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The Epic Bar Fight That Sums Up the Problem with Memorial Day

A Depression-era Story of Mourning, Motherhood, and Grandiosity

By Lisa M. Budreau
May 26, 2016

On Memorial Day, 1930, Mrs. Mathilda Burling of New York stood before the headstone of her son, Private George B. Burling, Jr. at grave 17, row 29, at the St. Mihiel American Cemetery in Thiaucourt, France. Burling, an imposing matriarch in a cloche hat and glasses, savored the realization that her decade-long struggle to persuade the government to ensure the right of Gold Star mothers to stand before the graves of their sons had indeed succeeded beyond all expectations. She …

The Surprisingly Modest Start to McMansion Sprawl

Builders Like the Campanelli Brothers Helped Fuel Midcentury Suburban Desire, from Massachusetts to Moscow

By Barbara Miller Lane
May 24, 2016

After V-J Day—August 14, 1945—millions of World War II veterans came home and began to look for a place to live. New highways, cars, and government-sponsored mortgages encouraged them to dream big. Up until that point, Americans, especially immigrant Americans, had thought of the Land of Opportunity as the place where discipline and hard work would guarantee prosperity and upward social mobility. After the War, they believed they could have more. The American Dream now meant home ownership and spatial …

Harvard Neurologist Doo Yeon Kim

Sometimes You Have to Start With Small, Boring Things

May 20, 2016

Doo Yeon Kim is a neurologist at Harvard Medical School, where he studies Alzheimer’s disease. Before joining a Zócalo/Smithsonian “What It Means to Be American” panel discussion about creativity in America—“What Does American Ingenuity Look Like?”—he talked in the green room about not going out, not being mainstream, and teaching students to be patient.

Q: What first got you interested in neuroscience?
A: Its complexity.

Q: What’s your favorite thing to do for fun in Cambridge?
A: I generally stay at home. …

How Ronald Reagan Peddled Laundry Detergent

Borax Promised Americans a Ticket to the Middle Class and a Mythic Piece of the Western Frontier

By Kim Stringfellow
May 16, 2016

One fall evening in 1881, a prospector named Henry Spiller knocked on the door of Aaron and Rosie Winters’ modest stone cabin about 40 miles due east of Death Valley and asked to stay the night.

After dinner Spiller exuberantly showed off a sample of “cotton ball,” a weird, semi-translucent rock formation containing borax. Spiller suggested to his hosts that fortunes awaited those lucky enough to find a generous deposit of the stuff. He showed them how to test for …

My Business Card Says ‘Enthusiast’

Artist Zoe Crosher Finds Poor Funding Is the Biggest Impediment to Creativity

May 12, 2016

Zoe Crosher is the co-creator of the Manifest Destiny Billboard Project, a series of 100 artist-designed billboards that spanned the United States along Interstate 10. 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 the eclectic mediums she works in, D.C. punk rock, and that time Bill Nye flirted with her.

Q: You’re the child of a diplomat and an airline stewardess, …

What Does ‘Natural-Born’ American Even Mean?

The Seemingly Rigid Requirement for the Presidency Didn't Disqualify the Nation's British-Born Founders

By Don H. Doyle
May 10, 2016

When choosing among presidential candidates, Americans find plenty to debate about their fitness for office, experience, and economic and foreign policies. But the framers of the Constitution made no mention of such qualifications; they were primarily concerned that the president be truly American. And one of the ways that a president counted as truly American was to be, in the Constitution’s phrase, a “natural-born citizen.”

In the modern era, this phrase has been particularly contentious. There was the clamor over whether …

Why I Was Destined to Idolize a Yankee Shortstop

Sociologist Richard Alba Thinks the First Real Word an Immigrant Learns in America Has to Be ‘Where’

May 5, 2016

Richard Alba is distinguished professor of sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His teaching and research focus on immigration; his latest book is Strangers No More: Immigration and the Challenges of Integration in North America and Western Europe, co-written with Nancy Foner. Before participating in a panel discussion about the legacy of the 1965 immigration act, Alba talked about why his family ended up in the Bronx, his favorite place to retreat to, …

The Chicago Physician Who Understood the Paradox of Radiation

Emil Herman Grubbe Discovered That X-Rays Could Cure, but He Was Right for the Wrong Reasons

By Timothy J. Jorgensen
May 4, 2016

Radiation is a paradox. On the one hand, it’s a lifesaving tool. As powerful energy that can pass through solid matter, it’s often used in medicine for everything from diagnostic X-rays to cancer therapy. But radiation also can be deadly. If handled carelessly, it causes cancer.

No one was better witness to the split personality of radiation than Chicago physician Emil Herman Grubbe, who lived from 1875 to 1960. He was the first to recognize that radiation might cure cancer. …

Where Craig Calhoun Comes Up With His Best Ideas

The Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science on Sociology, Talking to Strangers, and What It Means to Be American

April 28, 2016

Craig Calhoun has been director of the London School of Economics and Political Science since September 2012. He was president of the Social Science Research Council in the U.S., and previously taught at the University of North Carolina, Columbia, and NYU. Among his books on politics and social movements are Neither Gods Nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China and The Roots of Radicalism. Before he discussed whether America is still a British colony, he talked in …

America’s First ‘Indian’ TV Star Was a Black Man from Missouri

Stymied by Hollywood Racism, Korla Pandit Reinvented Himself as a Mystical Brahmin Pianist

By John Turner
April 26, 2016

Turning on the TV in Los Angeles in 1949, you might have come face-to-face with a young man in a jeweled turban with a dreamy gaze accentuated by dark eye shadow. Dressed in a fashionable coat and tie, Korla Pandit played the piano and the organ—sometimes both at once—creating music that was both familiar and exotic.

According to press releases from the time, Pandit was born in New Delhi, India, the son of a Brahmin government worker and a French …

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