Make your funding for Backstories provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment

for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining

Davis foundations.

From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is Backstory.

Welcome to Backstory.

I'm Ed Ayers.

I'm Joanne Freeman.

And I'm Brian Vallow.

If you're new to the show, we'll tell you a bit about Backstory.

Joanne, Brian, and I are all historians.

Every week we dive into a story in the news, and we look at that topic across American

history.

So Brian, Joanne, let's begin today's show by heading to an island in the San Francisco

Bay in 1917.

A ship pulls into the dock.

It's full of immigrants, including young women traveling from Japan.

They've come thousands of miles to meet their husbands in America.

They would have the pictures of their husbands in their hands.

This is historian Judy Young.

Then they're appearing across the waters and trying to find their husbands.

And so you could say that that would be the first glimpse they might have of their husbands.

Wait a minute.

...