American Survivors: Trans-Pacific Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

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Friday, March 4, 2022 | 5:30pm to 7pm

American Survivors is a fresh and moving historical account of U.S. survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, breaking new ground not only in the study of World War II but also in the public understanding of nuclear weaponry. A truly trans-Pacific history, American Survivors challenges the dualistic distinction between Americans-as-victors and Japanese-as-victims often assumed by scholars of the nuclear war. Using more than 130 oral histories of Japanese American and Korean American survivors, their family members, community activists, and physicians – most of which appear here for the first time – Naoko Wake reveals a cross-national history of war, illness, immigration, gender, family, and community from intimately personal perspectives. American Survivors brings to light the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that connects, as much as separates, people across time and national boundaries.

Purchase Book: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/american-survivors/7B687334AF1F0F5A67931CC2B2327E81#

Author Bio

Naoko Wake is Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University. Prof. Wake is a historian of gender, sexuality, and illness in the twentieth century United States and the Pacific Rim. She has written on the history of psychiatric and psychoanalytic approaches to homosexuality in her first book Private Practices: Harry Stack Sullivan, the Science of Homosexuality, and American Liberalism (Rutgers, 2011). Her second book American Survivors: Trans-Pacific Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Cambridge, 2021) is on Japanese American and Korean American survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Her current project is about the history of disability among Asian Pacific Islander Desi Americans.