Search the Media Repository
Discover the curated images, videos, and primary sources featured throughout Foundations and Futures
History is more than just text on a page; it is the photographs, voices, and artifacts of the people who lived it. The images and recordings featured across Foundations and Futures are part of a meticulously curated media repository. Whether you are building a lesson plan or investigating an artifact, you can use this database to trace the provenance of our media: discover who created an asset, the historical context behind it, and how it can be used to bring Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences into your classroom.
Multimedia
Chapters
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Image
White Shell Corsage Pin
Many women at Tule Lake collected tiny shells, the remains of mollusks that once inhabited an ancient lakebed located where the camp was built. They painstakingly cleaned, sorted, arranged and decorated the shells into elaborate creations like these pins.
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Stenographers and Clerks In Tule Lake Administrative Office
All other workers, like the stenographers in this photo taken at Tule Lake, received $12–16 a month. In contrast, white camp employees earned more than ten to twenty times as much as Japanese American workers for the same jobs.
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Dr. James Goto Examines a Patient
The government paid Japanese American professionals, like the doctor pictured here, nineteen dollars a month. In contrast, white camp employees earned more than ten to twenty times as much as Japanese American workers for the same jobs.
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Pinedale (Calif.) Assembly Center Dining Hall
Photograph shows Japanese Americans young women in waitress uniforms during forced removal of Japanese Americans to temporary concentration camps during World War II.
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Seattle Times: “Axis Spy Groups Smash in Coast Raids; 300 Jailed”
Anxious Japanese Americans feared that the government would shoot or deport the Issei leaders that the FBI had arrested.
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Video
Homer Yasui Interview Segment 9
Hearing about the bombing of Pearl Harbor: “My heart sank down to my toes”
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Text
Japanese Relocation Order, 1942
Issued by President Franklin Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, this order authorized the evacuation of all persons deemed a threat to national security from the West Coast to relocation centers further inland.
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“How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs”
For decades, Chinese immigrants were reviled in the United States. But China was a US ally during World War II. A December 22, 1941 Time magazine article, “How to Tell Your Friends From the Japs,” included these comparative images and the guidance that “the Chinese expression is likely to be more placid, kindly, open; the Japanese more positive, dogmatic, arrogant.” Articles like this illustrate how international politics impacted the treatment and perception of Asians in the United States.
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Nursery School Children Singing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star
Schools in the camps, like this one shown here at Tule Lake, ran the gamut from nursery programs to high schools.
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Laborers at the Tule Lake Agricultural Field
Given wartime food rationing and labor shortages, Japanese Americans, like these Tule Lake inmates, labored in nearby agricultural fields to raise crops to feed themselves.
