JILL LEPORE is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. She is also a staff writer at the New Yorker, and the host of the podcast The Last Archive. A prize-winning professor, she teaches classes in evidence, historical methods, humanistic inquiry, and American history. Much of her scholarship explores absences and asymmetries in the historical record, with a particular emphasis on the history and technology of evidence. As a wide-ranging and prolific essayist, Lepore writes about American history, law, literature, and politics. She is the author of many award-winning books, including the international best-seller These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). Her latest book, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, is long-listed for the National Book Award.
WYNTON MARSALIS, world-renowned trumpeter, bandleader, and composer, is a leading advocate of American culture. Wynton assembled his own band in 1981 and began touring, performing more than 120 concerts annually for fifteen consecutive years. With the power of his musicianship, the infectious sound of his swinging bands, and a far-reaching series of performances and music workshops, Marsalis rekindled interest in jazz worldwide, inspiring a renaissance that attracted a new generation of fine young talent to jazz. Marsalis has recorded more than one hundred jazz and classical recordings, garnering nine Grammy Awards and selling more than seven million copies worldwide. In 1997, Marsalis became the first jazz artist to be awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in Music for his oratorio Blood on the Fields. Marsalis is a 2021 inductee into the American Academy of Arts and Letters; he was honored with the National Humanities Medal by Barack Obama and holds honorary degrees from more than thirty colleges and universities across the nation. As an educator, Wynton reaches students through innumerable avenues, from his children’s books to his Jazz for Young People concerts and his Harvard lecture series. Marsalis presently serves as managing and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center and director of jazz studies at Juilliard.
DAVID MCCULLOUGH has been acclaimed as a “master of the art of narrative history.” He has written twelve books that have been published in nineteen languages. He is twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, twice winner of the National Book Award, and has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award. As may be said of few writers, none of his books has ever been out of print. In the words of the citation accompanying his honorary degree from Yale, “As an historian, he paints with words, giving us pictures of the American people that live, breathe, and above all, confront the fundamental issues of courage, achievement, and moral character.” Born in Pittsburgh in 1933, he was educated there and at Yale. He has enjoyed a lifelong interest in art and architecture and is as well a devoted painter. He and his wife, Rosalee Barnes McCullough, have five children and nineteen grandchildren.
JON MEACHAM is a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer. The author of the New York Times best-sellers Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, Franklin and Winston, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, and The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, he is a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University, a contributing writer for the New York Times Book Review, and a fellow of the Society of American Historians. Meacham lives in Nashville and in Sewanee with his wife and children.
RITA MORENO has won all four of the most prestigious awards in show business: an Oscar, a Tony, two Emmys, and a Grammy. Moreno has starred on Broadway and London’s West End, appeared in more than forty feature films, and has performed in numerous regional theaters, including her one-woman show, Life Without Makeup, at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Moreno recently costarred in the Latinx reimagining of Norman Lear’s classic sitcom One Day at a Time. Her critically acclaimed documentary, Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and had its worldwide theatrical release in summer 2021. Moreno also costars in and is an executive producer of the Steven Spielberg remake of West Side Story, scheduled for December 2021 release. A recipient of the Peabody Career Achievement Award and the Kennedy Center Honor for her lifetime contributions to American culture, she was also honored by her peers as the fiftieth recipient of the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. Moreno’s all-Spanish-language album, Una Vez Más, was produced by her good friend Emilio Estefan, and she is a New York Times bestselling author with her first book, Rita Moreno: A Memoir. Moreno has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush and the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama.
