1. Volume E-1 Volume E CONTEMPORARY PERIOD: 1945 TO THE PRESENT

2. Volume E-2 Dorothy Allison Like the woman in Dorothea Lange’s Depression photograph, the women of a later generation in Dorothy Allison’s “Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Know” “understood everything, expected nothing, and watched [their] own lives like a terrible fable from a Sunday morning sermon.” (Library of Congress)

3. Volume E-3 John Okada John Okada in No-No Boy, Hisaye Yamamoto in “Seventeen Syllables,” and Janice Mirikitani’s poems all concern the experience and cultural memory of the American incarceration of Japanese people on the West Coast in1942. The teenagers in the photograph await a train to take them to “relocation camps.” (National Archives)

4. Volume E-4 Leslie Marmon Silko In Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Lullaby,” there are no Navajo translators to help Ayah with the white doctors who take her children. Yet in this painting, Navajo “code talker” marines, among the first to land on the Pacific beaches in World War II, send information to headquarters using a Navajo code the Japanese never broke. (U.S. Marine Corps Art Collection/Colonel C.H. Waterhouse)

5. Volume E-5 Ann Petry The double bind of this advertisement—you must drink, you can’t drink—is similar to the impossible situation in which white hoodlums put their “witness” in Ann Petry’s story of that name: schoolteacher Charles Woodruff must witness yet can’t testify to the cruelty of white boys, even in the snowy North, because he is black. (Library of Congress)

6. Volume E-6 Sherman Alexie The “peace, music, and love” of Woodstock in 1969 meant something very particular for Sherman Alexie’s narrator’s father in “Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock.” (Library of Congress)