Invisible Restraints: Life and Labor at Seabrook Farms | National Council on Public History

This exhibition explores the history of Seabrook Farms, a frozen foods agribusiness and company town in southern New Jersey that recruited incarcerated Japanese Americans, guestworkers from the British West Indies, and European Displaced Persons and stateless Japanese Peruvians during the 1940s and 1950s. It focuses on Seabrook Farms’ layered histories, and the relationship between captive labor and capitalism that defined the company’s employment practices and government-backed hiring strategies during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath.

Subjects or Themes

African American, Japanese American, Japanese Peruvian, Estonian American, World War II, guestworkers, internment, incarceration, labor history, migration history, Displaced Persons, New Jersey, agricultural history

Project Language(s)

English

Time Period

Geographic Location

Project Categories

Content Type

Images, Text

Target Audience(s)

Creators

Rutgers University, New Brunswick and the New Jersey Digital Highway

Year(s)

2015-2016

Host Institution / Affiliation / Project Location

Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Software Employed

Labor and Support

Work on the exhibition initially took place in an interdisciplinary public humanities course that Prof. Andy Urban taught during the fall 2015 semester at Rutgers, which was connected to the Humanities Action Lab's national, collaborative States of Incarceration project. (Students contributed to that exhibition as well.) During the fall 2015 semester, students worked on the exhibition sections as well as the individual "I Remember" and visual essay components of the site. During the spring 2016 semester, Prof. Urban worked with two students from the fall class who were hired as assistant curators, Sabah Abbasi and Amy Clark, to revise, edit, and complete the exhibition text, and to produce features like the timeline. Prof. Urban also coordinated with the digital team that is part of the Rutgers University libraries, which hosts the New Jersey Digital Highway. The exhibit went live in April 2016.