Untold Story for Classrooms About WWII Internment -- Read and Share

If We Knew Our History - Zinn Education Project New Monthly Column

A Monthly Column Presented by the Zinn Education Project
A Collaboration between Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change

Teaching Untold Stories During Asian Pacific
American Heritage Month

By Moé Yonamine, high school teacher, Portland, Ore.

Art Shibayama / (c) Tyler Sipe, PRI's The World.

Art Shibayama holds a portrait of his family, interned by the U.S. government. (c) Tyler Sipe, PRI's The World.

Most U.S. history textbooks now acknowledge that beginning in 1942, the U.S. government rounded up more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent---- even those who were U.S. citizens---- and sent them to internment camps. What the textbooks fail to include is that the United States demanded that Latin American governments do the same thing, and turn over their own internees to U.S. authorities. These internees went on to become refugees with no country to call home. Read more.

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Teaching Untold Stories During Asian Pacific American Heritage Month is the newest article in the Zinn Education Project's monthly column called If We Knew Our History.

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Related resources at the Zinn Education Project website

	The Other Internment: Teaching the Hidden Story of Japanese Latin Americans During WWII. By Moé Yonamine. Poetry, photography, and text are used in this role play to teach about the seldom told history of Japanese Latin American internment during WWII.
	Learning About the Unfairgrounds: A 4th-Grade Teacher Introduces Her Students to Executive Order 9066. By Katie Baydo-Reed. Students hold a "tea party" and a mock trial to connect with a challenging novel.
	ANPO: Art X War: A film tackles the U.S. occupation of Japan. Film review and teaching activity. By Moé Yonamine. ANPO is a documentary about visual resistance to U.S. military bases in Japan by Japan's foremost contemporary artists.
	Yuri Kochiyama: "Then Came the War." Sandra Oh reads Yuri Kochiyama, "Then Came the War" (1991). By Voices of a People's History. Yuri Kochiyama and her family were among 120,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast rounded up in a wave of anti-Japanese hysteria.
	Teaching About Asian Pacific Americans: Effective Activities, Strategies, and Assignments for Classrooms and Communities. Edited by Edith Wen-Chu Chen and Glenn Omatsu. Comprehensive collection of articles and lessons on Asian American and Pacific American history.

More related resources

The goal of the Zinn Education Project is to introduce students to a more accurate, complex, and engaging understanding of United States history. www.zinnedproject.org