This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people.

And we'd love to hear your stories. send them to our Americanstories.com.

They're some of our favorites. The surge of children's books, school curricula films,

websites, plays, and exhibitions about the wartime forced removal and incarceration of Japanese

Americans has, for the most part, been a good thing. There is generally

one simple narrative that gets told. Our next story comes to us from Preston Jones, who is a

professor of history at John Brown University and is also a Jack Miller Center Fellow.

The Jack Miller Center is a nationwide network of scholars and teachers

dedicated to educating the next generation about America's founding principles and history.

To learn more, visit jackmiller center.org.

Let's take a listen to the story.

Mary McCami arrived in Anchorage, Alaska, with her immigrant parents soon after the town was

founded in 1914. Her father, who in the U.S., went by George, had studied English before

emigrating from Japan to the U.S., but he never mastered it. Mary's mother, Minnie, never became

comfortable in English. I first saw a photo. Mary's mother, Minnie, never became comfortable in English.

I first saw a photo of Mary McCami in an Anchorage School annual for 1929, after starting

research into the city's history from its founding to the beginning of the Second World War.

Given Japan's attacks on Alaskan Islands and the town of Dutch Harbor during that war,

I wanted to track what Anchorage's residents thought about Japan and the Japanese up to December

1941.

When I first saw a photo of Mary, I felt sorry for her.

After everything I'd read about the experience of Japanese Americans

...