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The mass imprisonment of over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II was one of the most egregious violations of civil liberties in United States history. Removed from their homes on the temperate Pacific Coast, Japanese Americans spent the war years in desolate camps in the nation's interior. Photographers including Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange visually captured these camps in images that depicted the environment as a source of both hope and hardship. And yet the literature on incarceration has most often focused on the legal and citizenship statuses of the incarcerees, their political struggles with the US government, and their oral testimony. Nature Behind Barbed Wire shifts the focus to the environment. It explores how the landscape shaped the experiences of both Japanese Americans and federal officials who worked for the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the civilian agency that administered the camps. The complexities of the natural world both enhanced and constrained the WRA's power and provided Japanese Americans with opportunities to redefine the terms and conditions of their confinement. Even as the environment compounded their feelings of despair and outrage, the incarcerees also found that their agency in transforming and adapting to the natural world could help them survive and contest their incarceration. Japanese Americans and WRA officials negotiated the terms of confinement with each other and with a dynamic natural world. Ultimately, as Connie Chiang demonstrates, the Japanese American incarceration was fundamentally an environmental story.
In 1942, Bill Manbo (1908-1992) and his family were forced from their Hollywood home into the Japanese American internment camp at Heart Mountain in Wyoming. While there, Manbo documented both the bleakness and beauty of his surroundings, using Kodachrome film, a technology then just seven years old, to capture community celebrations and to record his family's struggle to maintain a normal life under the harsh conditions of racial imprisonment. Colors of Confinement showcases sixty-five stunning images from this extremely rare collection of color photographs, presented along with three interpretive essays by leading scholars and a reflective, personal essay by a former Heart Mountain internee. The subjects of these haunting photos are the routine fare of an amateur photographer: parades, cultural events, people at play, Manbo's son. But the images are set against the backdrop of the barbed-wire enclosure surrounding the Heart Mountain Relocation Center and the dramatic expanse of Wyoming sky and landscape. The accompanying essays illuminate these scenes as they trace a tumultuous history unfolding just beyond the camera's lens, giving readers insight into Japanese American cultural life and the stark realities of life in the camps. Also contributing to the book are: Jasmine Alinder is associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she coordinates the program in public history. In 2009 she published Moving Images: Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration (University of Illinois Press). She has also published articles and essays on photography and incarceration, including one on the work of contemporary photographer Patrick Nagatani in the newly released catalog Desire for Magic: Patrick Nagatani--Works, 1976-2006 (University of New Mexico Art Museum, 2009). She is currently working on a book on photography and the law. Lon Kurashige is associate professor of history and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His scholarship focuses on racial ideologies, politics of identity, emigration and immigration, historiography, cultural enactments, and social reproduction, particularly as they pertain to Asians in the United States. His exploration of Japanese American assimilation and cultural retention, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival, 1934-1990 (University of California Press, 2002), won the History Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies in 2004. He has published essays and reviews on the incarceration of Japanese Americans and has coedited with Alice Yang Murray an anthology of documents and essays, Major Problems in Asian American History (Cengage, 2003). Bacon Sakatani was born to immigrant Japanese parents in El Monte, California, twenty miles east of Los Angeles, in 1929. From the first through the fifth grade, he attended a segregated school for Hispanics and Japanese. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, his family was confined at Pomona Assembly Center and then later transferred to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming. When the war ended in 1945, his family relocated to Idaho and then returned to California. He graduated from Mount San Antonio Community College. Soon after the Korean War began, he served with the U.S. Army Engineers in Korea. He held a variety of jobs but learned computer programming and retired from that career in 1992. He has been active in Heart Mountain camp activities and with the Japanese American Korean War Veterans.
Chronicling a lesser-known aspect of World War II, this glimpse into secret history re-creates the world of Aliceville, Alabama, during the war, when as many as 6,000 German prisoners-of-war (POWs) and 1,000 military police guards set up camp and stayed for almost three years. It discusses how the residents of Aliceville helped build, operate, and supply the camp, as well as become inextricably intertwined with camp life and the soldiers being held there. Uncovering what being treated well by the enemy meant in the lives of these POWs, this relevant and fascinating story investigates the nature of war and the principles of human dignity in the midst of America's seemingly unending war on terror, which has brought "Geneva Convention" back into common vocabulary along with questions about what is appropriate treatment of enemies and how future generations are affected by such treatment.
The Monterey coast, home to an acclaimed aquarium and the setting for John Steinbeck's classic novel Cannery Row, was also the stage for a historical junction of industry and tourism. Shaping the Shoreline looks at the ways in which Monterey has formed, and been formed by, the tension between labor and leisure. Connie Y. Chiang examines Monterey's development from a seaside resort into a working-class fishing town and, finally, into a tourist attraction again. Through the subjects of work, recreation, and environment -- the intersections of which are applicable to communities across the United States and abroad -- she documents the struggles and contests over this magnificent coastal region. By tracing Monterey's shift from what was once the literal Cannery Row to an iconic hub that now houses an aquarium in which nature is replicated to attract tourists, the interactions of people with nature continues to change. Drawing on histories of immigration, unionization, and the impact of national and international events, Chiang explores the reciprocal relationship between social and environmental change. By integrating topics such as race, ethnicity, and class into environmental history, Chiang illustrates the idea that work and play are not mutually exclusive endeavors.
