Barnhart, Edward Norton, 1909-

Barnhart was a professor of Rhetoric at the Univ. of CA, Berkeley; served as bibliographer, Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Collection at the Univ. of CA, Berkeley; wrote articles on Peruvian Japanese internees in the US.

American historian.

Edward Norton Barnhart received a Ph.D. in 1939, in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. Barnhart joined the faculty at UC Berkeley in 1945 as an assistant professor of public speaking and eventually directed the Communications and Public Policy curriculum. Also, Barnhart wrote about the evacuation of Japanese Americans during WWII. He died on Aug. 30, 1988.

Biography

Edward Norton Barnhart (1909-1988), Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, served as bibliographer for the university's Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS) collection. The JERS project received the Woodrow Wilson Award of the American Political Science Association for the most distinguished work in political science published in 1954. As the bibliographer, he was responsible for creating an inventory for the collection.

Barnhart began his scholarly career in the field of psychology, but after joining the government services as a Public Opinion Analyst in the Office of Facts and Figures (later known as the Office of War Information), he started focusing on issues in communication and public policy. In particular, he was interested in examining the legal implications of government bowing down to public opinion pressures during wartime. Such research was embodied in a book he wrote with two others, titled Prejudice, War and the Constituion (1954), which stems from JERS, and deals with the political characteristics and constitutional significance of the wartime internment of Japanese Americans. He also wrote articles on Peruvian Japanese internees in the United States.