Children of Manzanar

Children of Manzanar captures the experiences of the nearly four thousand children and young adults held at Manzanar during World War II.

Eleven tumultuous weeks after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, an act that authorized the U.S. Army to undertake the rapid removal of more than one hundred thousand Japanese and Japanese Americans from the West Coast. With only a few weeks' (and sometimes only a few days') notice, families were forced to abandon their homes and, under military escort, be removed to remote and hastily erected compounds, such as Manzanar War Relocation Center in the California desert. Quotes from the children held there, most now in their eighties and nineties, are accompanied by photographs from both official and unofficial photographers, including Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and Toyo Miyatake, himself an internee who for months secretly documented daily life inside the camp, and then openly for the remaining years Manzanar operated.

Heather C. Lindquist is the editor of Children of Manzanar, a copublication by Heyday and Manzanar History Association, which received an award of excellence from the Association of Partners for Public Lands in 2013, and she was one of several contributing authors to Freedom in My Heart: Voices from the United States National Slavery Museum, published by National Geographic in 2007. She has also written numerous exhibit scripts for museums, visitor centers, and national parks across the country, including Manzanar National Historic Site; the National Prisoner of War Museum at Andersonville, Georgia; the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County; and the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.