On July 23, Densho launched a new online digital library of over 100 films documenting the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.
Spanning 80 years, the archive includes hard to find films from the Redress Movement of the 1970s, when Japanese Americans fought for recognition of government wrongdoing and compensation for the community losses during incarceration.
“With the generation of filmmakers who produced these early works aging and even passing on, this is a crucial time to preserve these works for posterity,” according to Densho in a press release. “We hope this collection—which will continue to grow in the years to come—will become an important archive for both historians and educators, whether to show films in classes or to explore the evolution of how the incarceration story has been told over time.”
The digital library project was created in collaboration with the Internet Archive.