CAL RIPKEN JR. is baseball’s all-time Iron Man. He retired from baseball in October 2021, after twenty-one seasons with his hometown Baltimore Orioles. During his career he was Rookie of the Year, a nineteen-time All-Star, a two-time AL MVP, and is one of only ten players in history to amass over 400 home runs and 3,000 hits. In 2007 he was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. In 1995, Ripken broke Lou Gehrig’s Major League record for consecutive games played (2,130) and voluntarily ended his streak on September 20, 1998, after playing 2,632 consecutive games. Today Ripken is a successful business leader and philanthropist. He owns and operates Ripken Baseball, which runs youth baseball and softball complexes that host thousands of young ballplayers each year. He also owns the Aberdeen IronBirds, a Baltimore Orioles minor league affiliate that plays in his hometown in Maryland. In 2001, Cal and his family established the Cal Ripken Sr. Foundation in memory of the family’s patriarch. Since its inception, the foundation has impacted over 10 million kids in underserved communities, providing them with safe places to play and learn. Since 2007 Cal has served as a Special Public Diplomacy Envoy to the U.S. State Department and has traveled internationally on goodwill trips using baseball to bring people together.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR was born in the Bronx, New York, on June 25, 1954. She earned a BA in 1976 from Princeton University, graduating summa cum laude and receiving the university’s highest academic honor. In 1979, she earned a JD from Yale Law School, where she served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal. She served as assistant district attorney in the New York County District Attorney’s Office from 1979 to 1984. She then litigated international commercial matters in New York City at Pavia & Harcourt, where she served as an associate and then partner from 1984 to 1992. In 1991, President George H. W. Bush nominated her to the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, and she served in that role from 1992 to 1998. She served as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit from 1998 to 2009. President Barack Obama nominated her as an associate justice of the Supreme Court on May 26, 2009, and she assumed this role August 8, 2009.
BHU SRINIVASAN is a writer focused on the history of business and capitalism. Starting from the days of the Internet’s commercialization in the 1990s, his career has spanned across ventures in digital media, pop culture, technology, and financial data. Srinivasan arrived in the United States with his family at the age of eight, and as a child lived in the South, the Rust Belt, Southern California, and the Pacific Northwest. He lives in Marin County, California, with his wife and four children.
ELAINE WEISS is a journalist and author whose feature writing has been recognized with prizes from the Society of Professional Journalists, and her byline has appeared in many national publications. Her first book, Fruits of Victory, explored an organization of women activists during WWI. Her next, The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote (Viking/Penguin), won critical acclaim from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the New Yorker, and was hailed as a “riveting, nail-biting political thriller” with powerful parallels to today’s political environment. The Woman’s Hour was a Goodreads Choice Award winner, was short-listed for the 2019 Chautauqua Prize, and received the American Bar Association’s highest honor, the Silver Gavel Award, also in 2019. Weiss is a popular speaker and media commentator on the themes of women’s history and political organization as well as voting rights. She lives
in Baltimore.
JIA LYNN YANG is national editor at the New York Times. Before joining the Times in 2017, she was deputy national security editor at the Washington Post, where she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of Trump and Russia. Before becoming an editor, Yang wrote about business and economics at the Post and at Fortune magazine for over a decade. Yang’s family immigrated to the United States from Taiwan in the 1970s and was able to stay in the country thanks to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. One Mighty and Irresistible Tide is her effort to understand the people who fought to give her family a place in America.
Appendix I: Citizenship Test
A major part of the American Experiment has been immigration. More than any other country, the United States was built and largely populated by immigrants and their descendants.
Today, out of a U.S. population of roughly 331 million people, about 46 million are immigrants, and 40 million are second-generation Americans. At the country’s outset, there were essentially no constraints on who could enter the country, or even who could become citizens.
But in 1790, as the new U.S. government was getting organized under the Constitution, legislation was passed to permit immigrants who were white, over twenty-one, and residents of the U.S. for two years to petition a federal court for citizenship.
Five years later, the residency requirement was extended to five years, and an affidavit of a U.S. citizen witness vouching that the applicant “possessed a good moral character” was added. From 1795 to 1906, requirements for citizenship changed—an oath to support the Constitution was added; previous citizenship (and any nobility title) had to be renounced; and Blacks were finally permitted to become citizens after the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868.
In 1906, under new legislation, a Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization was created; an English literacy test was essentially established (later officially required in 1917); and federal judges (who administered the citizenship process) were allowed to ask questions about U.S. history and civics—though no preparatory materials were provided and each judge was the sole arbiter of the answers’ accuracy.
In subsequent years, different requirements were imposed before citizenship was granted—literacy; nationality quotas; basic verbal English proficiency; race and ethnicity. From time to time, these requirements were amended, allowed to lapse, or made more precise.
But not until new legislation was enacted in 1990 was the process of judicial admission ended; federal naturalization examiners would now review whether the applicants met the various standards, and judges would be limited to administering the oath of allegiance to the United States.
As part of the citizenship process, a requirement was established in 1952 to ensure that the prospective citizen had a “knowledge and understanding of the fundamentals of the history, and of the principles and form of government, of the United States.”
