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A Captive Audience: Voices of Japanese American Youth in WWII Arkansas

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ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY 170 slaves. In addition to its rich discussions of gender and honor, Forret’s work takes on the dificult subject of infanticide. He explains that bond- women murdered their children for complicated motives that included desires to “govern their own reproductive powers,” and “deny masters a future generation of enslaved labor” (p. 383). Although Slave Against Slave uses data from a few areas of the South to offer careful suggestions about rates of intra-slave violence over time (rising after the American Revolution and in the pre-Civil War decade), the sample size is much too small to lend too much weight to those conclusions, and Forret rightly insists that the numbers are much less important than what the incidents themselves can tell us about slaves’ conditions and values. While the book pans across the South, the heart of Forret’s research lies in data gathered from legal sources from Virginia, the upcountry of South Carolina, Middle Georgia, and Adams County, Mississippi. Wel- come anecdotes relating to people who experienced slavery in Arkansas surface from time to time, and the book does a good job of showing re- gional variation in the relevant civil and criminal laws of slavery. For ex- ample, Forret notes the similarity in the ways that Arkansas and Missouri treated intra-slave murders. Slave societies on the margins were more apt to “tweak the common-law understanding of masters’ liability” (by allow- ing masters some civil suits in relation to slaves’ murder of slaves) than were older eastern states or states with higher slave populations (p. 104). Unfortunately, through no fault of the author and despite Slave Against Slave’s careful treatment of the topic, some people with particular polit- ical agendas may misuse this book to bolster racist claims about black criminality or a black social life supposedly long broken by slavery. But Slave Against Slave’s valuable contribution to scholarship far outweighs this risk, and Forret has written the work in such a way that anyone sin- cerely in search of history’s truths will ind them within. kelly houston Jones austin Peay state university *** A Captive Audience: Voices of Japanese American Youth in World War II Arkansas. Edited by Ali Welky. (Little Rock: Butler Center Books, 2015. Pp. 116. Illustrations, maps, bibliography. $21.95, paper.) In recent years, the internment camps for Japanese Americans at Rohwer and Jerome, Arkansas, have attracted new attention. For instance,
BOOK REVIEWS 171 the well-known Japanese-American actor George Takei, who was interned at Rohwer, has helped to raise the proile of the long-overlooked camps. This renewed interest led to an ongoing digital reconstruction project called “Rohwer Reconstructed: Making Connections across Time and Space,” which is supported by the National Park Service and the Center for Advanced Spatial Technology at the University of Arkansas, Fayette- ville. All of this makes the publication of Ali Welky’s edited collection of archival materials from both Rohwer and Jerome very timely. A Captive Audience is meant to be a teaching aid for advanced mid- dle school or high school students, although anyone with an interest in the camps at Rohwer and Jerome is sure to learn something new about Japanese internment in Arkansas from Welky’s carefully curated irsthand accounts. With photos on almost every page and short, easily digestible quotations drawn from writing done in camp schools by young Japanese Americans, the book humanizes internment in a way that will help young readers to develop empathy for historical situations that they might not otherwise be able to comprehend. The book begins with a series of hy- pothetical questions to familiarize young readers with the experiences of Japanese Americans, and each chapter contains a small section called “Walking in their shoes” that will help teachers to generate classroom discussion. Welky’s collection of primary sources was gathered from several holdings in Little Rock: the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, particu- larly the Edna Miller Collection, and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture’s Life Interrupted collec- tion about the Japanese-American experience in World War II Arkansas. The book provides the web address for the collections’ inding aids and explains to readers that all of the archives are open and accessible. For students living in and around Little Rock, a class trip to these archives could easily be arranged. Welky contextualizes the primary sources with an overview of the internment of Japanese Americans in Arkansas. She begins each chapter with brief narrative accounts of the events surrounding Pearl Harbor, the subsequent internment order, daily life in the camps, and what people did after the war ended. The book contains numerous maps, timelines, and images as well as important terminology that might not be familiar to readers with no previous knowledge of the history of Japanese mi- gration to North America. She also provides interesting statistics about the Japanese Americans interned at both camps, such as age and gender distributions.
