Adams, Ansel, photographer. Manzanar Relocation Center from Tower/photograph by Ansel Adams. Manzanar California, 1943. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2002695969/.
This photograph gives students context not only for one of a handful of times (Trail of Tears and Indian Reservations; slavery, and Japanese Incarceration, etc.) that US citizens were put in jail without due process. It also allows teachers to cross into social studies with the study of due process through its look into life at Manzanar, CA, the more well-known of the incarceration camps. This can also be a tool to talk about how some history books still designate this era as Japanese internment rather than Japanese incarceration.
Many eighth-grade students read Farewell to Manzanar, and as this is a view from what we would describe as a guard tower, this photograph will help build context for what happens in that fictional novel with what happened in real life, to real people. Teachers may or may not know that George Takei (from Star Trek) was incarcerated at such camps (Santa Anita Park, CA, and Rohwer, AR) when he was a child.
Ansel Adams was a famous American photographer, and he documented Japanese incarceration in the 1940s. His photos show much of camp life from the barracks to the mess halls. There are more than 200 photographs in this whole collection, and many can be used as comparisons or contrasts of daily American life at the time in other parts of the country.
From 1942 to 1946, the United States chose to detain (incarcerate) people of Japanese descent, as they were thought to be a threat to the country after Pearl Harbor, HI, was bombed (12/7/1941). Many of these people were United States citizens, and many had to give up rights to their farms when they went to the camps. This took place while the US was fighting World War II.
- What do you notice about the terrain here?
- What time period is this?
- What is missing from this photograph?
- Where do you think the photo was taken from? Why?
- What does this place remind you of and why?
- Where have you seen something similar to this?
Texas ELAR TEKS and Texas Social Studies TEKS
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ELA |
Social Studies |
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8.5(E): make connections to personal experiences, ideas in other texts, and society.
8.6(B): write responses that demonstrate understanding of texts, including comparing sources within and across genres.
8.12(D): identify and gather relevant information from a variety of sources.
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USH-Intro-(A): Celebrate Freedom Week, including the relationship of its ideas to the rich diversity of our people as a nation of immigrants, the American Revolution, the formulation of the U.S. Constitution, and the abolitionist movement, which led to the Emancipation Proclamation and the women's suffrage movement.
8.11(A): analyze how physical characteristics of the environment influenced population distribution, settlement patterns, and economic activities in the United States
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- Examining the historical context of a time period before asking students to read about it builds critical inquiry skills. This piece could be used to contextualize Farewell to Manzanar. It could also be used to introduce a poetry study that begins with the Emma Lazarus poem at the base of the statue of Liberty, “The New Colossus.” The photo depicts the opposite of “bring me your tired, your poor, your hungry,” one of the more memorable lines from that poem, so the contrast would be a valuable study. Or a teaching approach could include this photo to introduce a current study of immigration policies, and could examine where certain ethnic groups have settled historically in the US and why they have settled there.
- This is also a strong candidate for noticing what is left out of a photograph. There are no faces of people in this photograph; there is no geographical distinction; there are no signs. What does the lack of information tell us?
- There could be an objection to the term incarceration, but most historians have moved away from internment to incarceration, as it more aptly describes what happened in this time period.
- There may be an exception to showing the more cruel side to the incarceration with the barracks and the barbed wire fences, but reading the first person narratives, especially those of the adults, paints a bleak period in US history.
Links to resources for approaching those topics
- Harvard University has tools about working through processes for teaching controversial topics.
- While not based on geography like the source above, this source could be used as an alternative to show a less austere examination of the incarceration.
- This photo shows parts of daily life in the Manzanar detention facility, so it could be seen as less austere as well.
- The Densho Project preserves first-hand testimonies from survivors of the incarceration camps. This is geared more toward secondary and undergraduate classes.
- Sharon McMahon (America’s government teacher) has a podcast called “Here’s Where it Gets Interesting,” and one of the series is called “Resilience,” and covers Japanese incarceration. While not all episodes are appropriate for playing in their entirety, many have excerpts that would help extend ideas in this picture as well as the more than 200 of Ansel Adams’ photographs.
- The National Archives also has the cards the government used to “intern” these citizens against their will. It has a record of where people were apprehended and then where and when they were relocated. Some families moved two or three times in the span of the incarceration years.
- The Virginia Museum of History and Culture has a site dedicated to teaching with photographs, and they have organized their photograph collection into seven themes: Transportation, Urbanization, Industrialization, Women, Rural Life, Education, and Jim Crow to Civil Rights.