HSTAA 110: History of American Citizenship: Research Step by Step

So I am interviewing my mother. She was born in Japan and was a child during World War II. She mentions moving into the mountains during the war to get away for the bombing of her home town, Sendai. After the war, she went to work first as a nanny to an American family and later at a school located on an American military base. There she met my father, a young G.I. I've decided to focus on her experience as a Japanese woman married to an American soldier -- her experience as a "war bride."

I'm now ready to dig deeper into finding more historical context by identifying relevant secondary sources (scholarly books and articles). I'm going to begin with books since my encyclopedia entry on Japanese War Brides included a short bibliography. I might also want to look at some of the general histories of Japanese Americans that are listed in the encyclopedia entry in the Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America.

To find these sources I use UW Libraries Search and search for the title of the book or article.

• Glenn, Nakano Evelyn.1986. Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. (ebook available)
• Simpson, Chung Caroline. 1998. “Out of an Obscure Place’: Japanese War Brides and Cultural Pluralism in the 1950s.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10(3): 47–81. (article available online)
• Nakano, Mei T. Japanese American Women: Three Generations 1890–1990. Berkeley, CA: Mina Press, 1990. (print only at Odegaard Library)

I can use UW Libraries Search to find additional books related to my topic by following the directions on Secondary Sources page of this guide.

I'm now ready to look for other primary sources -- material created during the period I am researching (in my case the 1950s) or by those that lived through the experience (memoirs, newspaper & magazine articles from the 1950s, oral histories, etc.)

I first start with primary sources cited in the scholary article I found listed in my encyclopedia search: “Out of an obscure place”: Japanese War Brides and Cultural Pluralism in the 1950s."

To find primary sources cited by secondary sources, you can try a variety of strategies:

• Use UW Libraries Search -- try searching first for the article title and if that doesn't work, search for the title of the magazine.
• Check the Primary sources page to see if we have access to a digitized version of a magazine or newspaper. 

So for the two primary sources I found in the article:

• Michener, James A. “Pursuit of Happiness by a gi and a Japanese.” Life (21 Feb. 1955): 124+.
  • The digitized version of Life magazine is available freely online. You'll find it on the Primary Sources: Newspapers & Magazines page. I just go to the specified date and find the article.
     
• Smith, J. W., and William L. Worden. “They’re Bringing Home Japanese Wives.” The Saturday Evening Post (19 Jan. 1952): 24+.
  • I try looking for the article title in UW Libraries Search but have no luck. However serendiptously I find a disseration with a similar title that looks to be a good secondary source for my topic: “They're Bringing Home Japanese Wives”: Japanese War Brides in the Postwar Era. I go back to UW Libraries Search and search for the magazine name instead and find that the magazine is available online. I go to the specified date and find the article.

At this beginning stage of my research, I need to place my mother's experience in context. I'm curious and have questions:

• Was her experience typical or atypical?
• Did Asian women who married American G.I.s have a similar experience?
• How is my mother's experience similar or different to that of the broader Japanese American community?
• What role did racism have?

To start my research, I begin with specialized encyclopedias. These  provide background information and, because many include a bibliography of additional readings, a start on finding secondary sources (scholarly books and articles}.

To find articles, come up with search words/phrases that capture your topic. Keeping things simple works best. I'm going to begin searching for:

• "war bride*" AND japan*  [put phrases in quotations; the * is used to search for both singular and plural versions of a word and the AND connects different aspects of your topic]

I might try broader searches if I don't initially find much.

• "war bride*" AND asia*
• "war bride*" AND "world war ii"
• "american military" AND japan*

To find additional primary sources, check the Primary Sources pages for the types of sources you want. For most topics, newspaper and magazine articles are going to be the easiest sources to find. 

• Scan the Primary Sources: Newspapers & Magazines pages for the newspapers and magazines most likely to have articles related to your topic, region & time period. For my topic I see a number of sources to try.
• Be aware that language changes over time so you want to use the language of the time. For example when looking for 1950s news articles about African Americans you will need to use the term "Negro." In the 1970s when looking for articles about Latinx/Latina/Latino Americans you might need to also use the term "Chicano."
• Use publication years as a way to narrow your searches. In my case, I'm looking for articles published during the late 1940s through the 1950s.