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During the Civil War, the entire North constituted the homefront, an area largely removed from the din and horror of combat. With a few exceptions of raids and battles such as Gettysburg, civilians in the North experienced the war indirectly. The people on the homefront mobilized for war, sent their menfolk off to fight, supplied the soldiers and the army, coped without their breadwinners, and suffered the loss or maiming of men they loved. All the while, however, the homefront was crucially important to the course of the war. The mobilization of northern resources—not just men, but the manufacture of the arms and supplies needed to fight a war—enabled the North to conduct what some have called a total war, one on which the Union expended money and manpower at unprecedented levels. Confederate strategists hoped to break the will of the northern homefront to secure southern independence. Despite the hardships endured in the North, this strategy failed. On the homefront, women struggled to provide for their families as well as to serve soldiers and the army by sending care packages and doing war work. Family letters reveal the impact of the war on children who lost their fathers either temporarily or permanently. Communities rallied to aid soldiers’ families but were riven by dissension over issues such as conscription and emancipation. Immigrants and African Americans sought a new place in U.S. society by exploiting the opportunities the war offered to prove their worth. Service in the Union army certainly advanced the status of some groups, but was not the only means to that end. Nuns who nursed the wounded improved the reputation of the Catholic Church and northern African Americans used the increasingly emancipationist war goals to improve their legal status in the North. The Civil War altered race relations most radically, but change came to everyone on the northern homefront.

The Cold War turned hot in Asia. Wars in Korea and Vietnam evidenced that the Cold War, the ideological contest between democracy and communism, met violent ends in the Pacific. While considered one of America’s “forgotten wars,” what unfolded in Korea sent geopolitical ripples around the world and had devastating consequences that would forever change Korea. The war claimed over three million Korean lives, the majority civilians. The United States played an outsized role in the conflict. The United States sent 350,000 servicemen, making up 90 percent of UN forces in Korea. What began as an effort to contain communism north of the 38th parallel, a dividing line drawn up by two US colonels in 1945, shifted to remove communism from the peninsula entirely. Fighting escalated in October 1950 when the People’s Republic of China entered on the side of North Korea. Between 1950 and 1953, the United States dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on the peninsula, which is roughly the size of Minnesota. An August 1953 armistice brought an end to combat but not the war. Korea remained divided, only this time with more than half the population either killed, wounded, missing, or permanently separated from their families. The unended war went on to shape the geopolitical landscape of US-Korea relations, expanded the Korean diaspora, and had a disproportionate impact upon Korean civilians, especially women and children. In the United States, the violence of war was obscured by media that figured Koreans as wartime waifs, assimilating adoptees, and talented entertainers, like the Korean Children’s Choir and Kim Sisters, representations that fostered internationalist scripts of rescue and care. Images of Koreans as model Cold War citizens helped Americans move on from the war, while overwriting the actual experiences of displaced Korean women and children. Between 1953 and 1965, an estimated 7,700 Korean “war brides” and six thousand Korean and mixed-race adoptees arrived in interracial households scattered across a still-segregated United States. The migration of Korean women and children was directly tied to US militarization in South Korea. Camptowns catering to US servicemen that cropped up near bases during the war became permanent sites of prostitution. The presumption that Korean brides were former prostitutes was symptomatic of how the US military impacted the social construction of Korean women. Also resulting from US militarization was the birth of “GI babies.” The mixed-race children of US servicemen and Korean women anchored postwar missionary appeals for Americans to adopt from Korea, campaigns that opened the path to transnational adoptions. Ultimately, what transpired in Korea placed civilians at the crossroads of the Cold War navigating life in Korea, the United States, and spaces in between.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans, living primarily on the West Coast of the continental United States. On August 10, 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation authorizing formal apologies and checks for $20,000 to those still alive who had been unjustly imprisoned during WWII. In the interim period, nearly a half century, there were enormous shifts in memories of the events, mainstream accounts, and internal ethnic accountabilities. To be sure, there were significant acts of resistance, from the beginning of mass forced removal to the Supreme Court decisions toward the end of the war. But for a quarter of a century, between 1945 and approximately 1970, there was little to threaten a master narrative that posited Japanese Americans, led by the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), as a once-embattled ethnic/racial minority that had transcended its victimized past to become America’s treasured model minority. The fact that the Japanese American community began effective mobilization for government apology and reparations in the 1970s only confirmed its emergence as a bona fide part of the American body politic. But where the earlier narrative extolled the memories of Japanese American war heroes and leaders of the JACL, memory making changed dramatically in the 1990s and 2000s. In the years since Reagan’s affirmation that “here we admit a wrong,” Japanese Americans have unleashed a torrent of memorials, museums, and monuments honoring those who fought the injustices and who swore they would resist current or future attempts to scapegoat other groups in the name of national security.