Foreword Ori Z Soltes (bio) Human beings are significantly shaped by language and memory. Both of these instruments, carrying us in many ways beyond other creatures across the planet, are magnificent yet flawed. Language extends us but is limited: there are aspects of our experience—like parental love or exquisite sunsets (to say naught of concepts like "God")—that transcend language. Moreover, we often cannot easily translate terms from one language to another: to render Chinese dao as "way" falls short of the underlying implications of that pictogram's root elements. If one translates "sand" into Arabic, which is the correctly nuanced term? Memory, often but not always connected to or dependent upon language, is differently flawed. As Primo Levi points out in the first paragraphs of The Drowned and the Saved, we humans not only don't usually remember events exactly as they transpired, but in many cases, as time moves on, we unconsciously (or consciously) edit out aspects of them that make us uncomfortable. Further, two or more humans present at a given time and place are likely to perceive an event differently in the first place—as in the classic exploration of this phenomenon in the Japanese film, Rashomon. One may realize that the category of group memory known as history doesn't really exist. Professionals in the field are more accurately called historiographers than historians, since they are all analyzing and interpreting the raw data of events that they did not witness—but even those present may have begun with differing perceptions, subsequently multiplied by conflicting recollections of what transpired. The father of Western historiographers, Thucydides, announces early in his account of the Peloponnesian Wars that, unlike his predecessors, he will present the reader only with precise facts—and then demonstrates, by describing his method of recording both actions and speeches, that he has not and cannot do anything of the sort. These interwoven challenges notwithstanding, we are obligated as humans to keep trying to remember—and where historical (as opposed to personal) events are concerned, should we fail to do so, we endanger ourselves and our progeny, who can become victims of the same complications of which our grandparents and ancestors were victims. Our world, today, is marked in particular by two particular horrors: an upsurge in autocratic, jingoistic political leadership, from Brazil to Hungary, India to the Philippines, Poland to Russia, Turkey to—perhaps—the United States and a world-wide pandemic that has claimed several millions of lives across the planet. There are people alive who can remember a similar ugly political surge across much of the world less than a century ago—and its explosive consequences. Very few can personally recall the last time the worldwide Spanish flu epidemic played out across every continent with such devastating consequences. The number of those who can remember these events personally is less important, however, than the number of those interested enough in learning about them and about the all too many other moments resonating from the past to the present along these destructive lines—political developments that are fully anthropogenic, pandemics that are perhaps a combination of a destructive partnership between nature and humanity. The question—upon which millions of lives may depend—is whether we consider prior moments that bear various resemblances to the present moment so that we can learn from the past and thereby preserve the future. The number of those who prefer to ignore or deny [End Page 151] the past—echoed by the numbers who have convinced themselves that the present crises are not real—is profoundly disturbing. Amnesia that extends from Texas to Timbuktu is arguably as threatening as COVID-19 as a disease. An antidote to such dangerous, willful ignorance is exemplified in the array of articles and interviews in the pages that follow: each and every well-crafted piece addresses a thread in the complicated tapestry of the present by way of events that overtly or subtly extend out from the past. Each article, focused on a specific place, people, or mechanism, offers instruction regarding American and worldwide events today and how we might respond to them. They underscore the importance of pressing memory and historiography...