OSU's WWII Era Japanese American Students
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This digital collection is a compilation of materials from the 1940s, 1990s, and 2000s, documenting the experiences of the Japanese Americans who were students at Oregon State College during the 1940s. Just four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor,...
- Title
- OSU's WWII Era Japanese American Students
- Description
- This digital collection is a compilation of materials from the 1940s, 1990s, and 2000s, documenting the experiences of the Japanese Americans who were students at Oregon State College during the 1940s. Just four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese American students of OSC (Oregon State College) wrote a letter to the college president to express their loyalty to the United States. Over the course of the next 6 months, the OSC President’s Office produced numerous records, including letters and travel documents, pertaining to those students. In addition, the OSC student newspaper, The Barometer, published a couple of articles in 1942 pertaining to the Japanese American students. In October 1995, the Oregon Stater published an article explaining the impact of the internment policies on OSC’s Japanese American students: “Freedom Lost: The Experiences of OSU students of Japanese Ancestry during World War II”. Over 60 years later, on May 31, 2007, Governor Kulongoski signed House Bill 2823 that allowed state institutions of higher education to award honorary post-secondary degrees to an individual ordered “evacuated by Presidential Executive Order 9066” to an internment camp during the Second World War. In 2008, OSU awarded honorary degrees to some of the students who had been interned. Various newspaper articles from 2007-2008 regarding the campaign for the honorary degrees and the 2008 commencement are available as part of this collection. Beyond this digital collection, the recording of the 2008 commencement ceremony is available online 139th Annual Commencement Ceremony – OSU honors World-War II era students of Japanese ancestry (https://media.oregonstate.edu/media/2008_commencement_-_tribute_to_japanese_american_students/0_d89g6opp) and the OSU Spotlight Blog (https://blogs.oregonstate.edu/spotlight/2008/06/10/recognition-deserved/) has information pertaining to the 2008 honorary degrees. In addition, OSU Beaver Yearbook is also an excellent resource to discover materials pertaining to the Japanese American students; many photographs of the Japanese American students who signed the letter to the President are in the OSU Yearbooks.
