At the height of the Progressive Era, a small circle of scholars and educators launched a zealous but failed effort to reform American spelling. Bankrolled by Andrew Carnegie, the Simplified Spelling movement epitomized the era's much-chronicled passion for “efficiency”: By replacing words like through and although with thru and altho, the simplifiers said, citizens would save both time and money. Yet the rapid demise of the campaign also highlights the limits of America's efficiency craze, even during its supposed heyday. Although some critics invoked the efficiency idiom against Simplified Spelling, questioning its utility and practicality, others denounced efficiency itself. Even if simplification made spelling more efficient, they said, Americans should retain their older forms in the name of higher values: beauty, habit, and tradition. Their rejection of Simplified Spelling stood as a standing rebuke to the gospel of efficiency, which never quite gained the full-throated worship that its high priests imagined.

The three essays in this forum examine the ways in which individuals have sought to reconcile sociocultural differences between those at the fringes of American society and those at the center. Two concepts embody this effort. One is the bridge concept—the idea that those with dual identities would serve as links between the two sociocultural worlds. The other concept, that of the cultural broker, refers to someone who actively seeks to mediate the differences between the two groups. The essays in this cluster use the two concepts to analyze the ways in which individuals in three disparate places—the American West (California), a U.S. colony across the Pacific (the Philippines), and the American Southwest (New Mexico)—served as bridges and brokers in their efforts to negotiate the imbalance of power between dominant and subordinate groups.

For years, scholars of Native American history have urged U. S. historians to integrate Indians into national narratives, explaining that Indians' experiences are central to the collective story rather than peripheral to it. They have achieved some successes in penetrating and reworking traditional European-American dominated accounts. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the field of colonial history. In fact, for several decades now colonialists have placed Native Americans at the center, seeing them as integral to imperial processes and as forces that simply can no longer be ignored. To omit them would be to leave out not only crucial participants but important themes. Native people occupied and owned the property European nations coveted. They consequently suffered great losses as imperialists bent on control of land, resources, cultures, and even souls applied their demographic and technological advantages. But conquest did not occur overnight. It took several centuries for Spain, France, the Netherlands, Russia, Great Britain, and eventually the United States to achieve continental and hemispheric dominance. Nor was it ever totally achieved. That 564 officially recognized tribes exist in the early 2000s in the United States demonstrates that complete conquest was never realized.

In February 1915, upon viewing The Birth of a Nation at a special White House screening, President Woodrow Wilson reportedly remarked, “It's like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” This line has appeared in numerous books and articles over the past seventy years. This article examines the history of this alleged quotation and the sources where it has appeared. The article weighs the evidence that Wilson effusively praised in these words one of the most racist major movies in American history.

Joseph Kurihara was a son of immigrants, a Japanese American who did everything he could to become a bridge of understanding. Ultimately, however, he came to believe that the bridge that he had built was made of straw.

How did he come to this conclusion? When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Kurihara immediately volunteered his services for the war effort. He volunteered a number of times but to no avail. Instead, he was rejected and—like other Japanese Americans and their parents—he was forced to leave his home and job, and move to what the U.S. government first called “concentration camps” and later, euphemistically, “relocation centers.” What Kurihara learned later, he said, was that his “Japanese features” and his job as a fishing-boat navigator made him suspect in the eyes of the U. S. government, and as a result FBI agents had been tailing him since the Pearl Harbor attack. He could accept these actions as government mistakes.

A 1910 Normal School Yearbook featured six young women in basketball uniforms. Sixteen-year-old Paz Marquez, the tallest among them and the captain of the team, looks out unsmilingly. In the early years of the century, photographs of women's basketball teams appeared in hundreds of normal-school yearbooks across the American landscape, but this photo came from the normal school in Manila. Two years later, sharing another American ritual, the former team captain graced the cover of the weekly magazine Renacimiento Filipino, this time dressed in a luxurious gown befitting the Queen of the Carnival. That same year, 1912, Paz Marquez graduated with a B.A. in the first class from the College of Liberal Arts at the newly formed, secular University of the Philippines. Participating in commonplace American events, Paz Marquez (later Benitez) acted as a bridge, a link, between two cultures. Over the next decades, Paz continued in this role. In addition, however, she also became a cultural broker, as she confronted the conundrum that the use of English as the official language had imposed on Filipino culture. In these ways, Paz illustrates the complicated and intriguing story of U.S. nation-building from an intimate and distinctly Philippine viewpoint.

New Mexicans pride themselves on their ability to bridge multicultural divides. Part of what we are urged to understand as “enchanting” about the Land of Enchantment is its diverse cultural background. Native American, Hispano, and Anglo have existed side by side, at times with remarkable harmony and good will, for nearly two centuries. The Land of Enchantment is not altogether a fantasy. Many New Mexicans have shown an uncanny ability to bridge ethnic divides and find common ground in the interstices between cultures. The soil of New Mexico seems to be fertile ground indeed for producing cultural brokers. Margaret Connell Szasz admits that living in New Mexico makes her particularly attuned to the role of the cultural broker.