This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Save on appliances at the Home Depot with up to $1,000 off, plus up to an extra $500 off select appliances like Whirlpool that can keep up with your busy routine. The Home Depot has Whirlpool laundry appliances with FanFresh. This feature fans and tumbles your laundry after it's done to help keep your clothes fresh until you're ready to grab them.
Shop now and get up to $1,000 off, plus free delivery on select appliances at the Home Depot. How doers get more done. Free delivery on appliance purchases of $999 or more. Offer valid January 8th through the 28th. U.S.
only. See store online for details. Ready to change your life for just $2 a day? Orange Theory Fitness delivers one-hour workouts that combine strength and cardio to help you burn fat, build muscle, and feel unstoppable. Right now, get a full month of unlimited classes for just $62.
Don't wait. This offer ends soon. Visit orangetheory.com or your local studio and start your transformation today. Offer ends January 31st, 2026. New members only.
Premier membership, performance monitor, and monthly billing required. Discount applies to first month only. Other terms apply. See studio for details. Want to buy your way?
Of course you do. That's why CarMax offers an experience designed just for you. Want to start online, then visit the lot, then go back online? Sure. Want to talk to a real person or chat online?
Either works. Want to take your time and compare all the makes and models? No problem. Then make up some time by filling out the paperwork at home and schedule express pickup or home delivery? Done.
When it comes to how you buy, CarMax puts you in the driver's seat. Want to drive? CarMax. Delivery restrictions apply. See CarMax.com for details.
This is Vardy Devlukia from A Really Good Cry. I absolutely love being outdoors, even if it's just stepping outside for a bit of fresh air between meals or taking a mindful walk to clear my head. But the one thing that can really ruin that is when my feet feel cramped in my shoes.
So I switched to ultra running, and honestly, it made such a difference. What I love most is their signature ultra fit comfort balance strength. They have this roomy toe box that lets my toes actually spread and move naturally. And I personally have some wide feet so I really appreciate that. I feel more grounded and balanced with every single step.
It's like my feet can finally do their job. Using all those little muscles that make me feel stronger the more I move. Whether you're a marathon runner, beginner or advanced or just getting outside to train, ultras have become my go-to for running and moving mindfully. They fit so well, they're so comfortable, and they just move with you. Shop now at altrarunning.com.
That's A-L-T-R-A running.com. Experience Altra and stay out there. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And we'd love to hear your stories. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com.
They're some of our favorites. The surge of children's books, school curricula films, websites, plays, and exhibitions about the wartime forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans has for the most part been a good thing There is generally one simple narrative that gets told Our next story comes to us from Preston Jones who is a professor of history at John Brown University and is also a Jack Miller Center fellow The Jack Miller Center is a nationwide network of scholars and teachers dedicated to educating the next generation about America's founding principles and history. To learn more, visit jackmillercenter.org. Let's take a listen to the story. Mary Mikami arrived in Anchorage, Alaska with her immigrant parents soon after the town was founded in 1914.
Her father, who in the U.S. went by George, had studied English before emigrating from Japan to the U.S., but he never mastered it. Mary's mother, Minnie, never became comfortable in English. I first saw a photo of Mary Mikami in an Anchorage school annual for 1929. after starting research into the city's history from its founding to the beginning of the Second World War.
Given Japan's attacks on Alaskan Islands and the town of Dutch Harbor during that war, I wanted to track what Anchorage's residents thought about Japan and the Japanese up to December 1941. When I first saw a photo of Mary, I felt sorry for her. After everything I'd read about the experience of Japanese Americans in the years before and during World War II, I assumed that she must have had a very difficult time. But then I learned that Mary made the honor roll as a first grader in Anchorage. I learned that as a 10-year-old, she won an essay contest sponsored by the Bank of Alaska.
Over the next months, I saw many photographs of Mary in Anchorage School publications and elsewhere. and I noticed that she had a lot of friends, as did her three younger siblings, Harry, Alice, and Flora. In various archives, I found short notes Mary had written to classmates. One was addressed to Louise, whom Mary called the best of girls and a sweet friend. I learned that Mary graduated in 1930 from Anchorage's school as valedictorian of her class, the first of the four Mikami children to do so.
Then she went to what would later be called the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, where she graduated in 1934 with the highest grades of any student at the college to that time. The school's newspaper reported that Mary had eclipsed all rivals by nearly a 7% margin. After graduating, Mary went on an anthropological research trip to St. Lawrence Island. She wrote articles about the expedition.
