archive

Who Americans really are

Malice and spite are as American as baseball and apple pie, but it’s never admitted into our romantic, naive, sentimental understanding of who Americans really are, and what their lives are really like. The All-of-a-Kind Family books, marking their 60th anniversary, are a classic text of becoming American — they’re also a still-moving tribute to sisterhood. The first chapter from Remaking the Heartland: Middle America since the 1950s by Robert Wuthnow. A review of Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America by Elizabeth Fraterrigo and "Raising Sexually Pure Kids": Sexual Abstinence, Conservative Christians and American Politics by Claire Gresle-Favier. A review of New York Hustlers: Masculinity and Sex in Modern America by Barry Reay. A plague on your White House: Nick Parkins on the presidents killed by a Native American curse. A larger-than-Rushmore size granite memorial to the famous Sioux warrior Crazy Horse has been under construction since 1948, but is that really what the Sioux residents in the area need? An excerpt from A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America by Greg Robinson (and an interview). What defines Latino literature? In compiling the latest anthology in the famed Norton series, professor Ilan Stavans researched the themes explored by Latino authors. Patricia Williams on the right wing and the rebooting of segregation. Without highlighting the experience of being a minority in America, we can't work to move beyond what divides us.