Richard Reeves (1) (1936–2020)

"Infamy" covers all the familiar bases of the story of Japanese internment: propaganda, Executive Order 9066, the No-No votes, and the 442nd regiment. Though Reeves' work is a historical chronicle, it is also a testimony to the diversity of experiences, as it includes many personal stories and narratives. It is important that this story be told, and be told repeatedly. What separates Reeves' work from others, though, is that he deliberately connects to the political dangers of 2015 and the current political era: that without this knowledge of Japanese experiences during WWII, the United States is able to commit the same crimes against its Muslim, Latino, and other non-white citizens today.… (more)

In the early hours of June 26, 1948, phones began ringing across America, waking up the airmen of World War II—pilots, navigators, and mechanics—who were finally beginning normal lives with new houses, new jobs, new wives, and new babies. Some were given just forty-eight hours to report to local military bases. The president, Harry S. Truman, was recalling them to active duty to try to save the desperate people of the western sectors of Berlin, the enemy capital many of them had bombed to rubble only three years before.

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had ordered a blockade of the city, isolating the people of West Berlin, using hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers to close off all land and water access to the city. He was gambling that he could drive out the small detachment...… (more)