Days of infamy : how a century of bigotry led to Japanese American internment

Author

Lawrence Goldstone

Call Number

• 940.5317 G6248 TEEN (CEN, OSH)

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Edition

First edition.

Publication Information

New York : Scholastic Focus, 2022.

Physical Description

xviii, 265 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm

Audience

Grades 10-12 Scholastic Focus.

Summary

"On December 7, 1941 -- 'a date which will live in infamy' -- the Japanese navy launched an attack on the American military bases at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The next day, President Franklin Roosevelt declared war on Japan, and the US Army officially entered the Second World War. Three years later, on December 18, 1944, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which enabled the Secretary of War to enforce a mass deportation of more than 100,000 Americans to what government officials themselves called 'concentration camps.' None of these citizens had been accused of a real crime. All of them were torn from their homes, jobs, schools, and communities, and deposited in tawdry, makeshift housing behind barbed wire, solely for the crime of being of Japanese descent. President Roosevelt declared this community 'alien,' -- whether they were citizens or not, native-born or not -- accusing them of being potential spies and saboteurs for Japan who deserved to have their Constitutional rights stripped away. In doing so, the president set in motion another date which would live in infamy, the day when the US joined the ranks of those Fascist nations that had forcibly deported innocents solely on the basis of the circumstance of their birth. In 1944 the US Supreme Court ruled, in Korematsu v. United States, that the forcible deportation and detention of Japanese Americans on the basis of race was a 'military necessity.' Today it is widely considered one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of all time. But Korematsu was not an isolated event. In fact, the Court's racist ruling was the result of a deep-seated anti-Japanese, anti-Asian sentiment running all the way back to the California Gold Rush of the mid-1800s. Starting from this pivotal moment, Constitutional law scholar Lawrence Goldstone will take young readers through the key events of the 19th and 20th centuries leading up to the fundamental injustice of Japanese American internment. Tracing the history of Japanese immigration to America and the growing fear whites had of losing power, Goldstone will raise deeply resonant questions of what makes an American an American, and what it means for the Supreme Court to stand as the 'people's' branch of government"--

Notes

"True stories in focus"--Cover.

Contents

• Free and white
• White, black--and gold
• Ah yup
• Enter the Japanese
• Birthright
• Exclusion
• The workers--
• --And the boss
• Tremors
• A convenient target
• Mr. Schmitz goes to Washington
• Here come the brides
• This land is (not) your land
• Fake news
• Slamming the golden door
• All in the family
• The golden west
• The heart of an American
• What meets the eye
• Turning the soil
• Banzai and baseball
• Fear and fiction
• No island paradise
• Infamy
• Four who refused.