Help students keep an American story alive
- What are the benefits of this project?
- This project addresses the difficulty that students and teachers have when they want to use videos to create documentaries, multimedia websites, and video enhanced presentations and reports about the World War II Japanese American confinement sites. Often, the main challenges for these creators are 1) availability of a good source of credible, production-quality video, 2) finding specific content for their project, 3) securing the rights to use the content, and 4) getting access to high resolution digital files for editing.
- Where does my money go?
- Funds will go towards equipment purchase, creation of educational modules on ethical editing, and the creation of new editable video files for this project.
- Are there gifts?
- Yes! You will receive a gift from Densho if you donate at least $20 or join the fundraising team. Give $20 and receive a set of five custom-made first class postage stamps created from a historic photograph from the Amache concentration camp. Give $50 and receive the stamps plus six free issues of the award-winning Asian Pacific American semi-monthly newspaper Pacific Citizen. Give $125 and receive the stamps, the Pacific Citizen and the award-winning DVD, Honor & Sacrifice, the story of American hero Roy Matsumoto who saved his army unit in the jungles of Burma during World War II. And if join the fundraising team and ask 10 of your friends and family to support this campaign, we will send you the complete gift pack of the DVD, Pacific Citizen newspaper, and the five stamps.
Make a donation and get a Thank You Gift from Densho!
Help students tell stories that link the past with the present
18 years ago Densho began video-recording the stories of Japanese Americans who were unjustly incarcerated during WWII. Densho now has 800 of these interviews and wants to make them available to students and teachers to create powerful video essays and documentaries to help make sense of the present by exploring the past. Imagine a high school student in Texas not only watching the powerful first-person testimonies about Japanese American history but then downloading the interview videos and historic photographs, along with TV news clips, to create a documentary about the dangers to civil liberties in our fight against global terrorism.
HOW YOU CAN HELP
- Make a donation by clicking on Make a Donation in the upper right hand corner.
- Join our fundraising team by clicking Join the team below and emailing 10 of your friends and family about this campaign.
- Or best yet, do both!
Everyone who donates or joins the fundraising team before July 18th will receive special thank you gifts from Densho.
Densho: Preserving the Past, Inspiring the Future
Densho is a Japanese term meaning “to pass on to the next generation,” or to leave a legacy. The legacy we offer is an American story with ongoing relevance: during World War II, the United States government incarcerated innocent people solely because of their ancestry. Densho uses digital technology to preserve and make accessible primary source materials on the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans.
We present these materials and related resources for their historic value and as a means of exploring issues of democracy, intolerance, wartime hysteria, civil rights and the responsibilities of citizenship in our increasingly global society. We encourage use of these resources to expand awareness of our country’s diverse history, to stimulate critical thinking, to develop ethical decision-making skills, and to help ensure that democratic principles are upheld now and in the future.
Densho website
Densho Encyclopedia
Read what teachers say about Densho’s materials
- The Densho website was life changing for me and my students. It is a plethora of priceless materials that help to show the incredible strength of those who lived through the camps, discrimination, harassment, and abuse can share their testimony to help this never to happen again.
- The Densho website was highly engaging and informative. It allowed me to better understand and appreciate perspectives associated with Japanese Internment during WWII. Thank you for helping to bring history alive!
- This really helped me explain the concepts and all the underlying issues about the Japanese incarceration in comparison to the Nazi concentration camps. It motivated all my students and even got them into debates in the classroom.