Manzanar

by Jane Wehrey

Overview

East of the rugged Sierra Nevada in California's Owens Valley lies Manzanar. Founded in 1910 as a fruit-growing colony, it was named in Spanish for the fragrant apple orchards that once filled its spectacularly scenic landscape. Owens Valley Paiute lived there first, followed by white homesteaders and ranchers. But with the onset of World War II came a new identity as the first of 10 "relocation centers" hastily built in 1942 to house 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them American citizens, removed from the West Coast. In the face of upheaval and loss, Manzanar's 10,000 confined residents created parks, gardens, and a functioning wartime community within the camp's barbed-wire-enclosed square mile of flimsy barracks.
Today Manzanar National Historic Site commemorates this and all of Manzanar's unique communities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780738558080
Publisher:	Arcadia Publishing SC
Publication date:	06/30/2008
Series:	Images of America Series
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	423,341
Product dimensions:	9.18(w) x 6.68(h) x 0.33(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Author Jane Wehrey, a historian and Owens Valley native, also wrote Voices From This Long Brown Land: Oral Recollections of Owens Valley Lives and Manzanar Pasts and has been a consultant, park ranger, and exhibit writer at Manzanar National Historic Site. For this pictorial odyssey through Manzanar's past, she compiled images from private and museum archives and from an extraordinary wartime record that includes photographs by Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and former Manzanar internee Toyo Miyatake.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     6
Introduction     7
A Neighbor's Field     9
The Apple Orchard     17
Exclusion Orders     33
Communities in Confinement     43
A City Serving a Wartime Purpose     57
Making the Best of It     79
Taking Leave     101
Landscapes of Remembering     115
Bibliography     127