The experimental session will be divided into three parts with ample opportunities for audience discussion and engagement. We will start with a screening of the short film, Resettlement: Chicago Story, which tells an intergenerational story of a Japanese American teenage girl who moves to Chicago with her mother and grandfather after their release from a U.S. concentration camp in Arizona. The film picks up with the Yamamoto family in 1950, several years after camp, as they collectively struggle to rebuild their lives and make ends meet through their family dry-cleaning business.

After the film screening, the presenters will take audience members on a tour of the online educational website and share our collaborative process of researching, designing, and creating the project, which has embedded primary sources, including oral histories, photographs, and documents. The project’s lead academic advisor will explain how she and her team of historians curated the primary source materials for the learning tool; the web producer will show how the film and the learning tool were interwoven through both the narrative and curriculum; the film’s writer and director will describe the artistic process of creating the film; the project’s manager will share how the Japanese American community informed and drove the project from inception to distribution; and two of the research interns will discuss their contributions.

The third part of the session will be interactive with ample opportunity for participants to explore the project themselves, on their phones, tablets, and computers, ask questions to the presenters, and offer their own insights and strategies for teaching undertold histories in their own classrooms. We will divide participants into three break out groups. Each group will explore the primary sources related to one of the three main characters in the film and use some of the curricular exercises developed for classrooms, including “connecting the sources,” and “look closer.”

In 2020, we had the opportunity to present at AHA on our first cinematic digital history project, titled The Orange Story. We would very much like to return to AHA in 2024 with our new project.