What It Means to Be American

In our defense, we were a bit desperate. It was 1968 and ABC News was starved for resources and significantly smaller than its rivals NBC and CBS. We had to do something, anything, to get noticed. I should know: I was ABC News’ director of public relations.
As the presidential nominating conventions loomed that year (Miami Beach for Republicans, Chicago for Democrats) ABC News executives came …

My maternal grandparents, Jean and Lou Kaplan, did not keep kosher. That was their ancestors’ way, the path of slavish adherence to the stringencies of Jewish law. But old habits die hard, and they never ate the foods they had not consumed as children. They would sooner have taken off all their clothes and danced naked in front of their neighbors in Flushing, Queens, than …

One hundred years ago, on November 25, 15 men climbed atop Stone Mountain, just outside Atlanta, touched a lit match to a kerosene-soaked cross, and resurrected a terror from America’s past.
The Ku Klux Klan, dead for some 40 years, was back.
Their mission? To defend white, Protestant, native-born America from “illegal foreigners” and religious minorities. Faced with unprecedented ethnic and cultural change, at least 3 million …

In 1926, Los Angeles grocer George Ralphs opened the first supermarket. His property diverted from many of standards of the time, offering off-street parking, a selection of fresh meats and produce, and an environment amenable to middle-class women.
Nearly a century later, Ralphs’ creation has become a quintessential institution of American capitalism, representing national abundance and insatiable material desire. Yet for such a central part of …

From the light bulb to the iPhone, America has a long history of revolutionary inventions. So what does this ingenuity spring from? What are the conditions that allow for our innovative spirit?
At a Smithsonian/Zócalo “What It Means to Be American” event, held at the National Museum of American History in Washington, Zócalo Public Square publisher Gregory Rodriguez moderated a lively, big-picture discussion about the nature …

In a recent episode of This American Life, producer Zoe Chace travels to the headquarters of the fast-food chain Hardee’s to get to the bottom of one of the stranger trends in American cuisine in recent years: the food mashup. Pioneered in 2010 by KFC’s notorious “Double Down” sandwich—a bacon and cheese sandwich with two slabs of fried chicken in place of the buns—frankenfoods have …

Daniel Dae Kim is an actor best known for his roles in the TV series Lost and Hawaii Five-O. Born in Busan, South Korea, and raised in New York and Pennsylvania, Kim now spends most of his time in Hawaii. Before participating in a discussion about what Hawaii can teach the rest of America about race, he talked about his go-to karaoke song, the virtues …

In the early 20th century, most children’s books were large, lavishly illustrated, and expensive. They were absent from the bookshelves of most American families, and enjoyed primarily in libraries and schools. All that changed in 1942 with Little Golden Books—a series of slim, brightly colored books that revolutionized how, where, and what children read.
The book series—introduced by Simon & Schuster, the Artists and Writers Guild, …

Voters are in a bad mood. Again. We are routinely (and justifiably) frustrated with our politicians, but “throwing the bums out” doesn’t seem to change much. And we are all bracing for another anger-pageant that will stomp through American life for the next 13 months until election day.
A forgotten moment in our history suggests that the way out of a bad political mood is …

Just as in Casablanca everybody came to Rick’s, so in the Catskill Mountains of New York everybody aspired to go to Jennie’s.
In its storied 1914-to-1986 existence, Jennie Grossinger’s family boarding house was called Longbrook House (the original name when the Galician Jews first started to rent out the spare bedrooms of their rundown farmhouse), Grossinger’s Terrace Hill House, Grossinger’s Catskill Resort Hotel (which built upon …