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
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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Image
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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Video
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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Image
“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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Image
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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Video
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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Image
“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.
