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HISTORY 183S: Asian Americans and Civil Rights: More Primary Sources

Research guide for Dr. Mazumdar's course, spring 2014

Microform Collections

American Civil Liberties Union archives, 1950-1990. Series 3 (Perkins/Bostock Library, M9510) -- reel 255 contains information about Japanese-American internment. 

Papers of the U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. Part 1, Numerical file archive (Perkins/Bostock Library, M9549)

The Internment of Japanese Americans: records of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library (Perkins Bostock, M9811)

Online Sources

Primary Source Collections

The Chinese in California, 1850-1925, illustrates nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese immigration to California through about 8,000 images and pages of primary source materials. Sponsored by the Library of Congress, The materials in this online compilation are drawn from collections at The Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley; The Ethnic Studies Library, University of California Berkeley; and The California Historical Society, San Francisco.

Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project provides access to 800 hours of interviews, visual histories of Japanese Americans and others affected by the World War II incarceration. Also included are over 10,700 historical images documenting Japanese American history.

The Final Accountability Rosters of Japanese-American Relocation Centers, 1944-1946, collection provides demographic information on the "evacuees" resident at the various relocation camps.

Korean American Digital Archive, part of University of Southern California Digital Library, brings more than 13,000 pages of documents, over 1,900 photographs, and about 180 sound files together in one searchable collection that documents the Korean American community during the period of resistance to Japanese rule in Korea and reveal the organizational and private experience of Koreans in America between 1903 and 1965. 

Online Archive of the Japanese American Relocation During World War II is a collection of pamphlets, letters, newspapers, and and other publications preserved from 1941-1946 by the Occidental College's President, Remsen DuBois Bird, and Librarian, Elizabeth McCloy.

SEAAdoc: Documenting the Southeast Asian American Experience is a digital collection focusing on post-1975 refugees and immigrants from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam and the communities they have developed in the United States.   It contains 1,500 visual images and 4,000 pages of searchable text selected from the Southeast Asian Archive at the UC Irvine Libraries.

South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) was founded in 2008 to document the experiences of the South Asian diaspora in the United States, including those who trace their heritage to Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the many South Asian diaspora communities across the globe.

The Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives, 1960-1974 provides access to thousands of pages of scanned images from diaries, letters, autobiographies and other memoirs, written and oral histories, manifestos, government documents, memorabilia, and scholarly commentary.

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 examines United States women's social movements from colonial times to present through primary source documents.

Magazine/Journal Articles

American Periodicals Series (APS) provides access to full text images of popular American newspaper, professional journals and magazines that began publication from 1740-1900.

Harper's Weekly provides access to images of all the pages in Harper's Weekly from 1857 to 1912.  Everything in this publication has been indexed.  You can even exclusively search the advertisements or illustrations.

Readers' Guide Retrospective (1890-1982) is an excellent source to identify articles from popular/general interest magazines.  It indexes over 200 magazines published in the United States.