Zócalo Admin, Author at What It Means to Be American

I Heart N.J.

Call It Smelly. Call It Sleazy. Call It the Armpit of America. To Me, It's Home.

By Carly Okyle
June 19, 2015

I’m sitting in a circle during the second week of my freshman year of college, listening to everyone perform the introductions that have become comically commonplace: name, hometown, dorm. It’s routine until someone farther down the circle, some five bodies away, says he’s from New Jersey. I break into a smile, then catch his eye. I do the only thing I can think to do to commemorate this moment of commonality—I lean across two people to my right, raising my …

A Young Bride Among the Roustabouts of Santa Fe

My Great-Great Grandmother Missed the Gentle, Green Valleys of Germany, But Our Jewish Family Needed a New Start

By Hannah Nordhaus
June 16, 2015

When my great-great-grandmother set out for New Mexico territory in 1866, she spoke no English. Nor did she speak any Spanish.

German was her native language; Yiddish as well. Julia Staab was a German Jew from a small village in Prussia. I don’t know how her marriage to my great-great-grandfather Abraham Staab came about—if it was arranged beforehand, or if they chose each other. But I do know that they were in a hurry to begin their married life in …

Have We Turned the Last Page in America’s Songbook?

Tracing the Great Songwriting Tradition, From Cole Porter to Joni Mitchell

By Ben Yagoda
June 12, 2015

The Great American Songbook isn’t really a book. Rather, it’s a notional collection of several hundred pop songs. The precise identity of the songs varies according to who is doing the collecting, but in almost all versions the bulk of them were composed, starting in the 1920s, by a small (almost all male) group of composers and lyricists including George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers (teaming first with Lorenz Hart and later with Oscar Hammerstein, II), …

The Biggest Forgotten American Indian Victory

While We Remember Little Bighorn, That Wasn't the Battle That Led to the First Congressional Investigation in U.S. History.

By Colin G. Calloway
June 9, 2015

In less than three hours on November 4, 1791, American Indians destroyed the United States Army, inflicting more than 900 casualties on a force of some 1,400 men. Proportionately it was the biggest military disaster the United States ever suffered. It was also the biggest victory American Indians ever won. Yet it was quickly consigned to the footnotes of history.

Unlike the much more famous Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, when American Indians annihilated George Armstrong Custer’s command, …

Captain America Dons a Turban

Armed With a Beard, a Shield, and a Sense of Humor, I Learned Why the U.S. Needs New Superheroes

By Vishavjit Singh
June 5, 2015

I was born in our nation’s capital in the early 1970s—but sometimes when people see me in my turban, they think of conflicts in faraway lands, terrorism here at home, Hollywood caricatures, and sensationalized news coverage.

Donning the costume of a superhero—complete with unitard and shield, in addition to the turban of my Sikh faith—changed all that. Suddenly, there was no question that I was American.

Like any good comic book, there’s an origin story. One that covers moving thousands of miles …

How Living Abroad Brought Me Closer to Home

As a Californian With Korean-Irish Roots, I Felt More Like a Global Citizen—Until I Lived Outside the U.S.

By Victoria Namkung
June 2, 2015

In the summer of 1997, days after my 20th birthday, I was making my first international trip alone. I was going to Kuala Lumpur for the summer to intern at a men’s lifestyle magazine that published in English.

Halfway through the connecting flight from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur, I was handed a landing card from the flight attendant and began filling out my passport details. Under nationality, I wrote Korean and Irish. After all, anytime someone at college in Santa …

The Dichotomy of ‘The Duke’

Onscreen, John Wayne Embodied the American Man at His Best and Worst

By Scott Eyman
May 29, 2015

First, the backstory, which happens to be true.

In 1972, I was 21 years old, living in my native Ohio, and had come to the conclusion that if I wanted to write about the movies I probably should begin talking to people that actually made them.

I started at the top: I wrote a letter to John Wayne asking for an interview. Mary St. John, Wayne’s secretary of nearly 30 years, wrote back to inform me that should I come to California, …

World War I’s Heart Is Kept in the Heartland

The Conflict That Disillusioned the World and Killed More than 100,000 Americans Is Remembered in Three Powerful Midwestern Memorials

By James MacLeod
May 22, 2015

World War I was one of the most destructive events in human history, killing around 16 million soldiers and civilians worldwide, including 116,000 Americans. It did more than just destroy lives. It destroyed confidence in progress, prosperity, and the rationality of civilized society, perhaps the most treasured characteristic of the 19th century.

The Great War also arguably destroyed much of the next generation: those who would have provided leadership to Europe in the dark days of the 1920s and 30s, …

George Washington’s Deep Self-Doubt

The First President Was Indispensable to Our Early Democracy, Precisely Because He Didn’t See Himself as Indispensable

By Robert Middlekauff
May 18, 2015

Revolutions tend to get hijacked, going from being about the people to being about the triumphant revolutionary leaders. And so the French Revolution begat Napoleon, and the Russian Revolution begat Lenin and Stalin.

It’s appropriate, therefore, that one of the more enduring, and endearing, aspects of our national reverence for George Washington is the fact that once he had militarily won independence for the American colonies—at a time when he had achieved global fame for this feat—he appeared perfectly content to …

Baltimore’s Refusal to Be Silent Was an American Triumph

Like the Youth of the 1960s Free Speech Movement, the Citizens Who Took to the Streets in April 2015 Roared Against Unfairness

By Tracy K. Smith
May 15, 2015

Four days after protests in Baltimore turned violent, I found myself looking into every black face I saw as I made my way through Pittsburgh International Airport, wanting to say something huge-hearted and restorative. My eyes were wet, my chest full but also empty, as if a balloon were lodged there and about to pop. I looked at all the white faces, too, thinking, Don’t you know me? Don’t we mean something to each another?

My emotional state surprised me, …

Index