During World War II, 110,000 Japanese Americans--30,000 of them children--were torn from their homes and incarcerated in camps surrounded by barbed wire and military guards in what the ACLU has called "the greatest deprivation of civil rights by government in this country since slavery." The experience of these children left a tangle of social meanings that had not been inspected with the care it deserves until this book was written. Because they were schoolchildren, theirs was an educational history; and Thomas James tells it here, fully mindful of the irony of children studying democracy and its ideals while suffering as victims of the most undemocratic of all processes--imprisonment in a relocation camp solely on the basis of their race.James uses the rich documentary evidence in the records of the War Relocation Authority and other archives to survey the camps as educational institutions. Photographs of life in the camps show uncomprehending, innocent faces tinged with sadness. What sort of education took place? What did educators think they were doing there? How did the children react and adjust?James interprets the improbable hope of educational planners that they could make good on America's promise to provide educational opportunity for its citizens even under adverse conditions. What began as a story of war hysteria and racial exclusion in 1942 soon became a more complicated history of public institutions that embodied conflicting motives and numerous layers of authority and expertise. Incongruous elements of coercion and idealism led to conflict in the camps, and differences of opinion deepened when the government required declarations of loyalty while denying civil liberty. For the children, education continued despite inadequate resources, a high teacher turnover rate, and frequent confusion about ends and means. The role of the older generation in preserving cultural expression and in insisting on continuity of education was a crucial thread in the social history of the camps.Exile Within makes a strong contribution to the history of minority groups and of education in the United States; to the literature on children in crisis; and to our understanding of the contradictory uses of public authority under a democratic form of government.

Much has been written about the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)--the forerunner of the CIA--and the exploits of its agents during World War II. Virtually unknown, however, is the work of the extraordinary community of scholars who were handpicked by "Wild Bill" Donovan and William L. Langer and recruited for wartime service in the OSS's Research and Analysis Branch (R&A). Known to insiders as the "Chairborne Division," the faculty of R&A was drawn from a dozen social science disciplines and challenged to apply its academic skills in the struggle against fascism. Its mandate: to collect, analyze, and disseminate intelligence about the enemy.

Foreign Intelligence is the first comprehensive history of this extraordinary behind-the-scenes group. The R&A Branch assembled scholars of widely divergent traditions and practices--Americans and recent European émigrés; philosophers, historians, and economists; regionalists and functionalists; Marxists and positivists--all engaged in the heady task of translating the abstractions of academic discourse into practical politics. Drawing on extensive, newly declassified archival sources, Barry M. Katz traces the careers of the key players in R&A, whose assessments helped to shape U.S. policy both during and after the war. He shows how these scholars, who included some of the most influential theorists of our time, laid the foundation of modern intelligence work. Their reports introduced the theories and methods of academic discourse into the workings of government, and when they returned to their universities after the war, their wartime experience forever transformed the world of scholarship.

Authoritative, probing, and wholly original, Foreign Intelligence not only sheds new light on this overlooked aspect of the U.S. intelligence record, it also offers a startling perspective on the history of intellectual thought in the twentieth century.