The Organization of American Historians’ 2018 Annual Meeting will be held in Sacramento, California. You can find out more about the meeting here and register here. As you plan your visit, consider taking in the sites of Old Sacramento either through an official OAH tour or on your own.
“A Neighborhood Lost: Sacramento’s Japantown,” is a ten-minute film that Access Sacramento selected as one of the finalists for their A Place Called Sacramento 2016 Film Festival. Sacramento’s Japantown was home to thousands of Japanese immigrants and hundreds of businesses making it one of the largest Japantowns in California. Many Japanese experienced success, leading to growth not only of Japantown but Sacramento, too. The documentary tells the history of Sacramento’s former Japantown from its beginnings as a stopping point for local Japanese workers wishing to buy goods and services to the forced relocation of its residents and the destruction of the neighborhood under the policy of Redevelopment in the late 1950s.
Jeffrey Dym is a professor of history at Sacramento State. For nearly a decade he has been turning his historical research into self-produced documentaries that can be found on YouTube: Dymsensei. The research for this film, however, was carried out by Jason Bowman, a master’s student in Sacramento State’s Public History Program.
Watch “A Neighborhood Lost” here:
