For my family, America meant opportunity. It meant getting an education and having a better life. In the early 1990s, my mother came to the U.S. from Mexico at the age of 18. She originally came to visit her brothers (my […]
In the eyes of many, America is a symbol of freedom, opportunity, and a more stable way of living. For people like my mother America meant exactly that. At the age of 31 while pregnant […]
I am an artist. It is my responsibility to create space and experience. I am an educator, I have a role to inform and teach. Words and actions require the utmost care and consideration. We need to create […]
Recently, I had a discussion with my parents about where we each felt most at home. My mother, a British-American, and my father, a native Romanian-Hungarian, both agree that New York City, being the melting pot of the United States, was […]
I am an American.
To some this phrase inspires hope and pride, and for others it arouses awkward silence and rolling eyes. But what does it mean to be an American?
Instantly, the images that come to my mind are summer baseball games with a hotdog in […]
I remember going to London with PNB back in 2002. I couldn’t wait to get back to America and everything that made me feel at home. The money, the food, the accents, the winding cobblestone streets, it all made me feel out […]
Both the inherent significance of being an American and my perception of what it means to be an American have changed dramatically for me as I’ve grown older. I was born in 1946. As a child, I completely […]
America’s founders declared the pursuit of happiness to be an unalienable human right, on a par with the right to life itself. Despite an underlying streak of Puritanism, Americans usually accord a measure of tolerance and respect, if sometimes reluctantly, to […]
My family was a hodgepodge of national backgrounds, but my generation (late baby boomer) and our previous two generations were all American-born. My parents grew up in the Depression and were young adults during WWII, so my “American Story” was shaped […]
My great-grandmother, Amelia, was born in 1854 and emigrated from Crewkerne, England, a grimy factory town. It took Amelia’s father three years to earn passage for her mother and two sisters, after he found work […]