Fifty Years of Living with America’s Unexploded Bombs

Laos Was Collateral Damage in the U.S.’ Secret War. The Wounds Are Visible in the Land and in Generations Still Waiting on Justice

A horrific image haunts me: my father amputating a little girl’s leg to stop her from bleeding to death. The girl attended the same village school as my siblings and me. She was about my age, around 5. As blood flowed from her tiny body, my father’s snow-white lab coat turned bright crimson. The girl’s cries and her mother’s painful screams terrified me. I stood frozen, unable to turn away until my mother swept me to the safety of our home.

My father worked on countless victims of unexploded ordnance, or …

Facing Our Collective Wounds With Generous Hope | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

Facing Our Collective Wounds With Generous Hope

Historian William Sturkey Reflects on Confronting Our Dark Past, and Moving Forward

I’ve felt the power of reconciliation wash over me. I felt it at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery and at the War Remnants Museum in Saigon. …

Misread, Illegible, Invisible: Searching for a Vocabulary for Tule Lake | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

Misread, Illegible, Invisible: Searching for a Vocabulary for Tule Lake

A Descendant of a Japanese American Concentration Camp Survivor Reckons With Wartime Incarceration

Out the front windows of our bus, we could see acres of sun-dried grasses in a hot and arid Northern California summer. On either side of the road: barbed wire …

A Black Neighborhood, Upended by a Highway, Looks to Reconnect

Communities of Color in St. Paul, and Across the Country, Are Making Efforts to Remember and Rebuild

How do you remember—and reconnect—a neighborhood destroyed by highway construction over a half-century ago?

Since 1983, this has been the mission of Saint Paul, Minnesota’s annual Rondo Days festival. “[You see] …

A Playwright’s ‘Wait … What?’ Approach to Difficult History

Mining Shock and Disbelief to Connect Audiences With the Past, Present, and One Another

I’m often identified as someone who writes “issues” plays, but I’m less high-minded about my subject matter than I should probably admit. Generally, I don’t decide to write a play …

Reckoning With Racist ‘Lynch Law’ and Rape Charges, a Century Later

States Like Virginia Are Reexamining Long-Ago Cases on the Path Toward Redress and Redemption

This piece publishes alongside the Zócalo/Mellon Foundation program “How Does Confronting Our History Build a Better Future?” Read a summary of the event and …