In Common ground, Gary Okihiro uses the experiences of Asian Americans to reconfigure the ways in which American history can be understood. He examines a set of binaries--East and West, black and white, man and woman, heterosexual and homosexual--that have structured the telling of our nation's history and shaped our ideas of citizenship since the late nineteenth century. Okihiro not only exposes the artifice of these binaries but also offers a less...

"The internment of Japanese Americans was a violation of the Constitution and its guarantee of equal protection under the law--yet it was authorized by a presidential order, given substance by an act of Congress, and affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Japanese American internment is a topic that we as Americans cannot afford to forget or be ignorant of. This work spotlights an important subject that is often only described in a cursory fashion in...