On our cover, Sam Mihara, the 51st NEH Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities, holds a print of a well-known photo taken by Dorothea Lange. It shows Japanese American schoolchildren emphatically pledging allegiance. For Mihara, the photo is more than a snapshot of history. It is an image of his childhood in San Francisco. That’s his future wife, Helene Nakamoto, on the left.
Then came Pearl Harbor. Mihara, his family, and more than 120,000 other Japanese Americans on the West Coast, including many U.S. citizens, were separated from their homes, their jobs, and their neighborhoods. Sent to remote, inhospitable detention centers, they remained prisoners of the federal government for more than three years, until a Supreme Court decision finally set them free.
Mihara did not train as a historian or a writer, but one day he was asked if he would speak to an audience of government lawyers about this tragic chapter of American history. He was a happily retired aerospace executive, living the good life, fly-fishing his way around the world. Called upon to bear witness, he hit the books to make sure he could do justice to the general topic. But then the invitations to talk about the internment of Japanese Americans kept coming. And he realized there were more parts to the story he wanted to know and speak about.
So he put away his fishing gear and began to do research. He visited archives and conducted interviews, adding to his own knowledge until there were few aspects of the subject on which he couldn’t speak. Years later, this self-made historian is now a highly regarded speaker, answering urgent questions about our nation’s history and his own personal experience.
On January 15, he will deliver the Jefferson Lecture at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, an institution dedicated to preserving the experience of Japanese Americans, with an emphasis on World War II. The presentation will be livecast and made available online. And for the story behind his story, Mihara is interviewed, in these pages, by NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo).
In October, President Biden awarded the National Humanities Medal to a total of 19 recipients for the years 2022 and 2023. The 2022 medalists are profiled in this issue. They include two poets, one filmmaking collective, two college presidents, a philanthropist, a presidential historian, scholars of various type, and an elementary school principal.
Angelica Hankins covers a new exhibition of works by the Venezuelan American artist Marisol. A fixture of the New York scene, Marisol crushed on Willem de Kooning and was profiled by Gloria Steinem, but her mind-bending figures were not of this world.
Constance Fenimore Woolson was a successful writer but is better remembered for her friendship with Henry James. She may have been a model for Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady. But who was she, really? And what about her own books? Alyson Foster weighs in.
