Peter Merholz posts about discovering that his house was once owned by a Japanese-American couple interned during World War II. For Peter, or anyone else interested in this topic, I'd recommend checking out Densho. They've collected hundreds of hours of oral history interviews and other material on the topic (internment/incarceration). There might even be interviews of people who were connected to Peter's community.
As an aside, the Densho project is a nice example of how technology is changing scholarship and history. Providing this wealth of information through the internet, with ample metadata, is pretty unusual in the archive world, I think. Granted, it has been five or six years since I've been in the academic history community. Back then, when I would talk to people about projects like Densho (I first met the Densho guys when I was a history grad student), folks would look at me funny. I don't think they quite grasped what a little technology could do. Maybe the new generation of historians is a bit more tech-savvy than the last...
Posted by Karl
July 25, 2006 07:21 AM