HST 287: Concentration Camps USA

A grassroots organization dedicated to preserving, educating, and sharing the story of World War II-era incarceration of Japanese Americans in order to deepen understandings of American history and inspire action for equity." Densho.Org

Japanese American National Museum’s Collections Online features selected highlights from our permanent collection of over 60,000 unique artifacts, documents, and photographs

The Japanese American Archival Collection (JAAC) ImageBase presents about 1400 images in a searchable database of selected photographs and images of artifacts related to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. This award winning collection is housed in the Special Collections and University Archives of California State University, Sacramento.

The Chinese in California, 1850-1925 illustrates nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese immigration to California through about 8,000 images and pages of primary source materials. Included are photographs, original art, cartoons and other illustrations; letters, excerpts from diaries, business records, and legal documents; as well as pamphlets, broadsides, speeches, sheet music, and other printed matter.

This collection features documents, oral histories, photographs and other materials relating to the incarceration of Japanese American during World War II. Touching on a wide range of topics, many camps, the effects of the earlier Alien Land Acts and other topics

Original residency papers for Chinese immigrants entering the United States in the late 19th century exclusion era.

The collection consists of files collected and maintained by Ralph Palmer Merritt (Director of the Japanese Relocation Center at Manzanar, California). There are also books, clippings, copies of the , reprints of committee hearings, and magazines documenting the history of Japanese and Japanese Americans in the United States and their internment and military service, photographs and photographic negatives documenting activities and people at Manzanar, photographs by Ansel Adams of the Manzanar War Relocation Center, various newspapers and printed materials.

Bancroft Library at University of California: Berkeley's collection of Chinese immigration records. Includes a timeline and primary sources from the time period.
*No longer maintained by the library. Link provided through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine

The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps Online Checklist provides a searchable database of the fire insurance maps published by the Sanborn Map Company housed in the collections of the Geography and Map Division. The online checklist is based upon the Library's 1981 publication Fire Insurance Maps in the Library of Congress and will be continually updated to reflect new acquisitions.

Calisphere is your gateway to digital collections from California's great libraries, archives, and museums.

With overview essays and more than 400 A-Z entries, this exhaustive encyclopedia documents the history of Asians in America from earliest contact to the present day. Organized topically by group, with an in-depth overview essay on each group, the encyclopedia examines the myriad ethnic groups and histories that make up the Asian American population in the United States. "Asian American History and Culture" covers the political, social, and cultural history of immigrants from East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Pacific Islands, and their descendants, as well as the social and cultural issues faced by Asian American communities, families, and individuals in contemporary society. In addition to entries on various groups and cultures, the encyclopedia also includes articles on general topics such as parenting and child rearing, assimilation and acculturation, business, education, and literature. More than 100 images round out the set.

In this sweeping work, Elliott Young traces the pivotal century of Chinese migration to the Americas, beginning with the 1840s at the start of the "coolie" trade and ending during World War II. The Chinese came as laborers, streaming across borders legally and illegally and working jobs few others wanted, from constructing railroads in California to harvesting sugar cane in Cuba. Though nations were built in part from their labor, Young argues that they were the first group of migrants to bear the stigma of being "alien." Being neither black nor white and existing outside of the nineteenth century Western norms of sexuality and gender, the Chinese were viewed as permanent outsiders, culturally and legally. It was their presence that hastened the creation of immigration bureaucracies charged with capture, imprisonment, and deportation.

This book is the first transnational history of Chinese migration to the Americas. By focusing on the fluidity and complexity of border crossings throughout the Western Hemisphere, Young shows us how Chinese migrants constructed alternative communities and identities through these transnational pathways.

From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Immigration Act of 1924 to Japanese American internment during World War II, the United States has a long history of anti-Asian policies. But Lon Kurashige demonstrates that despite widespread racism, Asian exclusion was not the product of an ongoing national consensus; it was a subject of fierce debate. This book complicates the exclusion story by examining the organized and well-funded opposition to discrimination that involved some of the most powerful public figures in American politics, business, religion, and academia. In recovering this opposition, Kurashige explains the rise and fall of exclusionist policies through an unstable and protracted political rivalry that began in the 1850s with the coming of Asian immigrants, extended to the age of exclusion from the 1880s until the 1960s, and since then has shaped the memory of past discrimination.

In this first book-length analysis of both sides of the debate, Kurashige argues that exclusion-era policies were more than just enactments of racism; they were also catalysts for U.S.-Asian cooperation and the basis for the twenty-first century's tightly integrated Pacific world.

The Chinese experience in America began with dreams of gold, as legends of instant wealth in California lured hopeful adventurers across the Pacific Ocean. Those dreams soon lost their luster, though; these sojourners found mostly hard times and persecution, and scrambled to survive in a strange country.

Only through decades of struggle, isolation, and slow progress were Chinese Americans able to find a secure place in the life of the nation. Today, though, a new surge of growth and cultural vitality promises to transform the Chinese American community, and to reshape American life for future generations.