The student newspaper in Fairbanks noted that Mary was the only woman on the expedition. It said nothing about her Japanese ancestry. People liked Mary and her sisters and brother. They didn't care where their parents were from. Having a keen interest in anthropology, Mary worked at the University of Alaska Museum, which was directed by a graduate of Yale University.
She was inspired by what he told her and she applied to Yale and was accepted for graduate study. Traveling alone she took a steamer to Seattle and a train across the country to Connecticut As before Mary thrived and gained friends Her Japanese ancestry seemed not to be a barrier This held through the Second World War While Mary's parents, who had moved to California by late 1941, were interned along with thousands of other Japanese Americans living in the western U.S. and Canada, none of the Mikami children were intern. Flora, married to a Canadian, lived out the war in British Columbia. Mary and her brother Harry, attending Yale University, lived in Connecticut.
Alice stayed in the Alaskan town of Palmer, where she lived well into her 90s. I had the privilege of speaking with Alice a few times. I asked if, the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese Navy, she felt any animosity directed against her. She said that if there was any animosity, she wasn't aware of it. It didn't take long for me to stop feeling sorry for Mary McCommie.
There was no reason to.
Soon I came to admire her, though not because she had successfully struggled against forces that intended to keep any particular group down. There's nothing in the surviving documents that suggests she ever faced such pressures. I came to admire Mary because she had succeeded the old-fashioned way. She took advantage of her smarts and the motivation her parents provided. She worked hard.
She was decent. She didn't step on other people. She succeeded with grace. She earned her rewards. When Alaska Senator Frank Murkowski spoke about Mary after she passed away in August 1999, he used words like tenacity and extraordinary.
Growing up in Alaska, Mary lost much of the Japanese she had spoken as a child. She spoke only English with her siblings. She made up for this later in life with research and trips to Japan to learn about her family's history and culture. She remastered Japanese as an adult. Her language abilities shaped much of her work as a researcher, editor, and teacher at Yale.
She edited translations, worked with the Institute of Oriental Languages, and contributed to the production of academic archaeological journals. History, like the news, focuses on the negative. This is easy to do because history is about people, and people are complicated and do bad things. But people also do admirable things, and it's useful to see goodness where it exists. It's good to remember that there really is something to the American dream.
Certainly, Mary McCommie would say so. Mary earned a doctorate degree in anthropology at Yale and married fellow graduate student Irving Rouse, who became a professor of anthropology there. Their son, Peter, became a senior advisor to President Obama. And a terrific job on the production editing and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler A special thanks to Preston Jones professor of history at John Brown University for sharing the story of Mary Mikami One Japanese-American story, here on Our American Stories. Here at Our American Stories, we bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith, and love.
Stories from a great and beautiful country that need to be told. But we can't do it without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they're not free to make. If you love our stories in America like we do, please go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot.
Help us keep the great American stories coming. That's OurAmericanStories.com. This is Julian Edelman from Dudes on Dudes with Gronk and Jules. Sunday mornings, I've got my game day ritual. coffee lucky socks and now new morning uncrustable sandwiches it's all about that 12 gram protein boost with the new uncrustables bright eyed berry or up and apple flavors bright eye berries got a feisty receiver energy up an apple your classic do it all tight end soft pillowy packed with protein and easy enough for Gronk to grab from the freezer.
Whether you're on the couch driving to the tailgate or heading to the locker room, new morning uncrustable sandwiches are the MVP of snacks. Your new Sunday kickoff ritual starts here with new morning uncrustable sandwiches packed with 12 grams of protein. For the first time ever, a truly beautiful medical breakthrough promises physical perfection. One shot makes you hot, but with terrifying consequences. In the new original series, FX is the Beauty, the glamorous world of supermodels turns deadly as mysterious deaths draw in FBI agents and a shadowy billionaire who will stop at nothing to protect his empire.
From executive producer Ryan Murphy, FX is the Beauty premieres January 21st on FX, Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for bundle subscribers. The new year brings new health goals and wealth goals. Protecting your identity is an important step. Your info is in endless places that could expose you to identity theft, leading to lost funds. LifeLock monitors millions of data points per second.
If your identity is stolen, LifeLock's restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Resolve to make identity, health, and wealth part of your new year's goals with LifeLock. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock.com slash iHeart. Terms apply.
This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
