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Essay Questions for Thinking through Sources 23

Make Comparisons: These five documents provide information about the status and civil liberties of Japanese Americans on the American home front during World War II. What do they reveal about the extent to which the United States protected and violated Japanese Americans’ civil liberties during the 1940s? How does U.S. treatment of Japanese Americans during the 1940s compare to U.S. treatment of German Americans during World War I? What accounts for the similarities and differences between the two wartime periods?

Notice What’s Missing: These documents provide several perspectives on Americans’ perceptions of Japanese Americans and the impact of those perceptions on the federal government’s treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II. What perspectives are included and which ones are missing from this collection of documents? What additional points of view could be included here and how might they complicate your understanding of this issue?

Notice Point of View: From what position and with what motivation did creators of these documents compose them? How did each author’s position and motivation shape what he had to say?

Consider Ideas about Race: Several of these documents employ the term racism and wrestle with questions about the acceptability of classifying and treating people according to their race or ethnicity. What assumptions about race and ethnicity lie at the foundations of each of these documents? To what extent are these assumptions similar to the ones Americans held and acted on in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How are they different and why?