Ethel Thomas Herold (1896-1988) was an ordinary person caught up in extraordinary circumstances - a woman whose sense of patriotic duty took her from small-town Wisconsin to the Philippines in 1922. There she would spend the next thirty-seven years, including three in a Japanese internment camp. Theresa Kaminski uses Ethel's experiences to explore a unique example of how enormous forces helped shape Americans' notions of citizenship and patriotism in the first half of the twentieth century.