1978: NOAA announces gender-neutral hurricane naming system
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On Feb.19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, ordering the removal of resident enemy aliens from parts of the West vaguely identified as military areas. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in 1941, Roosevelt came under increasing pressure by military and political advisers to address the nation’s fears of further Japanese attack or sabotage, particularly on the West Coast. The region was also home to long-standing racism against Japanese Americans, motivated in part by jealousy over their commercial success and which erupted after the attack. While 9066 also affected Italian and German Americans, the largest numbers of detainees were by far Japanese. Japanese immigrants and their descendants, regardless of American citizenship status or length of residence, were systematically rounded up and placed in detention centers. Thousands of families’ lives were interrupted and in some cases destroyed. Roosevelt delegated enforcement of 9066 to the War Department. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt tried to change her husband’s mind but he rebuked her on the subject, and the Supreme Court twice upheld the order during World War II. Decades later, on Feb. 19, 1976, President Gerald Ford signed an order prohibiting the executive branch from re-instituting 9066. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan issued a public apology on behalf of the government and authorized reparations for former Japanese internees or their descendants.
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