In short, a history and civics requirement was imposed. This was met in a variety of ways, but the current system provides prospective citizens with materials outlining one hundred potential questions in the American history and civics area. The prospective citizens can study these questions and appear for the test when they are ready to do so.
* * *
When an applicant is being considered for citizenship, the examiner (now a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officer) orally asks the applicant ten of the potential one hundred questions. Six correct answers are required to pass.I
Currently, about 91 percent of prospective citizens pass both this test (presumably after some studying of the potential one hundred questions) and the English proficiency test (the other component of the citizenship test).
The questions are basic ones, and it would be presumed that nonnaturalized Americans—who likely had the benefit of civics or history classes in school—would be able to readily pass the same test.
That presumption, it turns out, is wrong. In 2018, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (now the Institute for Citizens and Scholars) created a process under which mostly natural-born Americans (who volunteered to participate in advance) were given five minutes to complete an online, multiple-choice survey. Twenty questions were chosen, at random, from the standard citizenship one hundred–question list.
The results were largely shocking. Forty-one thousand adults (approximately 90 percent were U.S. citizens at birth) from all fifty states and the District of Columbia participated. In only one state (Vermont) did a majority (53 percent) of the respondents pass (i.e. getting twelve questions correct out of the twenty that were asked). In forty-nine other states and the District, a majority of those interviewed could not answer correctly twelve questions out of the twenty asked.
How would you do in taking this portion of the U.S. citizenship test?
The actual test involves ten questions out of a potential one hundred. I have included over the next few pages those one hundred questions (available on the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website, uscis.gov/citizenship). I have arranged them in a format of ten questions—and thus there are in effect ten tests. The questions are in nine categories; in each mini test, I have included one question from each of the categories to the extent possible. Take any one of the ten tests—or all of them—to gauge your own ability to pass this basic civics and history test.
U.S. CITIZENSHIP—SAMPLE TEST ONE
What is the supreme law of the land?
Name one branch or part of the government.
There are four amendments to the Constitution about who can vote. Describe one of them.
What is one reason colonists came to America?
What territory did the United States buy from France in 1803?
Name one war fought by the United States in the 1900s.
Name one of the two longest rivers in the United States.
Why does the flag have 13 stripes?
When do we celebrate Independence Day?
What stops one branch of government from becoming too powerful?
U.S. CITIZENSHIP—SAMPLE TEST TWO
What does the Constitution do?
Who is in charge of the executive branch?
What is one responsibility that is only for United States citizens?
Who lived in America before the Europeans arrived?
Name one war fought by the United States in the 1800s.
Who was President during World War I?
What ocean is on the West Coast of the United States?
Why does the flag have 50 stars?
Name two national U.S. holidays.
Who makes federal laws?
U.S. CITIZENSHIP—SAMPLE TEST THREE
What is an amendment?
What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?
Name one right only for United States citizens.
What group of people was taken to America and sold as slaves?
Name the U.S. war between the North and the South.
Who was President during the Great Depression and World War II?
What ocean is on the East Coast of the United States?
What is the name of the national anthem?
How many U.S. Senators are there?
We elect a U.S. Senator for how many years?
U.S. CITIZENSHIP—SAMPLE TEST FOUR
What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?
Who is one of your state’s U.S. Senators now?
What are two rights of everyone living in the United States?
Why did the colonists fight the British?
Name one problem that led to the Civil War.
Who did the United States fight in World War II?
Name one U.S. territory.
The House of Representatives has how many voting members?
We elect a U.S. Representative for how many years?
Name your U.S. Representative.
U.S. CITIZENSHIP—SAMPLE TEST FIVE
What is one right or freedom from the Fir
st Amendment?
Who does a U.S. Senator represent?
What do we show loyalty to when we say the Pledge of Allegiance?
Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?
What was one important thing that Abraham Lincoln did?
Before he was President, Eisenhower was a general. What war was he in?
Name one state that borders Canada.
Why do some states have more Representatives than other states?
We elect a President for how many years?
In what month do we vote for President?
U.S. CITIZENSHIP—SAMPLE TEST SIX
How many amendments does the Constitution have?
What is the name of the President of the United States now?
What is one promise you make when you become a United States citizen?
When was the Declaration of Independence adopted?
What did the Emancipation Proclamation do?
During the Cold War, what was the main concern of the United States?
Name one state that borders Mexico.
The American Experiment Page 42
