Japanese-American Incarceration: Primary Sources

Japanese Americans and the U.S. Constitution

Photographs of Manzanar War Relocation Center in 1943 by renowned photographer

A gateway to the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project resources for exploring the civil rights activism of Asian Americans in the Pacific Northwest. Included are oral histories, research reports, newspaper reports, photographic collections, maps, historical documents.

The materials on this Web site include a U.S. history textbook; over 400 annotated documents from the Gilder Lehrman Collection, courtesy of The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and more.

The DPLA offers a single point of access to millions of items—photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more—from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. Users can browse and search the DPLA’s collections by timeline, map, format, and topic; save items to customized lists;etc.

Preserving the Legacy of Japanese American Veterans of WW II. Includes Hanashi Oral History Video Archive, and oral history clips.

Courtesy of the Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco.

This portal includes links to the Camp Harmony Exhibit, Interrupted Lives: Japanese American Students at the University of Washington, 1941-42, Children of Minidoka and more. Includes newspapers, photographs, correspondence, books, and documents.

Includes access to "The online collection of Clara Breed, or "Miss Breed" as she was known by her young library patrons. Over 300 letters and cards received by Breed from Japanese American children and young adults during their WWII incarceration; Stanley Hayami Collection, the diary of a Japanese American student from Los Angeles who attended high school at the Heart Mountain concentration camp in Wyoming; Hisako Hibi Collection, includes sixty-three oil paintings painted by artist Hisako Hibi at Tanforan Assembly Center in California and Topaz concentration camp in Utah; and more

Chronicles the 1942 removal of Japanese Americans who lived in California, Arizona, Oregon, and Washington State, and their resettlement in internment camps for the duration of the war. The collection includes assembly center newspapers; clippings from West Coast and other newspapers and periodicals; religious organization publications; Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA) orders, proclamations, press releases, and reports; presidential executive orders and proclamations; Justice Department regulations; and reports of the Federal Security Agency and the American National Red Cross. The materials are compiled in bound volumes or folders, all of which were produced in 1942 by the Western Defense Command and Fourth Army, Office of Assistant Chief of Staff, Wartime Civil Control Administration, in San Francisco.

Documentary materials collected by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), which in the 1980s investigated the decision to incarcerate Japanese Americans during WWII.

The War Relocation Authority & the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during WWII. A document collection from the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum.