplanted by a mission-control countdown followed by a massive nuclear blast in a classic mushroom shape. The message was clear if only implicit: Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was a genocidal maniac who threatened the world’s future. Two months later, President Lyndon Johnson won easily, and the emotional political …

How World War II Turned Soldiers Into Bookworms

American GIs Devoured Paperbacks on the Front Lines, Spawning a New Generation of Readers

By Molly Guptill Manning
April 8, 2016

In January 1942, thousands of New Yorkers gathered on the steps of the legendary New York Public Library, at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, wearing their Sunday best and warmest coats. When standing room became scarce, crowds formed across the street. Nearly everyone had at least one book in hand. These were not overdue, nor did they need to be returned to the library; instead they were “Victory Books,” bound for soldiers overseas.

It may be difficult to appreciate the …

The Lawyer Who Beat Back a Racist Law, One Loophole at a Time

Y.C. Hong Helped Chinese Immigrants Stay in America by Gaming a System Designed to Deport Them

By Li Wei Yang
April 5, 2016

Recent politics is full of debates about erecting walls on the U.S.-Mexican border or barring Muslims from entering the U.S. But excluding groups of immigrants based on a particular background is nothing new—though the targets may change. It was in 1882 that Congress, for the first time in the history of the United States, passed legislation to prevent a specific ethnic group from entering the country. In effect from 1882 to 1943, the Chinese Exclusion Act forbade Chinese residents from …

Manifest Destiny, That Atrocious Ideal

A Wintertime Visit to a Onetime Nuclear Test Site Reveals the Lengths Americans Go to Own Whatever They Please

By Matthew Gavin Frank
March 31, 2016

On the outskirts of Tularosa, New Mexico, I drove among sacred mountains. It was three days before Christmas, 2014, and it was over 70 degrees. With the A/C cranked, I passed the cookfires of shantytowns, children with strings of meat hanging from the ends of sticks, their parents drinking Coca-Cola from cool glass bottles, mezcal from plastic washtubs. Sheep grazed at the road shoulders. Skeletal motorcycles sashayed around buses laboring up the slopes.

My mouth was numbed with spice from pulverized …

Donald and Bernie, Meet Andrew Jackson

The Seventh President Stoked the Anti-Elitist Rancor That Is Now Engulfing the 2016 Election

By Harry Watson
March 28, 2016

We hear a lot about populism these days. Throughout this primary season, headlines across the country have proclaimed the successes of the “populist” contenders, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Without embracing the populist label, moreover, candidates in both parties had already adopted populist tactics by branding their opponents as tools of the “establishment.”

But what is populism, anyway? There is no easy answer, for “populism” describes a political style more than a specific set of ideas or policies, and most …

A Historian Who Wishes She Could Control Time

The University of Minnesota’s Erika Lee Hasn’t Yet Broken the News to Her Kids About Santa

March 25, 2016

Erika Lee teaches history at the University of Minnesota, where she holds the Rudolph J. Vecoli chair in immigration history and is director of the Immigration History Research Center. Her latest book is The Making of Asian America: A History. Before she discussed how the 1965 Immigration Act changed America, she talked about her go-to comfort food, her favorite Jane Austen novel, and how her family bounced back and forth between China and the U.S. for generations.

Q: What superpower would …

When Secret Societies Sold Life Insurance

Before the Great Depression, Fraternal Lodges Offered Financial Security Without the Stigma of Charity

By Lisa Hix
March 22, 2016

Once, when I visited my brother, who lives in a small Texas town, he took me down a winding road to a turn-of-the-20th-century cemetery in a forest clearing. There, we found three tall tombstones in the shape of tree trunks, each stamped with an insignia reading “Woodmen of the World.” What were these strange things?

When I got home, I dug into the mystery of these stone stumps, discovering the profoundly insecure time before Americans had Social Security, when anxieties about …

Index