Presenters:
- Robert Jordan, 30-year veteran of the Chicago PD
- David Duke, Wichita County Sheriff
- Patrick Coggins, MSU Chief of Police
- Moderator: Dr. Attapol Kuanliang, Criminal Justice professor
Thursday, Feb. 8, 2018 @ 7:00 pm
Wichita Falls Museum of Art, 2 Eureka Circle
A Discussion of Contemporary Challenges in Law Enforcement
Jan Jarboe Russell
Wed. Nov. 1, 2017 @ 7:00 pm
Wichita Falls Museum of Art, 2 Eureka Circle
A discussion of her book The Train to Crystal City, winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Prize for Best Book of Nonfiction.
During World War II, trains delivered thousands of civilians from the United States and Latin America to Crystal City, a small desert town at the southern tip of Texas. The trains carried Japanese, German, Italian immigrants and their American-born children. The only family internment camp during World War II, Crystal City was the center of a government prisoner exchange program called "quiet passage." During the course of the war, hundreds of prisoners in Crystal City, including their American-born children, were exchanged for other more important Americans -- diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, physicians, and missionaries -- behind enemy lines in Japan and Germany.
Focusing her story on two American-born teenage girls who were interned, author Jan Jarboe Russell uncovers the details of their years spent in the camp; the struggles of their fathers; their families' subsequent journeys to war-devastated Germany and Japan; and their years-long attempt to survive and return to the United States, transformed from incarcerated enemies to American loyalists. Their stories of day-to-day life at the camp, from the ten-foot high security fence to the armed guards, daily roll call, and censored mail, have never been told.
Combining big-picture World War II history with a little-known event in American history that has long been kept quiet, The Train to Crystal City reveals the war-time hysteria against the Japanese and Germans in America, the secrets of FDR's tactics to rescue high-profile POWs in Germany and Japan, and how the definition of American citizenship changed under the pressure of war.
Author Biography
Jan Jarboe Russell, author of The Train to Crystal City (winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Prize for Best Book of Nonfiction) is a former Nieman Fellow, a contributing editor for Texas Monthly, and has written for the New York Times, the San Antonio Express-News, Slate, and other publications. She is the author of Lady Bird: A Biography of Mrs. Johnson and has also compiled and edited They Lived to Tell the Tale. She lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband, Dr. Lewis F. Russell, Jr.