This newsreel video was made by the government sometime in the middle of 1942 to explain the its reasons and strategies for interning Japanese Americans. This was before television was widespread, and long before personal computers and the Internet!
In 1942, over 100,000 individuals of Japanese origin or descent were displaced from their homes and forced into internment camps. Their detention was federally mandated. However, a federal investigation in the early 1980s concluded that Japanese Americans posed no military threat. In this lesson, students investigate a series of primary documents to address the question: Why were Japanese Americans interned during World War II?