My Irish ancestors who came to America in the late 19th century called July “the hungry month” because the stored food from the year before was used up and the new crops were not yet in. I remember during summers as a child how my mother, a philosophy professor, would eat chips by the pool and say, “I don’t know why I’m always so hungry in the summer.”

I grew up to become an academic and writer and when I researched this history, I was able to make connections between my family history and our globe’s larger, collective histories.