Item Detail
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18760
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0
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0
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English
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Claiming a Place in the Intermountain West : Japanese American Ethnic Identity in Utah and Idaho
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Logan, UT
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Utah State University
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Master's thesis
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Historians, when developing the narrative of the Japanese American wartime experience, have largely ignored the small, but influential Nikkei populations in the intermountain states of Utah and Idaho. Japanese Americans, in Utah and Idaho, found themselves widely dispersed inside a largely white, Mormon population. These regional circumstances created a much different communal identity from that created by coastal Japanese Americans. Such regional differences became evident during the difficulties of World War II. Because of their interior location, Japanese Americans in the intermountain West avoided the incarceration camps authorized by Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066. This freedom, when combined with intermountain wartime prejudice, created a discourse of self-preservation among Utah's and Idaho's Nikkei. The spirit of survival found its way into the JACL's wartime policies and consequently affected the United States' larger Japanese American population in real and tragic ways. [Author's abstract]