Journalist Jia Lynn Yang Wins the 11th Annual Zócalo Book Prize

One Mighty and Irresistible Tide Challenges the Well-Worn American Immigration Narrative

Does America Really Want to Be a Nation of Immigrants? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

Jia Lynn Yang, national editor at the New York Times, is the winner of the 11th annual Zócalo Book Prize for her debut book, One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965, a clear-eyed look at how America’s modern immigration policy came to be.

Pushing back against the mythology that America has always been a nation of immigrants, One Mighty and Irresistible Tide centers on the four-decade period between the passage of the Immigration Law of 1924, which created a permanent race-based quota system, and the passage of the Immigration and …

Interview by Jackie Mansky | April 21, 2021

Can Playwrights Lead the Next American Reconstruction?

Theater Encompasses ‘Truth, Reconciliation, and Recompense’—All Integral Ingredients to Imagine How the Country Can Build Back Better

by Oliver Mayer | March 11, 2021

History shows how badly Americans flubbed our First Reconstruction in the aftermath of Civil War. Although we did better, we hardly lived up to the lofty intentions of the Second …

Thank the Pilgrims for America’s Tradition of Separatism, Division, and Infighting

They Were Not the Nation’s First Settlers, but They Were the Most Fractious

by Richard Kreitner | November 25, 2020

December marks the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth, the moment habitually yet mistakenly thought of as the beginning of America. The conflation of New England’s history with …

Our Search for Human Connection Continues in 2020

The 11th Annual Zócalo Book Prize Honors the Best Writing on Community and Social Cohesion

September 4, 2020

Since 2011, Zócalo Public Square’s annual book prize has recognized the nonfiction book, published in the U.S., that best enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or …

How the Yellow House Helped Make Washington, D.C. a Slavery Capital

The Notorious Jail Lent Institutional Support to Slavery Throughout the South

by Jeff Forret | July 15, 2020

Washington, D.C., was a capital not just of the United States, but of slavery, serving as a major depot in the domestic slave trade. In the District, enslaved men, women, …

When Idealistic New Englanders Moved to Kansas Territory to ‘Put an End to Slavery’

Hundreds of Abolitionists Founded Manhattan, Kansas, in the Hope of Creating a Free State

by Kevin G. W. Olson | July 8, 2020

When a Union soldier from upstate New York marched through Manhattan, Kansas, during the dismal Civil War summer of 1862, he was astounded: “All at once, as if by magic, …

American history