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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Video
Deann Borshay Liem Interview
Filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem was sent from Korea at age eight to her adoptive family in California. In her documentary First Person Plural (2000), she explores her family history. Here she discusses navigating family dynamics in the making of the film.
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Video
Harry Holt Brings Korean War Orphans to Seattle
On December 2, 1957, Universal Newsreel released footage of Harry Holt bringing 80 Korean orphans to Seattle, WA.
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Reverend Everett Swanson
Reverend Everett Swanson founded the Everett Swanson Evangelistic Association (now called Compassion International) in 1952 to advocate for adopting Koreans orphaned during the war.
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Korean War Bride
Sergeant Johnnie Morgan (right) with his Korean wife, Yoong Soon (left), and their newborn daughter Yvonne Arlene. Nearly 100,000 military brides from Korea immigrated to the United States between the end of World War II and the end of the 20th century.
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The Demilitarized Zone
The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) at the 38th parallel separating North Korea from South Korea was established by the Armistice Agreement in 1953.
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Philippine Republic Day
The Treaty of Manila recognized the independent Republic of the Philippines on July 4, 1946. Though freed from formal colonialism, the nation was left to rebuild after the devastation of war with little financial support from the US.
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Nagaishi Family’s Home Vandalized
The Nagaishi family return home to Seattle after three years’ incarceration at Minidoka War Relocation Center in Idaho to find their garage vandalized with the words “No Japs Wanted.”
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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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Video
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.
