![]() But here in my hands was a novel that underscored a belief that both true stories and imagined ones matter. I paged through Ragtime for hours, underlining sentences in pencil, readying the class I was to teach before finishing my graduate degree, leaving my intentional community and going on to-I didn’t know what yet. Five years before Howard Zinn published A People’s History of the United States, Ragtime spotlighted history’s outsiders, especially immigrants and African Americans, destabilizing the stories our nation likes to tell itself about itself. The famous characters shed light on the humble ones, making the story of those in search of a name for themselves especially vivid. Then Mother’s Younger Brother, in search of his life’s purpose, runs into the revolutionary Zapatistas in Mexico, but dies soon after. Father lands a spot on Robert Peary’s legendary 1909 North Pole expedition, but he isn’t on the final leg that actually makes the mark. ![]() One of the most touching elements of the book is in the characters’ doomed search for a place in history. ![]()
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