Ralph Carr had neither expected, nor wanted, to be governor. Carr was at the midpoint of his second term as governor when the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Public sentiment and the popular press overwhelmingly supported the incarceration of Japanese Americans. On February 18, 1942, for example, one Colorado newspaper editor…

In this article, the author attempts to connect two events--the wartime incarceration of the Japanese Americans and Americans' contemporary regret for that action--in a narrative that also tries to answer the most difficult kind of question that a historian can ask: How does change occur? How did it come about that what had been a popular wartime…

Few events in American history are so universally deplored as the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. The United States government has acknowledged the error and the injustice that resulted with an official Presidential apology and a Congressional disbursement of reparations to the victims of the incarceration policy. The…