Zócalo Admin, Author at What It Means to Be American

Why Are Americans So Obsessed with Genealogy?

How Studying the Family Tree—Long the Province of Racists and Social Climbers—Became the Country’s Second Most Popular Hobby

By Gregory Rodriguez
May 12, 2014

Alex Haley, author of the hugely popular 1976 book Roots, once said that black Americans needed their own version of Plymouth Rock, a genesis story that didn’t begin—or end—at slavery. His 900-page American family saga, which reached back to 18th-century Gambia, certainly delivered on that.

Is Placelessness the Cost of American Freedom?

If We Want to Nurture a Sense of Place in This Country, It Might Help to Know Why We Lost It To Begin With

By Gregory Rodriguez
April 28, 2014

Forty-four years ago—well before the advent of the contemporary mobile phone, Wi-Fi, and social media technology—fabled futurist Alvin Toffler predicted a “historic decline in the significance of place to human life.” He was right, of course. And no country has proven him more right than the United States.

Does America Need a Tahrir Square?

The U.S. Has Let the Public Square Become a Metaphor. That Can’t Be Good for Our Democracy.

People gather in Tahrir square to celebrate the anniversary of an attack on Israeli forces during the 1973 war, in Cairo

By Gregory Rodriguez
April 14, 2014

Maidan Square in Kiev. Taksim Square in Istanbul. Tahrir Square in Cairo. Recent democratic movements around the globe have risen, or crashed and burned, on the hard pavement of vast urban public squares. The media largely has focused on the role of social media technology in these movements.

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