Leonard Arrington: Groundbreaking Historian of Japanese Americans

In May 1962, Utah State University professor Leonard Arrington delivered a remarkable lecture on Japanese American confinement to his peers in Logan, Utah. It was one of the earliest scholarly examinations of Nikkei incarceration camps. Just how a middle-aged scholar specializing in Mormon history came to research and write about the ordeal of Japanese Americans during World War II forms something of a saga in itself.
Leonard Arrington was born in 1917 and raised in the sleepy southern Idaho town of Twin Falls. His parents, Noah and Edna, had migrated to the area after the Bureau of Reclamation built a ...