アーサー・A・ハンセン

(Arthur A. Hansen)

Art_Hansen

Art Hansen is Professor Emeritus of History and Asian American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, where he retired in 2008 as the director of the Center for Oral and Public History. Between 2001 and 2005, he served as Senior Historian at the Japanese American National Museum. Since 2018, he has authored or edited four books that focus on the topic of the resistance by Japanese Americans to their unjust World War II oppression by the US government.

Updated August 2023

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EO9066’s ‘Coerced Prison Work(ers)’

アーサー・A・ハンセン, 日米ウィークリー
2023年8月16日

Although certainly not an American labor historian per se, I am profoundly abashed that, notwithstanding my having been researching, writing, and teaching about the unjust Japanese American World War II detention for five decades, I never until now paid more than fleeting attention to the predominant focus of the invaluable book under review here by Stephanie Hinnershitz: “the design and implementation of Japanese American incarceration and the centrality of labor to both of these undertakings” (p. 22). In addition to Hinnershitz being the well-deserved recipient of the 2022 Ph…

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An In-Depth Examination of the WRA’s Legal System

日米ウィークリー, アーサー・A・ハンセン
2023年8月8日

As someone who has taught both history and literature classes, I recently had my curiosity aroused by an article in The New Yorker magazine (April 24 and May 1, 2023) written by Louis Menand, an English professor at Harvard University noted for his seminal books in U.S. intellectual history. The article’s subject matter, “creative nonfiction,” according to Menand, is a relatively new genre that has emerged when biographers and historians “adopt a narrative style intended to make their books read more like novels.” However, he concludes, notwithstanding that aut…

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An Inquiry into the Kibei-Nisei ‘Diasporic Experiences’

アーサー・A・ハンセン, 日米ウィークリー
2023年8月1日

I feel a close kinship with this remarkable book by Michael R. Jin. In 2013, I was privileged to read his pioneering UC Santa Cruz dissertation, which he completed under the able mentorship of Alice Yang and that became the basis for the 2022 Stanford University Press book here under review. It is included within the press’s Asian American series edited by Gordon Chang, the same series in which Yang (then Yang Murray) contributed her stunning 2008 work, Historical Memories of the Japanese American Internment and the Struggle for Redress, and I, in 2018, had published my edited volume, N…

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Recollections from Jerome and Rohwer

アーサー・A・ハンセン, 日米ウィークリー
2023年1月22日

In 2002-2004, I was honored to serve with two distinguished historical colleagues, the late Roger Daniels and the late Franklin Odo, as a co-consultant for the Life Interrupted Project, jointly sponsored by the Public History Program of the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, and the Japanese American National Museum. Funded chiefly by the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting statewide issues of economic, racial, and social justice, this project generated eight new exhibitions, initiated elementary- and secondary-level educational curriculum, produced a n…

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'A Heuristic Model' for Historians to Emulate with Other Camps

アーサー・A・ハンセン, 日米ウィークリー
2023年1月8日

Having read in Saara Kekki’s Acknowledgements within the book under review that its contents had been favorably vetted by three historians of the Japanese American World War II experience that I greatly admire (Eric Muller, Greg Robinson, and Paul Spickard), and having observed that the latter two of these historical scholars had provided promotional comments on the book’s cover attesting to the work’s seminal significance, I was utterly thrilled with the fortuitous opportunity to read and review Japanese Americans at Heart Mountain. This was especially the case because t…