The complicated politics of recognizing American survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Plus: Jasper Johns interview |

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By Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer More than 75 years since the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, the experience of survivors residing in the U.S. is still not widely known. To preserve their memories, historian Naoko Wake conducted 86 interviews with members of the survivor community over the last decade, meeting them initially at biannual medical checkups in the U.S. with doctors from Hiroshima that are funded by the Japanese government. Wake talked to TIME about her reporting and why it’s complicated for America to recognize this particular group of survivors. Click here to read that conversation.

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FROM THE TIME VAULT This week in 1951: Bert Lahr “He was cast as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. The job took six months and almost put him in the hospital. The banks of arc lights used for color film created murderous heat and he worked clad in long underwear, football shoulder pads and lion skin. It took two hours a day to apply his tricky makeup, and in every scene he was dependent, not only on his own art, but on a lackey who perched above him with a fishing rod and manipulated his tail.” (Oct. 1, 1951) Read More » This week in 1993: Video games “Games are part of a rapidly evolving world of interactive amusements so new that nobody knows what to call them: Multimedia? Interactive motion pictures? The New Hollywood? And like the proverbial blind men feeling their way around the elephant, everybody involved in it has a different idea of what this lucrative beast is, depending on what part of it touches them. Hollywood executives tend to see the emerging market as a way to distribute movies and TV shows. Computer types see it as a way to get their machines into every home. Cable TV companies see it as a Pied Piper that will lure a generation of young viewers onto the data superhighway—and get their parents to pay for pricey service connections and set-top cable boxes that might otherwise seem intimidating.”  (Sept. 27, 1993) Read More » This week in 2007: The Arctic “This summer, however, saw something new: for the first time in recorded history, the Northwest Passage was ice-free all the way from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The Arctic ice cap's loss through melting this year was 10 times the recent annual average, amounting to an area greater than that of Texas and New Mexico combined. The Arctic has never been immune from politics; during the cold war, U.S. and Soviet submarines navigated its frigid waters. But now that global warming has rendered the Arctic more accessible than ever—and yet at the same time more fragile—a new frenzy has broken out for control of the trade routes at the top of the world and the riches that nations hope and believe may lie beneath the ice.” (Oct. 1, 2007) Read More »

HIGHLIGHTS FROM AROUND THE WEB Remembering the Alamo: Vicky Camarillo of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times in Texas writes about a one-woman standoff in 1908 that helped make the Catholic mission an icon. Reviews: For the New York Times, former TIME Editor-in-Chief Rick Stengel reviews two new books on America’s founding: Joseph J. Ellis’ The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783 and Gordon S. Wood’s Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution. Tune in: NPR’s Sam Sanders and staffers talk about the cultural influence of the TV show Soul Train, as October 1971 marks 50 years since the program was first nationally syndicated. Grave history: The New Yorker’s Jill Lepore reports on the state of the movement to save Black cemeteries in the U.S. History wars: For the Washington Post’s “Post Everything” section, education historian Adam Laats looks back at the long history of U.S. school board meetings as a “ground zero” for culture wars.

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