Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II

by Roger Daniels, Eric Foner (Consultant)

Overview

Prisoners Without Trail is part of Hill and Wang's Critical Issues Series and well established on college reading lists.

This book presents a concise introduction to a shameful chapter in American history: the incarceration of nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.

With a revised final chapter and expanded recommended readings, Roger Daniels's updated edition examines a tragic event in our nation's past and thoughtfully asks if it could happen again.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809078967
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	08/18/2004
Series:	Hill and Wang Critical Issues Series
Edition description:	Revised
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	697,781
Product dimensions:	5.42(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Roger Daniels, the author of Guarding the Golden Door, is a renowned expert on Asian American and immigration history, was a consultant to the commission that recommended redress, and has served on the History Advisory Board for the Ellis Island Immigration Museum since its inception.

Editorial Reviews

This is a succinct synthesis of the latest scholarship on Japanese American relocation during the Second World War, interpreted by the leading historian of the subject. Daniels's account is broadly conceived, yet briefly executed. It is exciting to read, and shocking.” —Robert Allen Skotheim, president, The Huntington

“Distilled from three decades of meticulous research and nuanced reflection by the foremost expert in Japanese American history. This is the most succinct and masterful synthesis available of the ordeal Japanese Americans suffered during World War II.” —Sucheng Chan, University of California at Santa Barbara

“The arbitrary internment of Japanese Americans was one of the most shameful episodes of our history. And nobody knows the subject better than Roger Daniels. He writes with authority and clarity. His book should be read by everyone concerned with our civil liberties.” —Stanley Karnow

From the Publisher

Historian Daniels (co-author of Japanese-Americans: From Relocation to Redress ) provides a concise, deft introduction to a shameful chapter in American history: the incarceration of nearly 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II. He begins by showing the pattern of historical prejudice against Asian immigrants. After the Pearl Harbor bombing, jingoism permeated America. Conservative Republicans in the War Department, aided by pundits like Walter Lippman, pushed President Roosevelt in 1942 to order the round-up of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast. The spuriousness of suspicions that the Japanese constituted a danger, Daniels notes, is shown by the lack of action against Japanese-Americans in Hawaii, where their labor was crucial. Daniels describes the Supreme Court's upholding of the evacuation, life in the drab, desolate relocation centers and the complex process of resettling the uprooted. Daniels explores the political battles that led to a 1989 law providing for redress payments of $20,000 to each person incarcerated. He warns, however, that jingoism remains as anti-Arab feelings and acts during the Gulf War showed. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Many books have been written about the relocation of Japanese Americans during World War II, an injustice prompted not by military necessity but by political and racial motivations. The purpose of this volume is to tell the story in light of the redress legislation enacted in 1988, but the too brief treatment, lacking adequate citations to even the more interesting and provocative quotations, can only serve as an overview for the most casual reader. It is unfortunate that a historian like Daniels (Univ. of Cincinnati) does not provide the more substantive treatment he used in the volume he coedited with Sandra Taylor and Harry Kitano, Japanese Americans, from Relocation to Redress (Univ. of Washington Pr., 1991. rev. ed.). For more comprehensive subject and documentary coverage, consider Peter H. Irons's Justice at War ( LJ 10/1/83) and Justice Delayed (Wesleyan Univ., 1989).-- Kenneth W. Berger, Duke Univ. Lib., Durham, N.C.

Library Journal

YA-A dramatic account of the relocation of Japanese-Americans into prison camps during World War II. Daniels has written more than seven detailed chronicles on the status of Asian Americans in our society. This short narrative capsulizes information in previous volumes and cautions that, if the U.S. is not watchful, that shameful situation could happen again. This well-written title will be a good resource for students doing research papers on various social issues of World War II as well as for informative recreational reading.-Pat Royal, Crossland High School, Camp Springs, MD

School Library Journal