My father was an engineer who never told stories; he was, matter of fact, like his mother, Minerva, and his cousin Jimmy Carter, another engineer. On the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day he...

Memory is a human experience that demonstrates what we believe, what we value, and how we interpret our history. Clementine Hunter’s autobiographical African House Murals provide viewers...

I learned something I could not have learned at home during that period in our history. I learned to be an American as opposed to being a “Negro in America” negotiating the restrictions...

Do I hate to leave? No, I’ve been here long enough—long enough to know what makes Singapore such a model of good government, long enough to understand why it’s a model possible for a...

Even houses stripped of furnishings have their story to tell. In the connective tissue of these rooms, time and kinship are made manifest. And every now and then, alone with my camera, I...

Abuelo’s face went blotchy at once, his eyes liquid. It looked as if he were suffering a sudden allergic reaction. “¿Estúpido?” Abuelo asked. “¿Estúpido? Mira muchacha, I...

Sure, there are far more devastating fates, but at the time, I was certain there was nothing worse than enduring the seventh grade as a staggeringly skinny, flat-chested brown girl in Ohio,...

i know the grandmother one had hands but they were always inside the clouds poking holes for the rain to fall.

Next came General Ulysses S. Grant, or rather the guy portraying him, the first white man to appear in the parade: bearded, handsome, flat-bellied, sitting astride an immaculately...

We are all built of shadows, so I wonder, too, how many selves my mother has dismissed, if she mourns an alternate person every day she lives away from the South. If, like me, she feels at...

But if they stopped for just a moment, they would be connected to a little-known but fantastic tale of how an experience of a teenaged Chinese boy on that church site influenced the history...