https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-census-b/ A friend just sent this to me. If you read the latest books about the roundup of Japanese Americans, this information is in there, but as we know these kinds of books are not read or reviewed…it seems as a rule. But even when it’s in a publication like Scientific American, this kind of American history never gets into the "lay-readers’” diet of information that is fed to them by the purveyors of “general interest” news organizations as the NY Times has recently described itself and its readers to me in a correspondence with their Standards Editor about a similar matter. "Thanks for this additional background. I definitely don't discount or minimize the importance of the topic or the need for historical accuracy. I do find, though, that in many areas there is a gap between the precise legal or historical terms used by experts and the ordinary terms used by laypeople to describe the same things. The best terms for a historian writing a scholarly paper wouldn't necessarily always be the best usage for a general-interest newspaper." In trying to find this story in the NY Times, I found this from Dec. 2017 under the category “Lesson Plans/US History”: Teaching Japanese-American Internment Using Primary Resources As we are teaching history: Lesson one: Headlines matter. It would probably be more accurate to say the US forced roundup and mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans. Lesson two: Internment was used not to detain Japanese Americans, but to imprison Germans, Italians and Japanese foreign nationals (and some of their children and spouses). Lesson three: Japanese Americans were not placed in Japanese Internment Camps, but in what we now know were called US concentration camps by FDR and his administration.
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Setsuko WinchesterMy Yellow Bowl Project hopes to spur discussion around these questions: Who is an American? What does citizenship mean? How long do you have to be in the US to be considered a bonafide member of this group? Archives
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