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Essay On Italian American Internment

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The subject of this paper will be to highlight American attitudes towards both German and Italian Americans during the Second World War. By examining the internment of German and Italian Americans as well as American attitudes towards the two minority groups, specifically through American war posters, this paper will address and expose an issue that has largely been exaggerated and neglected up until the late 20th into the 21st Century. The treatment of both Italian and German Americans during the Second World War went unacknowledged for decades until the U.S. Congress passed the “Wartime Violation of Italian American Civil Liberties Act” in October of 1999. This led the way for historians such as Lawrence DiStasi and Stephen Fox to publish material …show more content…

Previously, material concerning Japanese American Interment has been highlighted and even accentuated. Examples, such as Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and No-No Boy by John Okada, as well as secondary material from historians like John Dower, emphasize just how absent stories and material concerning German and Italian American internment have been from history books. This paper will aim to bring to light just significant accounts from German and Italian Americans who were present in these internment camps on an level playing field compared to material that accentuates the Japanese American side of the story. While it would be wrong to propose that internment towards any one group was worse than the other, the thesis of this paper claims that while many Americans believed they were fighting the “Good War” against Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, many Americans were paradoxically discriminating on all three of these ethnic groups through the process of internment. This contradiction in American thought undermines the

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