Concentration Camps on the Home Front: Japanese Americans in the House of Jim Crow (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This splendid study is a meticulous, piercing account of the two detention camps set up in Arkansas for Japanese Americans during World War II. John Howard has an unusual array of gifts. He's a brilliant researcher, a stylist of clarity and wit and a writer with rare narrative skill. He is also astonishingly well informed on a wide array of subjects, and superbly contextualizes his given subject. Combining an activist's conscience with a scholar's precision, Howard has produced a moving, even searing work about American racism and imperialism."-Martin Duberman, author of The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein (Martin Duberman )

"The great strength of John Howard's book is that he not only asks new questions about the familiar story of the camps, but also that he has done a great deal of original research in material that has been largely unexploited. This is not a standard kind of camp history but something else-more imaginative but deeply rooted in the sources created by administrators and inmates. This is an important book, often gripping, and sure to be controversial."-Roger Daniels, author of Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans and World War II (Roger Daniels )

"John Howard brings fresh perspectives to the literature of Japanese-American incarceration during World War II, introducing readers to the two camps in the segregated South and lending us his sharp eye for issues of race, sexuality, and empire. His insightful meditations on those themes, his focus on individual people, and his lively writing make this book as enlightening and exhilarating as its subject is painful and frightening. Scholars of the topic and those like me, who teach about it, will discover brand new angles; more general readers will encounter profound challenges to conventional ideas about America."-Susan Strasser, author of Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (Susan Strasser )

"John Howard offers a powerful and even daring reinterpretation of the incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. Howard, one of the best historians of gender and sexuality writing today, has done significant and imaginative research that transforms the familiar tale of patriotic Americans fallen victim to wartime excess into something much more complex."-Beth L. Bailey, author of Sex in the Heartland: Politics, Culture, and the Sexual Revolution (Beth L. Bailey )

"[The book] holds up a critical lens to American society and values, raising such hot-button issues as race, family, gender politics, capitalism, individualism, immigration and nationalism. As such, it is a valuable contribution to the scholarship of the Japanese-American relocation and internment."-Jay Feldman, Truthdig (Jay Feldman Truthdig )

Product Description

Without trial and without due process, the United States government locked up nearly all of those citizens and longtime residents who were of Japanese descent during World War II. Ten concentration camps were set up across the country to confine over 120,000 inmates. Almost 20,000 of them were shipped to the only two camps in the segregated South—Jerome and Rohwer in Arkansas—locations that put them right in the heart of a much older, long-festering system of racist oppression. The first history of these Arkansas camps, Concentration Camps on the Home Front is an eye-opening account of the inmates’ experiences and a searing examination of American imperialism and racist hysteria.

While the basic facts of Japanese-American incarceration are well known, John Howard’s extensive research gives voice to those whose stories have been forgotten or ignored. He highlights the roles of women, first-generation immigrants, and those who forcefully resisted their incarceration by speaking out against dangerous working conditions and white racism. In addition to this overlooked history of dissent, Howard also exposes the government’s aggressive campaign to Americanize the inmates and even convert them to Christianity. After the war ended, this movement culminated in the dispersal of the prisoners across the nation in a calculated effort to break up ethnic enclaves.

Howard’s re-creation of life in the camps is powerful, provocative, and disturbing. Concentration Camps on the Home Front rewrites a notorious chapter in American history—a shameful story that nonetheless speaks to the strength of human resilience in the face of even the most grievous injustices.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 356 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (October 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226354768
• ISBN-13: 978-0226354767
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #216,350 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Story to Remember, December 3, 2008

By	DR "Digital reader" (USA) - See all my reviews

Confession no 1: I'm an avid reader (professionally and personally) of books, and like most people I rank academic studies as my least favourite. Who in his right mind wants to slug through another tome of dry, tedious academese? Now that you know my bias, here's Confession no 2: recently I read John Howards Concentration Camps in on the Home Front in (almost) one sitting, and am still reeling from the pleasure. The prose is brimming with a procession of astounding and gripping facts, the "mots" are "justes", the style is as graceful as an albatross in flight. Most of all, as far as I'm concerned, the author tells a damn good story. Make no mistake, this is an extraordinarily detailed study of the biggest federal incarceration drive in American history--the forceful wartime suspension of liberties and civil rights of hundreds of thousands of Americans (who happened to be of Japanese extraction). Yet it reads like a cross between a biography of a remarkable individual (Earl Finch), a journalistic account of the zeiteist of a nation at war with Japan (and with itself), a political expose of national and Congressional bigotry and racism (what else is new), and a detective story with the scholar-as-sleuth on the tail of the elusive historical clue.
The interested reader will find here a welter of data (some of it never seen before), judicious (and when appropriate, acerbic) commentary, narrative passages written by a wordsmith in total control of his medium, and a great number of photographs which put a human face on the "internees" and relieve the flow of pages (set in a rather small font). All in all, Concentration Camps is historical, polemical, critical, ironical, veridical, and topical. It is also well worth reading.