Guide for the internment of japanese americans
Alice Yang Murray, What Did the Internment of Japanese Americans Mean?
Personal Stories Assignment:
Read and be prepared to provide a brief summary of one of the personal stories (chapters) from Last Witnesses: Reflections on the Wartime Internment of Japanese Americans, Erica Harth ed. (Chapters will be handed out at the March book group session.)
Reading questions:
1. Carefully read the ‘Note for Students’ at the start of the book, paying particular attention to what Edward Countryman says about written history. He says “But good historians always approach the past on its own terms, taking careful stock of the period’s cultural norms and people’s assumptions or expectations, no matter how different from contemporary attitudes.” What point is he making here and do you agree with him?
2. The various essays in the book are taken from historical scholarship produced over time and with very different access to government documents and personal records and remembrances of the events surrounding Roosevelt’s signing the Executive Order. What does this scholarship tell us about writing with proximity to an event? How can this help us, as teachers, explain to our students what the historian does?
3. Roger Daniels in ‘The Decision for Mass Evacuation’ argues that Japanese Americans were placed in ‘concentration camps’. Other commentators continue to call the sites ‘Internment Camps’. Does it matter what these places were called?
4. Daniels quotes from one of the California proponents of removal (p. 50) that the Japanese could not be trusted at all because they had been so discriminated against in the past that they had become “unassimilable” and could not be well enough known to be trusted. Compare this point of view to the arguments used to ‘drive out’ the Chinese from the same places in the late nineteenth century. How much do you think being able to brand a group as ‘the other’ plays a role in these two cases? Do you think the same
Personal Stories Assignment:
Read and be prepared to provide a brief summary of one of the personal stories (chapters) from Last Witnesses: Reflections on the Wartime Internment of Japanese Americans, Erica Harth ed. (Chapters will be handed out at the March book group session.)
Reading questions:
1. Carefully read the ‘Note for Students’ at the start of the book, paying particular attention to what Edward Countryman says about written history. He says “But good historians always approach the past on its own terms, taking careful stock of the period’s cultural norms and people’s assumptions or expectations, no matter how different from contemporary attitudes.” What point is he making here and do you agree with him?
2. The various essays in the book are taken from historical scholarship produced over time and with very different access to government documents and personal records and remembrances of the events surrounding Roosevelt’s signing the Executive Order. What does this scholarship tell us about writing with proximity to an event? How can this help us, as teachers, explain to our students what the historian does?
3. Roger Daniels in ‘The Decision for Mass Evacuation’ argues that Japanese Americans were placed in ‘concentration camps’. Other commentators continue to call the sites ‘Internment Camps’. Does it matter what these places were called?
4. Daniels quotes from one of the California proponents of removal (p. 50) that the Japanese could not be trusted at all because they had been so discriminated against in the past that they had become “unassimilable” and could not be well enough known to be trusted. Compare this point of view to the arguments used to ‘drive out’ the Chinese from the same places in the late nineteenth century. How much do you think being able to brand a group as ‘the other’ plays a role in these two cases? Do you think the same