The Japanese American Incarceration Camp Newspaper Collection consists of nineteen publications from nine different American concentration camps. From 1942 to 1945, the U.S. government forcibly removed and incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II. During this time, newspapers were produced inside of both temporary army-run Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA) camps and the subsequent longer-term camps operated by the civilian War Relocation Authority (WRA). Incarcerated Japanese Americans wrote, edited, produced and distributed camp newspapers themselves. These newspapers documenting daily life, policy impacts, acts of resilience, sports news, opinion pieces, editorials, human-interest stories, and more. Newspapers at WCCA camps were routinely censored by the miliary. Newspapers published in the civilian-controlled WRA camps were not explicitly censored, but they were still “supervised” by camp officials. So, although the U.S. government strove to create the façade of a free press, there were still restrictions imposed.

Content Warning: The historical documents in this collection include euphemistic terms and racist language that were wrongfully used to describe Japanese Americans during and after the World War II period.