Zócalo Admin, Author at What It Means to Be American

America’s Relationship With Russia Has Always Been Complicated

As Ambassador to St. Petersburg, John Quincy Adams Impressed the Tsar, But Kept His Ideological Distance

By James Traub
September 29, 2016

A statue of John Quincy Adams stands outside of Spaso House, the residence of the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow. In 1809 President James Madison asked Adams, at age 42 already one of America’s most seasoned diplomats, to serve as the first American ambassador to Russia. The President needed a man with the prudence and the tenacity necessary to persuade the young Tsar Alexander to respect the interests of the United States, a neutral in the colossal battle between England and …

The Man Who Explained the Soviets to America

How George F. Kennan's Passion for Russia Colored Our Cold War Strategy

By David Milne
September 27, 2016

The enduring irony of George F. Kennan’s life was just how much the architect of America’s Cold War “containment” strategy—aimed at stopping Soviet expansionism—loved Russia.

Kennan arguably played a larger role in shaping the U.S.’s view of a major foreign power, and thus our relations with that power, than any other American in modern history. That the power in question was the Soviet Union, and the time in question the crucial period after World War II, made his outsized …

Whatever Happened to the Little Red Caboose?

Manufacturing of the Iconic Train Car Stopped in 1981, But They Still Hold a Special Place in American Pop Culture

By H. Roger Grant
September 22, 2016

Americans have many icons. But those dealing with the exploration and expansion of the United States seem especially beloved: stagecoaches, steamboats, trains—and the railroad caboose. From the mid-19th century through the last decade of the 20th century, the “little red caboose behind the train” has had iconic qualities similar to the little red schoolhouse, being the subject of songs, books, and toys that remain popular today. So what’s the caboose, and why has this icon largely disappeared from the national …

The Day Football Changed Forever

Twenty-Five Years Ago, a Little-Known Coach of a Tiny College Team Unveiled a Gridiron Revolution

By S.C. Gwynne
September 20, 2016

Saturday, August 31, 1991. It was Labor Day weekend, the very definition of a sleepy, late-summer day in that simple, pre-digital world. H.W. Bush was president, the Gulf War was five months gone. The biggest news was that Kyrgyzstan had declared its independence from the Soviet Union. Precisely nothing was happening.

Well, not quite nothing.

In the gently swelling cornfields of southeastern Iowa bordering the Norman Rockwell-brushed town of Mount Pleasant, Iowa Wesleyan College, a 500-student school that had been a showcase …

A Photograph That Speaks Volumes About Pre-War Innocence and Post-War Hope

My Parents’ 75-Year-Old Wedding Portrait Captures Our Family Just Before WWII Changed Everything

By Jim Shultz
September 15, 2016

It’s the only photograph we have of them all together.

My mother beams with the smile of an 18-year-old married only minutes before to the man who would be her husband for 49 years. My father is 21 and elegant in a gray double-breasted suit and matching fedora. To their right stands my mother’s mother, a widow who raised two children alone in the Great Depression. To their left stand my father’s parents, a pair of short and stout …

American Segregation Started Long Before the Civil War

How the Founders' Revolutionary Ideology Laid the Groundwork

By Nicholas Guyatt
September 12, 2016

Segregation remains an intractable force in American life, more than 60 years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling outlawed racial separation in America’s schools. The Government Accountability Office recently estimated that more than 20 million students of color attend public schools that are racially or socioeconomically isolated. This figure has increased in recent decades, despite a raft of federal and state initiatives.

Major cities like New York and Chicago struggle with high levels of residential segregation, …

Remembering 9/11, From a Scrawled Note to a Bit of Fuselage

How Objects Both Ordinary and Extraordinary Help Us Reflect on the Devastation

By Cedric Yeh
September 8, 2016

Three months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress officially charged the Smithsonian and the National Museum of American History with collecting and preserving artifacts that would tell the story of that day.

But where to start? If you were given the task, what objects would you collect?

Curators working at the attack sites were grappling with those questions. If they tried to collect the whole story, they would have quickly been overwhelmed. Instead they identified three points of focus to guide them: the attacks themselves, first responders, and the recovery efforts.

How Bikes Helped Invent American Highways

Urban Elites With a Fancy Hobby Teamed up With Rural Farmers in a Movement That Transformed the Country

By Margaret Guroff
September 6, 2016

Before there were cars, America’s country roads were unpaved, and they were abysmal. Back then, roads were so unreliable for travelers that most state maps didn’t even show them. This all started to change when early cyclists came together to transform some U.S. travel routes, and lay the groundwork for the interstate highways we use today.

Through the 1880s, spring and fall rains routinely turned dirt lanes into impassable mud pits that brought rural life to a standstill, stranding farmers …

In the Segregated 20th Century, Schoolchildren Embodied Black Uplift

How a Leading Portraitist Captured Their Refinement and Restlessness

By Sara Catania
September 1, 2016

For much of the 20th century, the Scurlock family of portrait photographers—first Addison Scurlock and his wife Mamie and then their sons Robert and George—were the premiere chroniclers of the aspirational lives of Washington D.C.’s black middle class. Over time they forged close working relationships with W.E.B. DuBois and Howard University, as well as photographing Marian Anderson, Duke Ellington, and Booker T. Washington.

But alongside this work—now preserved at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History as “Portraits of …

The 1900 World’s Fair Produced Dazzling Dynamos, Great Art, and Our Current Conversation About Technology

Henry Adams’ Influential but Largely Forgotten Warning About Science Superseding Soul is Especially Relevant Today

By Art Molella
August 30, 2016

Debates rage today about the risks and benefits of modern technology. Driverless cars, the use of drones in warfare and commerce, the deployment of robots in place of human soldiers, surgery by robotic rather than human hands. The Internet of Things that puts digital devices in just about everything. Artificial intelligence not only assisting but superseding the human brain. Genetic manipulation of food, organisms, and human parts. Human cloning—even the manufacture of human beings.

The National Institutes of Health recently …

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