Two years after the first Persian Gulf War, Robert Olen Butler’sA Good Scent from a Strange Mountainwas awarded the 1993 Pulitzer Prize in fiction.¹ Centered on Vietnamese refugees, Butler’s debut collection of fifteen short stories was praised by critics for its revision of a then-established Vietnam War script. AsNew York Timesreviewer George Packer averred, each first-person story “is told . . . from the viewpoint of a Vietnamese transplanted from the Mekong Delta to the Louisiana bayou. . . . The Americans have become foils; it’s the Vietnamese who are now at the center, haunted by...

Four years after California was granted “free soil” statehood, a seemingly innocuous article appeared in the December 6, 1854, issue of theGerman Reformed Messenger, a weekly Chambersberg, Pennsylvania paper. Placed among alarmist reports of “An Immense Subterranean Lake in Michigan,” touristic accounts of “Bird-Egging on the Pacific,” and declarations that “Masons Must Not Fight,” a headline unequivocally announced, “Chinese Not Competent to Give Testimony against Whites.”¹ TheGerman Reformed Messengerbriefly focused its journalistic attention on a far-away California criminal case:People v. George W. Hall(1854). The appellant, a Nevada County resident, had recently been convicted for murdering...

On December 21, 1898, following the fin-de-siècle U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War, President William McKinley addressed American citizens at home and newly annexed Filipino subjects abroad. The twenty-fifth commander-in-chief maintained that American forces came “not as invaders or conquerors, but as friends, to protect the natives in their homes, in their employment, and in their personal and religious rights.” McKinley buttressed such “friendly” foreign policy claims with the assertion that “all persons who, either by active aid or by honest submission, cooperate with the Government of the United States to give effect to these beneficent purposes will receive the...

As the 1912 presidential campaign moved into full swing, the “party of Lincoln” faced a crisis of divisive proportions. On the national stage, the conservative probusiness agenda of Republican incumbent William Howard Taft was pitted against the reform-minded antitrust philosophy of former president Theodore Roosevelt, also a Republican. In an election typified by bitter political discord, a failed assassination attempt, and a melodramatic nomination at the Republican National Convention, campaign debates were admittedly less spectacular.¹ Marked not so much by fireworks as by differences of administrative opinion, such party-line disagreements—forged on the “crucible” of what role government would take...

At 9:28 p.m. on July 3, 1986, President Ronald Reagan addressed an exuberant crowd assembled on New York’s Governors Island. At the president’s side was First Lady Nancy Reagan (an Empire State native), festively clothed in red and white. Standing behind a podium emblazoned with the presidential seal, the former California governor wore subdued navy blue. A glitzy blue-white backdrop completed the American flag tableau. Irrefutably, the president and the First Lady were executive actors in a televised event, held in honor of the Statue of Liberty. Aptly named Liberty Weekend (and labeled “The Party of the Century” by New...

In early April 2001, an M-17 helicopter crashed into a mountain range south of Hanoi, killing all sixteen on board.¹ Of the sixteen-member team, seven were U.S. armed forces personnel. Its primary mission—the search for soldiers’ remains—was part of a two-decade-long Vietnam War recovery program intended to facilitate closure for veteran’s families.² Despite the war’s traumatic resonance within U.S. national memory, the April 7 crash received scant media attention due to another event in the South China Sea. Six days prior to the Hanoi crash and 297 miles away, a U.S. Navy surveillance plane collided with a Chinese...

In July 2010,Timemagazine published an op-ed authored by Jewish American cultural critic and sometimes-comedian Joel Stein entitled “My Own Private India.”¹ Focused on shifting demographics in a post-1965 Hart-Cellar Act America, “My Own Private India” commences with nominal and thematic allusions to Gus Van Sant’s dystopic filmMy Own Private Idaho(1991).² Just as Van Sant’s Shakespeare-inspired production drew its narrative power from a story of two drifters searching for refuge in an inhospitable landscape, “My Own Private India” is shaped by a profound disconnection with Edison, New Jersey, Stein’s self-proclaimed hometown. Divergently, whereasMy Own Private Idaho...