170 ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY slaves. In addition to its rich discussions of gender and honor, Forret’s work takes on the dificult subject of infanticide. He explains that bondwomen murdered their children for complicated motives that included desires to “govern their own reproductive powers,” and “deny masters a future generation of enslaved labor” (p. 383). Although Slave Against Slave uses data from a few areas of the South to offer careful suggestions about rates of intra-slave violence over time (rising after the American Revolution and in the pre-Civil War decade), the sample size is much too small to lend too much weight to those conclusions, and Forret rightly insists that the numbers are much less important than what the incidents themselves can tell us about slaves’ conditions and values. While the book pans across the South, the heart of Forret’s research lies in data gathered from legal sources from Virginia, the upcountry of South Carolina, Middle Georgia, and Adams County, Mississippi. Welcome anecdotes relating to people who experienced slavery in Arkansas surface from time to time, and the book does a good job of showing regional variation in the relevant civil and criminal laws of slavery. For example, Forret notes the similarity in the ways that Arkansas and Missouri treated intra-slave murders. Slave societies on the margins were more apt to “tweak the common-law understanding of masters’ liability” (by allowing masters some civil suits in relation to slaves’ murder of slaves) than were older eastern states or states with higher slave populations (p. 104). Unfortunately, through no fault of the author and despite Slave Against Slave’s careful treatment of the topic, some people with particular political agendas may misuse this book to bolster racist claims about black criminality or a black social life supposedly long broken by slavery. But Slave Against Slave’s valuable contribution to scholarship far outweighs this risk, and Forret has written the work in such a way that anyone sincerely in search of history’s truths will ind them within. kelly houston Jones austin Peay state university *** A Captive Audience: Voices of Japanese American Youth in World War II Arkansas. Edited by Ali Welky. (Little Rock: Butler Center Books, 2015. Pp. 116. Illustrations, maps, bibliography. $21.95, paper.) In recent years, the internment camps for Japanese Americans at Rohwer and Jerome, Arkansas, have attracted new attention. For instance, BOOK REVIEWS 171 the well-known Japanese-American actor George Takei, who was interned at Rohwer, has helped to raise the proile of the long-overlooked camps. This renewed interest led to an ongoing digital reconstruction project called “Rohwer Reconstructed: Making Connections across Time and Space,” which is supported by the National Park Service and the Center for Advanced Spatial Technology at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. All of this makes the publication of Ali Welky’s edited collection of archival materials from both Rohwer and Jerome very timely. A Captive Audience is meant to be a teaching aid for advanced middle school or high school students, although anyone with an interest in the camps at Rohwer and Jerome is sure to learn something new about Japanese internment in Arkansas from Welky’s carefully curated irsthand accounts. With photos on almost every page and short, easily digestible quotations drawn from writing done in camp schools by young Japanese Americans, the book humanizes internment in a way that will help young readers to develop empathy for historical situations that they might not otherwise be able to comprehend. The book begins with a series of hypothetical questions to familiarize young readers with the experiences of Japanese Americans, and each chapter contains a small section called “Walking in their shoes” that will help teachers to generate classroom discussion. Welky’s collection of primary sources was gathered from several holdings in Little Rock: the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, particularly the Edna Miller Collection, and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture’s Life Interrupted collection about the Japanese-American experience in World War II Arkansas. The book provides the web address for the collections’ inding aids and explains to readers that all of the archives are open and accessible. For students living in and around Little Rock, a class trip to these archives could easily be arranged. Welky contextualizes the primary sources with an overview of the internment of Japanese Americans in Arkansas. She begins each chapter with brief narrative accounts of the events surrounding Pearl Harbor, the subsequent internment order, daily life in the camps, and what people did after the war ended. The book contains numerous maps, timelines, and images as well as important terminology that might not be familiar to readers with no previous knowledge of the history of Japanese migration to North America. She also provides interesting statistics about the Japanese Americans interned at both camps, such as age and gender distributions. 172 ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY A Captive Audience explores some lesser-known themes surrounding the experiences of internment in Arkansas. In one chapter, Welky shows that poor blacks and whites living in the delta sometimes expressed anger and jealousy because the interned Japanese had access to social services, hospitals, and schools and they did not. She devotes a chapter to friendships and romances that developed over time, noting that there were more than 250 marriages in the Arkansas camps. She also explains that most families left Arkansas quickly after the war ended because the state tried to prevent Japanese Americans from acquiring land. Only one Japanese-American student stayed in the state to attend what is now the University of the Ozarks. Overall, A Captive Audience is a well-balanced and informative addition to the growing body of literature on the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. With the renewed interest in Rohwer and Jerome, this book will make a welcome addition to classrooms around the state, helping young Arkansans gain a deeper understanding of wartime experiences and legacies. kelly anne haMMonD university of arkansas, fayetteville *** Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910. By Julie M. Weise. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. x, 344. Acknowledgments, maps, illustrations, tables, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $32.50, paper.) The anti-immigrant movement that swept the U.S. South starting around 2004—demands that undocumented students not receive in-state tuition discounts, local ordinances designed to harass immigrants and those who give them comfort, and criminalization of undocumented status—serves as the starting point for Julie Weise’s compelling study of the past one hundred years of Mexican migration to the region. Drawing on archival sources in both the United States and Mexico and for later periods on oral histories in both Spanish and English, she rejects the common assumption that southerners’ recent hostility to the mostly Mexican immigrants was simply a continuation of Dixie’s particularly deep-rooted commitment to white supremacy. Instead, she maintains that it was the rise of the modern Sunbelt South and the region’s increasing resemblance Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
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