Review: Manzanar Mosaic: Essays and Oral Histories on America’s First World War II Japanese American Concentration Camp, by Arthur A. Hansen

A half century ago, oral history was seen as a promising approach to historical research. For many scholars, the method circumvented problems with written documents generated by federal government officials, some whose credibility was open to question. For others, it revealed a democratic past relevant to the present by giving voice to ordinary people not seen in written documents. Some advocates adopted Canadian psychologist Endel Tulving’s distinction between episodic and semantic memory to preserve the personal experience of the interviewee’s past from the biases of present-day concerns couched in the language of general, abstract knowledge. In recent years, however, memory specialists in the neurosciences have seen large overlaps between episodic and semantic memory, since the former requires the latter at the initial stage of encoding for successful retrieval of a memory. For historians, disentangling the two types of memory requires dissection of the different semantic frameworks used in the initial...