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Manzanar in California's Owens Valley embodies several layers of history, from long Indigenous habitation and Owens Valley Paiute settlement to a farming town founded in 1910 that declined after Los Angeles diverted the valley's water. During World War II, it became the first of ten American concentration camps where Japanese Americans were forcibly incarcerated, holding more than 10,000 people at its peak in a guarded, barbed-wire enclosure of barracks and communal facilities. Despite harsh conditions and profound loss of freedom and privacy, those confined there built a functioning community. Today Manzanar is preserved as a vital place for understanding wartime confinement, forced removal, and civil liberties in the United States.
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California · United States
