Last Witness: Reflections on the Wartime Internment of Japanese Americans - Softcover

Harth, Erica

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1403962308 ISBN 13: 9781403962300

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003

Synopsis

Sixty years after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and FDR's Executive Order 9066 incarcerating over 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent (two thirds of them American citizens), one question remains unresolved: 'Could it happen again?' To the writers in this book - novelists, memoirists, poets, activists, scholars, students, professionals - the WWII internment of Japanese Americans in the detention camps of the West is an unfinished chapter of American history. Former internees and their children join with others in challenging readers to construct a better future by confronting the past. This is a fresh look at a compelling story, told by some of the people who lived it, that continues to tarnish the American Dream.

About this title

Review:

'What is ultimately at stake...is the significance of this incarceration for all Americans...The treatment of Japanese Americans resonates especially strongly.' - Publishers Weekly

'...a unique volume.' - Library Journal

'...a seamless chorus that sings the core lesson of a historical error.' - Women's Review of Books

About the Author:

ERICA HARTH is Professor of Humanities and Women's Studies at Brandeis University. She is the author of numerous publications on early modern France, most recently, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (1992). She has also written personal essays on her experience of having spent a year of her childhood at Manzanar, California (one of the ten so-called relocation centers for Japanese Americans), where her mother was working for the War Relocation Authority, the administrative agency for the internment camps.

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1403962308
• ISBN 13: 9781403962300
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320