Background:
In 1886, after the arrival of Commodore Perry, the Japanese
government lifted its ban on emigration and allowed its
citizens to move to other countries. In the years after
that, however, the United States made it more difficult
for Japanese to immigrate to America. In 1911, the United
States Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization declared
that only people descended from whites and African Americans
could become citizens. The US Supreme Court upheld this
ban in 1922 in the court case Ozawa v US (for
an extended list of Supreme Court cases related to immigration,
see History Now's issue
on immigration). By 1913, Japanese Americans were
not allowed to own land in California. After Pearl Harbor
was bombed and the United States entered World War II,
the FBI declared all Japanese Americans, German Americans,
and Italian Americans to be “dangerous enemy aliens.”
The government arrested and detained people on a daily
basis. By February 1942, President Roosevelt released
Executive Order 9066, which allowed the government to
legally detain American citizens of Japanese, Italian,
and German origin.
The book Farewell to Manzanar is the story of one family’s journey to the internment camp of Manzanar. The story of the internees is seen vividly through the eyes of a child, father, and mother. It graphically depicts the life of this family beginning at the formation of the camp, lasting three years at the camp, and then following their lives afterward.
Essential Question:
Citizens show allegiance to their country, but is their country required to do the same?
Materials:
- PowerPoint on how to deliver a Socratic seminar for teachers to view (click here )
- Rubric for student participation in Socratic seminar (click here)
- Questions to be asked during Socratic seminar (click here)
- Directions for a Haiku poem (click here)
- Primary documents showing living conditions in Manzanar:
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