Like merchant ships flying flags of convenience to navigate foreign waters, traders in the northern borderlands of the early American republic exploited loopholes in the Jay Treaty that allowed them to avoid border regulations by constantly shifting between British and American nationality. In Citizens of Convenience, Lawrence Hatter shows how this practice undermined the United States’ claim to nationhood and threatened the transcontinental imperial aspirations of U.S. policymakers. The U.S.-Canadian border was a critical site of United States nation- and empire-building during the first forty years of the republic. Hatter explains how the difficulty of distinguishing U.S. citizens from British subjects on the border posed a significant challenge to the United States’ founding claim that it formed a separate and unique nation. To establish authority over both its own nationals and an array of non-nationals within its borders, U.S. customs and territorial officials had to tailor policies to local needs while delineating and validating membership in the national community. This type of diplomacy—balancing the local with the transnational—helped to define the American people as a distinct nation within the Revolutionary Atlantic world and stake out the United States’ imperial domain in North America.
From tenements to alleyways to latrines, twentieth-century American cities created spaces where pests flourished and people struggled for healthy living conditions. In Pests in the City, Dawn Day Biehler argues that the urban ecologies that supported pests were shaped not only by the physical features of cities but also by social inequalities, housing policies, and ideas about domestic space. Community activists and social reformers strived to control pests in cities such as Washington, DC, Chicago, Baltimore, New York, and Milwaukee, but such efforts fell short when authorities blamed families and neighborhood culture for infestations rather than attacking racial segregation or urban disinvestment. Pest-control campaigns tended to target public or private spaces, but pests and pesticides moved readily across the porous boundaries between homes and neighborhoods. This story of flies, bedbugs, cockroaches, and rats reveals that such creatures thrived on lax code enforcement and the marginalization of the poor, immigrants, and people of color. As Biehler shows, urban pests have remained a persistent problem at the intersection of public health, politics, and environmental justice, even amid promises of modernity and sustainability in American cities. Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG9PFxLY7K4&feature=c4-overview&list=UUge4MONgLFncQ1w1C_BnHcw
Winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Religion A Los Angeles Times Bestseller “Raises timely and important questions about what religious freedom in America truly means.” —Ruth Ozeki “A must-read for anyone interested in the implacable quest for civil liberties, social and racial justice, religious freedom, and American belonging.” —George Takei On December 7, 1941, as the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, the first person detained was the leader of the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist sect in Hawai‘i. Nearly all Japanese Americans were subject to accusations of disloyalty, but Buddhists aroused particular suspicion. From the White House to the local town council, many believed that Buddhism was incompatible with American values. Intelligence agencies targeted the Buddhist community, and Buddhist priests were deemed a threat to national security. In this pathbreaking account, based on personal accounts and extensive research in untapped archives, Duncan Ryūken Williams reveals how, even as they were stripped of their homes and imprisoned in camps, Japanese American Buddhists launched one of the most inspiring defenses of religious freedom in our nation’s history, insisting that they could be both Buddhist and American. “A searingly instructive story...from which all Americans might learn.” —Smithsonian “Williams’ moving account shows how Japanese Americans transformed Buddhism into an American religion, and, through that struggle, changed the United States for the better.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer “Reading this book, one cannot help but think of the current racial and religious tensions that have gripped this nation—and shudder.” —Reza Aslan, author of Zealot
A Gift of Barbed Wire is a penetrating look at the lives of South Vietnamese officials and their families left behind in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975. A former Marine who served in Vietnam, Robert McKelvey went on to practice psychiatry and, through his work in refugee camps and U.S. social service organizations, met South Vietnamese men from all walks of life who had been imprisoned in re-education camps immediately after the war. McKelvey's interviews with these former political prisoners, their wives, and their children reveal the devastating, long-term impact of their incarceration. From the early years in French colonial Vietnam through the Vietnam War, from postwar ordeals of re-education camps, social ostracism, and poverty to eventual emigration to the United States, this collection of narratives provides broad and highly personal accounts of individuals and families evolving against the backdrop of war and vast social change. Some of the people interviewed for the book eventually reached the United States as boat people fleeing Vietnam in unsafe vessels; others arrived, after rigorous screening, through U.S. Government-sponsored programs. But even in the safety of the United States they had to begin anew, devoting all their remaining energies to survival. While crediting the courage and resilience of these families, McKelvey holds a critical mirror up to our culture, exploring the nature of our responsibility to our allies as well as the attitudes that obscured the reality of war as "a grinding, brutal interplay of complex forces that often develops a sustaining energy and momentum of its own, driving us in directions that we neither anticipated nor desired."