Once located on a spur off the coastal road between Tel Aviv and Haifa, Tantura was a fishing and agricultural village counting 1,490 residents. Attacked on May 22-23, 1948, the village fell after a brief battle; claims of a massacre are still debated. Some twelve...
Abstract: Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American writer. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner for his debut novel, The...
I end wars. When I arrive at bases and conflicts, my job is to help close them, move them, go underground. My military experiences travel the circumference of war, seldom intersecting the dangerous center of the bulls-eye target. My first duty station closed more than...
It’s six o’clock in the morning. A beautiful, mercifully cool summer Sunday morning. The final day of the three-day Stokes Folks Family Reunion. My father’s side of the family. Father’s mother’s side to be exact. Stokes to Ford to Frazier. I’m sitting in a gazebo in a...
As I was reading about the group of women in Handmaid’s Tale red robes and white bonnets who staged a pro-choice protest in the Texas senate this week on Monday, March 20th, I was thinking about the power of image. The group of women—channeling the characters in...
1. So I found myself sitting on a bench, waiting in a wooden building at Fort Holabird, an Army base in Baltimore, Maryland. A corporal, looking glum, walked through the rows of new recruits who were still dressed in blue jeans and button-down shirts, raggedy shorts...
Fascist. Totalitarian. Authoritarian. These words continue to appear more frequently in American and international media, amplified by the looming US 2020 election. As with many socio-political terms, such as “Left”, “Right”, “Far-Left”, “Far-Right”, “Moderate”,...
The name “Ku Klux Klan” apparently derived from the Greek word “Kyklos,” from which comes the English word “circle.” Klan was added for the sake of alliteration. Founded after the Civil War, the KKK spearheaded resistance to Reconstruction. A branch was based in...
I cannot trust a man to control others who cannot control himself.—General Robert E. Lee The day ambled on until it became night. The sun went down, but its heat remained, and we continued to swelter in the dark as we guarded the entrance to the small Iraqi village....
I teach at a very good liberal arts college in the Northeast, and perhaps it’s one reason why I’ve been having conversations in the past few years with people I know and don’t know, in passing or in close conversation, in which I hear anger, disappointment, or...
