Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II (Critical Issue Series) - Softcover

Daniels, Roger

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809015536 ISBN 13: 9780809015535

Publisher: Hill and Wang, 1993

Synopsis

As issues of national security have recently led many to question the scope and extent of our civil liberties, there is a rekindled interest in the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. This brief guide uncovers the history of that tragic part of our past.

Prisoners Without Trial is part of the celebrated Hill and Wang Critical Issues Series, which offers several concise and affordable works on pivotal topics in American history, society, and politics.

About this title

About the Author

Roger Daniels, who teaches American history at the University of Cincinnati, is the country's foremost historian of Asian Americans.

From Kirkus Reviews

More proof that good things can come in small packages, this volume--along with two others--kicks off the publisher's ``Critical Issues'' series (consulting editor: Eric Foner), in which experts tackle historical issues whose consequences reverberate today. Not only do the authors of the first three volumes offer cogent overviews of their respective issues, but each is willing to climb out on a critical limb. Daniels (Concentration Camp USA, 1972), for instance, writing about the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during WW II, states that ``this book has tried to explain how and why the outrage happened. That is the role of the historian and his book, which is to analyze the past. But this historian feels that analyzing the past is not always enough''--and so he takes on the question of ``could it happen again?'' and concludes that there's ``an American propensity to react against `foreigners' in the United States during times of external crisis, especially when those `foreigners' have dark skins,'' and that Japanese-Americans, at least, ``would argue that what has happened before can surely happen again.'' Similarly, Kirkpatrick Sale--in The Green Revolution (ISBN: 0-8090-5218-0; paper: 0-8090-1551-X)--summarizes the modern history of American environmentalism (which he sees as dating from the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring) and indicts ``a chemical industry that has subsequently produced some 30,000 chemicals of varying degrees of toxicity''), while Anthony F.C. Wallace--in The Long, Bitter Trail (ISBN: 0-8090-6631-9; paper: 0-8090-1552-8)--studies the legacy of Andrew Jackson's cruel Indian policies and declares that ``two hundred years of national indecision about how the United States should deal with its Native Americans have not come to an end.'' A promising beginning, then, to what looks like a very fine series with a cutting edge; future volumes will include Marvin Frankel on Church & State, Michael Hunt on How We Became Involved in Vietnam, and Betty Wood on Origins of Slavery in the United States. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0809015536
• ISBN 13: 9780809015535
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160