Wartime hysteria over "foreign" ways fueled a movement for Americanization that swept the United States during and after World War I. Eileen H. Tamura examines the forms that hysteria took in Hawai'i, where the Nisei (children of Japanese immigrants) were targets of widespread discrimination.
Tamura analyzes Hawaii's organized effort to force the Nisei to adopt "American" ways, discussing it within the larger phenomenon of Nisei acculturation. While racism was prevalent in "paradise," the Nisei and their parents also performed as active agents in their own lives, with the older generation attempting to maintain Japanese cultural ways and the younger wishing to become "true Americans." Caucasian "Americanizers," often associated with powerful agricultural interests, wanted labor to remain cheap and manageable; they lobbied for racist laws and territorial policies, portending the treatment of ethnic Japanese on the U.S. mainland during World War II.
Tamura offers a wealth of original source material, using personal accounts as well as statistical data to create an essential resource for students of American ethnic history and U.S. race and class relations.
Do historians “write their biographies” with the subjects they choose to address in their research? In this collection, editors Alan M. Kraut and David A. Gerber compiled eleven original essays by historians whose own ethnic backgrounds shaped the choices they have made about their own research and writing as scholars. These authors, historians of American immigration and ethnicity, revisited family and personal experiences and reflect on how their lives helped shape their later scholarly pursuits, at times inspiring specific questions they asked of the nation’s immigrant past. They address issues of diversity, multiculturalism, and assimilation in academia, in the discipline of history, and in society at large. Most have been pioneers not only in their respective fields, but also in representing their ethnic group within American academia. Some of the women in the group were in the vanguard of gender diversity in the discipline of history as well as on the faculties of the institutions where they have taught.
The authors in this collection represent a wide array of backgrounds, spanning Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. What they have in common is their passionate engagement with the making of social and personal identities and with finding a voice to explain their personal stories in public terms.
Contributors: Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp, John Bodnar, María C. García, David A. Gerber, Violet M. Showers Johnson, Alan M. Kraut, Timothy J. Meagher, Deborah Dash Moore, Dominic A. Pacyga, Barbara M. Posadas, Eileen H. Tamura, Virginia Yans, Judy Yung
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