ASIAN AMERICAN HISTORIAN TO SPEAK AT MOUNT HOLYOKE
ON WWII-ERA INCARCERATION OF JAPANESE AMERICANS

SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. – Roger Daniels, a leading scholar on the history of Asian Americans, will speak on "The Incarceration of the Japanese Americans: The View from 2002" on Thursday, February 28, at 4:30 PM in Hooker Auditorium at Mount Holyoke College. The talk is free and open to the public, and the auditorium is wheelchair accessible.

It has been 60 years since President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, the instrument by which 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated without indictment or trial in American concentration camps, many for the remainder of World War II. Daniels, Charles Phelps Taft Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati, will explain why there is a greater awareness of the incarceration today than there was in the years immediately following the war. He will also examine the incarceration in the context of reactions by the United States to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Since the attacks, more than one thousand aliens, largely of Middle Eastern nationalities, have been detained; captured fighters have been locked up at Guantanamo Bay; Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials talk of concentrating on "Middle Eastern" students; and the government plans to create military tribunals, bypassing normal legal procedures. "Optimists assure us that a mass incarceration of American citizens in concentration camps will not recur," writes Daniels in a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. "But reflection on our past suggests we ought not to be so sanguine."

The lecture is sponsored by the Office of the Dean of the College, the Florence Purington Visiting Professorship Fund, the Office of the Dean of Faculty, the Department of American Studies, the Department of History, and the Amherst College Department of English.

Daniels has written extensively on issues of United States immigration and race/ethnicity, and has served as a consultant to the Presidential Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, the United States Civil Rights Commission, the Smithsonian Institution, National Public Radio, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Geographic Society, and the history committee that helped plan the Immigration Museum on Ellis Island.

Daniels’s lecture is a prelude to Asian American Awareness Month, a program organized by Mount Holyoke’s Asian American Sisters in Action (ASIA). That program begins March 2 with a "teach in" to educate students, professors, staff, and community members about the issues, concerns, and accomplishments of Asian American studies.