On research, the internet, and an audience for historical work

By Robert Shaffer, Ph.D., History/Philosophy Department

Associate history professor Robert Shaffer holds a photo that shows George Yamamoto working on the Heston farm in Pennsylvania.

In the academic world it is often difficult to know whether anyone reads or values articles published in professional journals. But once in a great while something happens that shows “history” matters, and how the results of one’s research can spread much further than expected.

On a rainy Saturday evening this past September, I checked my e-mail, and was intrigued to find one with the subject: “Mr. Yamamoto: Japanese Americans in NJ in WWII.” I had written a brief article with more or less this title about ten years ago, when I was working on my Ph.D. and teaching at Rutgers University. The article, published in the Journal of American History, concerned George Yamamoto, who, like 120,000 other Japanese Americans in 1942, had been forced to move from his home on the West Coast to an internment camp.

The point of my 1998 article was to show how I used coverage in Life Magazine to bring home (literally) to my New Jersey students how the mistreatment of Japanese Americans extended even to their state. But I did not want them to see only the “poignant and frightening picture of racism against Japanese Americans,” as I put it then. I also wanted them to analyze the positive portrayals of George Yamamoto, as a willing worker and loyal American immigrant. In fact, the thrust of most of my research into the internment of Japanese Americans has been to show more Americans stood up on behalf of Japanese Americans than is generally acknowledged.

The first line of the e-mail — “I wanted to thank you for writing the article…” — was gratifying.

But it was the second line that floored me: “Mr. George Yamamoto was my grandfather.”

Naomi Barrie-Lake, Yamamoto’s granddaughter connected the past to the present by contacting Shaffer.

Naomi Barrie-Lake, a social worker in San Diego, California, went on to say in researching her grandfather’s life she came across my article on the Internet. In a follow-up e-mail, she said, with evident and justifiable pride, her grandfather had gone to agricultural college in Japan and was an expert at grafting fruit trees and developing hybrid seeds. Indeed, she wrote, before his release the U.S. government employed him as an agricultural consultant in the Dust Bowl states, where he advised farmers on what crops would grow best and help restore their fields.

After being run out of New Jersey, Mr. Yamamoto and four Japanese-American co-workers got jobs on the Herman Heston farm in Newtown, Pennsylvania. There are photos on the Internet of Mr. Yamamoto and others harvesting tomatoes in 1944, along with an extended caption in which Mr. Heston expresses his appreciation: “I have found them loyal, hard-working, clean, and pleasant to work with...[We] have a high regard for them.” Ms. Barrie-Lake reported her grandfather “was eventually able to buy a farm in Newtown, where he lived the remainder of his years (he died in 1984). He and his wife are buried in Bucks County.”

Ms. Barrie-Lake’s interest in my article also embodies a larger concern. “I just wanted to thank you,” she wrote, “for teaching the ‘real history’ of the United States. It makes me feel affirmed, that my grandfather’s (and father’s) stories are being told, and that American students today understand that an unfortunate part of our history involves institutional racism.”

The message out of the blue also demonstrates another side of historical research and writing today. Ms. Barrie-Lake is not an academic historian, but she found my 10-year-old article through the click of a mouse to a journal largely unknown outside the profession. As she put it, “Isn’t the Internet a wonderful tool?”

The possibility the fruits of historical research can reach a wider public has been vastly compounded by this tool. Moreover, the research process itself is being transformed. The photographs of Mr. Yamamoto along with the 7,000 other photographs and hundreds of lengthy captions were not on the Internet when I was researching and writing the article. Sources that in the past would have required expensive trips to far-away archives, or inter-library loan requests to dozens of libraries are at our fingertips. Students in my Theory and Practice of History class incorporated sources in their research papers that their counterparts four years ago could not have imagined.

It is most gratifying to discover not only someone is reading my work, but it would be difficult to think of anyone I would more want to have as a reader of my article about George Yamamoto and his efforts to overcome racism during World War II.

Robert Shaffer, an associate professor of history, has taught at Shippensburg since 1998.