Date of Award

2016

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Goff, Brendan

Keywords

United States, Japanese Internment Camps, Native Americans, Landscape Archaeology

Area of Concentration

History

Abstract

This senior thesis attempts to tell a spatial history of Japanese American Internment (1942-46), a historical episode that saw the United States federal government expropriate, incarcerate, and forcefully migrate 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. My first chapter situates the “Internment Camps” (as they are referred to in the majority of Internment historiography), within a longer history of expropriation, incarceration and forced migration, reaching as far back as British colonial Massachusetts and the Deer Island “Internment Camp” (1675-76). This chapter is designed to give the reader a deeper appreciation for the historical breadth of this distinct chapter in the history of American incarceration. Topics covered in this chapter include Deer Island, the Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears (1836-38), Angel Island (1900-1940) immigrant processing center and the Japanese American internment camps. I contend that the social forces at work during the Internment episode prove the rule rather than the exception in American history. My second chapter applies perspectives from landscape archaeology to the Topaz, Utah Internment Camp to analyze the connections between the historical landscape of the camp and modernday notions of historical memory, Japanese American heritage, and the centrality of space to the experience of internment; both for government officials, and also the innocent Japanese Americans who were shuttled across landscapes during their incarceration.

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