The Owens Valley was homeland to Paiute and Shoshone peoples before American settlers, ranching, and Los Angeles water acquisition transformed land and communities. A farming settlement called Manzanar developed in the early twentieth century, producing apples and other crops, but the city's diversion of valley water contributed to its decline. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942. Military authorities then excluded people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast without individual hearings, including United States citizens and long-established immigrant residents barred from naturalization.

The War Relocation Authority built Manzanar as one of ten confinement camps. More than eleven thousand Japanese Americans passed through between 1942 and 1945, with the population approaching ten thousand at its height. Families lived in tar-paper barracks divided into cramped apartments, using communal latrines, mess halls, schools, clinics, workshops, and recreation facilities behind barbed wire and guard towers. Incarcerated people improved harsh surroundings by building gardens, ponds, clubs, newspapers, sports leagues, and religious communities, acts of endurance that did not make confinement voluntary or legitimate.

Tensions over wages, administration, loyalty, and injustice culminated in unrest in December 1942. Military police fired into a crowd, killing two incarcerated men and wounding others. Later government questionnaires divided families through loaded questions about military service and allegiance. Some young men volunteered or were drafted into segregated units while relatives remained imprisoned; others resisted registration or challenged removal in court. The camp closed in November 1945. Returning families faced lost property, discrimination, housing shortages, and the task of rebuilding lives after an exclusion policy unsupported by evidence of collective disloyalty.

Most barracks and service buildings were sold or removed after the war. Surviving features included stone entrance posts, road traces, foundations, orchards, landscape remains, the cemetery, and its white Ireito memorial. The wartime auditorium endured and now houses the visitor center. Japanese American community members organized annual pilgrimages and advocated national recognition. The National Park Service later reconstructed two barracks and a women's latrine, restored a relocated wartime mess hall, and rebuilt guard towers and landscape elements based on research. These are interpretive structures amid authentic archaeological remains.

Congress established Manzanar National Historic Site in 1992 to preserve and interpret confinement and related valley history. Admission is generally free, with a self-guided road, walking routes, exhibits, reconstructed Block 14, and the cemetery available subject to hours. The National Park Service works with former incarcerees, descendants, tribal partners, and local communities. Manzanar's preservation explicitly distinguishes original fabric from reconstruction and refuses euphemisms that conceal state coercion. The place documents wartime racism, constitutional failure, resistance, service, community creativity, redress, and the continuing obligation to defend civil liberties.