What Did the Internment of Japanese Americans Mean - Essay Example

In her account titled “Confinement and Ethnicity”, Eleanor Roosevelt gives us a vivid picture of the events that took place during that period. Mrs. Roosevelt visited the Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona in 1943 and spoke to different people in an effort to understand clearly what had taken place. The source she used was first hand information and reports from the visits she had made there. Therefore these sources are considered authentic in relating Historical facts. Alice Yang Murray is associate professor of history in the University of California.

She had done a lot of research and has authored books like “Historical Memories of Japanese American Internment and the struggle for Redress”( 2004) “Major Problems in Asian American History” (2003)and another book titled “What did the Internment of the Japanese mean” (Alice Yang Murray, 2000) This book is a collection of works by five various historians who were in pursuit of a greater and better understanding of the internment of the Japanese American people during World War II.

Murray’s brief yet comprehensive account lays down the causes and the impact it had on internment. Alice Yang Murray is currently doing research on transnational memories of World War II, between 1945 and 2005 in the Pacific. The International context, in addition to class, gender and generation, has helped to shape the political and cultural experiences of the Japanese Americans. During World War II, sociologists and anthropologists participated in research work on Japanese Americans whom the Federal Government had incarcerated.

How the Japanese American field Assistants carried out their research, how they collected data regarding the Internment, the difficulties and pressures that they faced, and how they responded to political and ethical issues that they came across are some of the issues dealt with. Alice Yang Murray’s collection begins with