Jonathan van Harmelen
I am currently finishing my forthcoming book Legislating Injustice, a study of Congress’s role in the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Rather than just a study of Congressional action on one policy, my book uncovers the relationship between Congress and Executive Authority during wartime and the evolution of congressional policy regarding immigration and civil rights. My book also examines the role that Japanese American lobbyists played in shaping federal policy during and after World War II.
I am a co-author with Greg Robinson of The Unknown Great: Stories of Japanese Americans at the Margins of History. Published by University of Washington Press in 2024, our book offers readers with new biographies of Japanese Americans who shaped American history and culture.
My work has appeared in journals including Pacific Historical Review, California History, Journal of Transnational American History, and Southern California Quarterly. My review essays have appeared in Reviews in American History and the Journal of Urban History.
My Spring 2025 article for California History, “A Circus in Tulare,” profiles the career of Representative Alfred Elliott and his efforts to expel Japanese American residents from his district in 1942. Based on archival research at the Hoover Institution and Bancroft Library, I discovered that Elliott coordinated with local interest groups to pressure the Western Defense Command to remove Japanese Americans from the Central Valley. You can read more about it here.
My article “Epidemiology, Quarantine Orders, and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II,” offers a study of quarantine orders in the U.S. concentration camps for Japanese Americans during World War II. Read more here.
My article “The Scientists and the Shrub: Manzanar’s Guayule Project and Incarcerated Japanese Americans,” spotlights the work of several Japanese American scientists who studied the guayule shrub while incarcerated at Manzanar concentration camp in California. The work of these scientists led to breakthrough discoveries on the hybridization of guayule, and resulted in four publications in academic journals.
Jonathan van Harmelen 