Secretary Norman Y. Mineta is a person of many firsts. He was the first Asian-American mayor of a major city, San Jose, California; the first Japanese American from the mainland to be elected to Congress; and the first Asian American to serve in a presidential cabinet. Mineta served as President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Commerce and President George W. Bush’s Secretary of Transportation. SPICE is honored to be collaborating with Mineta and Bridge Media, Inc., on making Mineta’s legacy more broadly known at the secondary and collegiate levels through the Mineta Legacy Project (MLP). The MLP will include a documentary and educational curriculum that are being developed with Mineta’s full involvement.

The documentary, titled An American Story: Norman Mineta and His Legacy, “delves into Mineta’s life, public service career, and unabashed love for his country… this, in spite of the fact that in 1942 his country betrayed him,” note producers Dianne Fukami and Debra Nakatomi.

Presidents Clinton and Bush were recently interviewed for the documentary and educational curriculum. “[Mineta’s] family was in a Japanese internment camp in World War II, and it could have made him bitter, angry,” commented President Clinton, “but instead he used that…to deepen his own commitment; to make sure that people weren’t discriminated against or held back or held down. In that sense, he represents the very best of America.”

This quote will be one of many presented to students in the educational curriculum, which pivots around the essential question, “What does it mean to be an American?” When asked this question, President Bush referred not only to key values such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion, but also to a sense of decency in the public square and to the nation’s communities of compassion. “It means that we care about each other. One of the real strengths of America [are] what I would call the ‘armies of compassion’…people in their communities who set up programs to feed the hungry or find shelter for the homeless, without the government telling them what to do.” He also referred to the United States’ long history of immigration, and said that being an American means recognizing that “although, on the one hand, we ought to enforce our laws, [on the other hand] we ought to welcome immigrants in a legal fashion, because immigrants reinvigorate our soul.”

Beyond Mineta’s groundbreaking achievements, Mineta epitomizes the dreams and aspirations of youth. He is the son of immigrants and his family was forcibly removed from his home to spend years in an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. And yet, he remains a patriot, has led with integrity to achieve a long and distinguished career as a public servant, and continues to champion the underserved and mentor students.

The educational curriculum is being developed by Rylan Sekiguchi of SPICE in consultation with Fukami and Nakatomi and is targeted to high school and college educators and students. The curriculum will be offered free on the MLP and SPICE websites and is being developed in coordination with the documentary. The standards-aligned lesson plans will highlight six key themes connected to the life of Secretary Mineta—immigration, civil liberties & equity, civic engagement, justice & reconciliation, leadership & decision-making, and U.S.–Japan relations—and ask students to examine them in both historical and current-day contexts. Mineta himself has underscored the enduring relevance of these themes in U.S. society, for example drawing parallels between the Japanese-American experience following the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 and the Arab-American and Muslim-American experience following 9/11. As our country debates contentious topics such as deportations, immigration bans and restrictions, surveillance, and registries, the lessons learned from Mineta’s life can help us.

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Elaine Treharne earned her PhD from the University of Manchester, with a year as a Procter Graduate Fellow at Princeton University. She came to Stanford in 2012, after five years at Florida State, and fifteen years at the University of Leicester, where she had been Chair of the English Department, and interim Dean of the Faculty of Arts. She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, of the Royal Historical Society, and of the English Association; and has won grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, the NEH, the American Philosophical Society, and the Cyber Initiative. At Stanford, she is the Director of the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) and Director of Stanford Text Technologies. She is a Fellow of the STS Interdisciplinary Program, and a Stanford Fellow 2017-2019.

Elaine’s research is focused on medieval British manuscripts from c.600CE to 1450CE. Numerous publications—including The Old English Life of St Nicholas and Wiley-Blackwell’s Old and Middle English: An Anthology (which is about to be published in its fourth edition)—present edited and translated texts, ranging from sermons and religious poetry to extracts from Beowulf and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Other books and articles concern the prestige of the vernacular and the transmission of works in English from the late Anglo-Saxon period into the thirteenth century. This research has overturned previous scholarly opinion that held there to be little or nothing of value written in English between the Norman Conquest and the thirteenth century. In Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, Elaine discussed the significant corpus of manuscripts that survive from this period, and highlighted the contemporaneity and political functionalism of many of the works copied by English scribes.

Her very recent work is focused on a History of Text Technologies (with Claude Willan for Stanford University Press), which traces trends in the production and consumption of all forms of human communication from 30000BCE to the present day. And in The Phenomenal Book, Elaine is focused on the interpretation of the handwritten book as an embodied whole (even where the only evidence is fragments and parts of books), which represents the traces and experiences of users and readers through time. It includes a chapter on ‘invisible things’, highlighting the sensual and emotional qualities of book production and use. She has also just completed the CyberText Technologies Project in CESTA—using historical patterns of textual facture and consumption to predict future text technologies; and she is just beginning a new digital project, Stanford Ordinary People’s Extraordinary Stories (SOPES), which recuperates the lives of otherwise unknown people whose ephemera (like letter collections, scrapbooks, notebooks, autograph albums, postcards, receipts, and photo albums) can be acquired from Ebay and bric-a-brac shops. Preliminary research shows that the amazing stories of people’s lives emerge from their written remnants.

Elaine’s teaching focuses on Text Technologies, Medieval English Literature, and the study of the Handwritten Book.