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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I Have Lived With the American People by Manuel Buaken
Manuel Buaken, a US Army veteran and noted writer, described the heartbreak of Filipino immigrants: “We came to the United States to learn the best, and we found that our place here was in the blind spot of America.”
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Anna May Wong’s Wartime Volunteer Work
Chinese American film star Anna May Wong volunteered as an Air-Raid Warden during World War II. “As an American-born Chinese,” she said, “I feel it is a privilege to be able to do my little bit in return for the many advantages bestowed upon me by a free democracy.”
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Gordon Hirabayashi Interview
Gordon Hirabayashi explains why he refused to obey the curfew and evacuation orders for Japanese Americans, actions that resulted in his arrest and eventual case in front of the US Supreme Court. The court ruled against him in 1943.
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Masao Watanabe Interview
Masao Watanabe recounts being incarcerated at Puyallup Assembly Center in Washington State. The film shows the conditions of the camps and depicts the way communities were forced to live during the mass incarcerations resulting from Executive Order 9066.
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Temporary Detention Centers and War Relocation Authority Camps
Evacuees under Executive Order 9066 were first held in temporary detention centers along the West Coast (often horse-racing tracks), and eventually moved to ten concentration camps located beyond the West Coast military exclusion zone.
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Akiko Kurose Interview
In this oral history project, Akiko Kurose talks about the beginning of WWII as a young Japanese American woman living in Seattle.
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“The White Man’s Burden”
The cartoonist depicts Uncle Sam struggling to ascend a formidable mountain with all of the attributes of native people forming the rocks beneath him: barbarism, superstition, vice, brutality, and even cannibalism, among others.
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Philippine-American War Political Cartoon
The Philippine-American war was a brutal total war. The New York Journal’s May 5, 1902 issue depicts General Jacob H. Smith’s order to “kill everyone over ten.” The caption reads “Criminals Because They Were Born Ten Years Before We Took the Philippines.”
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20th Kansas Volunteer Infantry
Soldiers of the 20th Kansas Volunteer Infantry in a trench. President McKinley garnered congressional support for the Philippine-American war by shrouding its intentions behind a policy of “benevolent assimilation.”
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Queen Lili‘uokalani – The First and Last Queen of Hawai‘i
Queen Lili‘uokalani, the last monarch of the Hawaiian Kingdom, was overthrown and imprisoned for eight months in a bloodless coup driven by powerful US business interests and plantation owners supported by US Marines. She abdicated the throne in 1893 to avoid bloodshed.
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Emperor Meiji
The 1873 official imperial photo of Emperor Meiji, seated in full military dress. Within the Meiji Restoration period, the modern imperial government of Japan transformed from an isolationist feudal state to one that coalesced around principles that paralleled America’s expansionist rise, including mass industrialization and imperial colonization.
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“School Begins”
The political cartoon School Begins in Puck magazine shows Uncle Sam disciplining racist caricatures representing the Philippines, Hawaiʻi, “Porto” Rico, and Cuba. The chalkboard reads, “The U.S. must govern its new territories with or without their consent until they can govern themselves.
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Two Images of a Bontoc Igorot Man
These images represent one justification for “Manifest Destiny” and the US’s colonization of the Philippines. The transition of the barefoot boy on the left to the respectable doctor on the right romanticized the “civilizing” impact of colonial expansion without regard for the loss of indigeneity.
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U.S. Acquisitions in 1900
This 1900 map of the United States and its territorial acquisitions illustrates its vast expansion on the continent and abroad.
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Holding His End Up
In this cartoon from 1899, we see how empire can be defined through unequal relationships between the colonizers and the colonized. Uncle Sam “holds up” barbaric-looking figures representing conquered territories: “Porto” Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and the Ladrone Islands (Guam).
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“How America Became A Superpower”
From the thirteen colonies to the founding of the United States, the nation continued to expand past its continental borders to become a truly global power by the early 1900s.
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10,000 Miles from Tip to Tip
By juxtaposing that map with the impressive reach of the eagle, this 1898 cartoon gestures towards a central theme in defining empire: territorial expansion.
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Tiffany Min’s “Women”
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Kimsom Keoum’s “Refugee”
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FAPA Convention
Paul Schrade of the Delano chapter speaks at the Filipino American Political Association (FAPA) Convention in April, 1969.
Featured in:
Labor & Activism of Filipino Farmworkers, Module 5
