The bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 preceded the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans under Executive Order 9066. Multiracial Japanese families posed a problem to the segregation order. War officials attempted to further segregate the population through the Mixed Marriage policy. This policy allowed some multiracial Japanese families to leave Japanese mass incarceration camps. My project argues this policy was both a foreshadowing and facilitation of postwar integration; enabling rather than discontinuing the process of race and empire. The majority of sources were acquired through scanning, email, photocopying, microfilm, and phone interviews. Research initially began with understanding the Mixed marriage policy as a result of the prewar segregation along gendered and racialized lines. It soon became clear that the treatment of multiracial Japanese families under American occupation was both a result and continuity of the prewar racial logic. The Mixed Marriage policy was an attempt to reconcile the question: Who did the U.S. government and the Japanese American community consider Japanese? Japanese Americans emigrated with the transpacific identity of both Japanese and American. In contrast, the U.S. government rejected the possibility of dual identities by arguing that racial identity was based on biology alone. The existence of mixed race individuals in Japanese mass incarceration camps upset the U.S.’s racial logic that emphasized segregator biology over the possibility of cultural assimilation. The Mixed Marriage policy built upon segregation policies to determine who could integrate into the American identity. Those who passed the appeal process of the Mixed Marriage policy were welcomed back into the categories of Japanese and American. These individuals became symbols for the U.S. government to project an image of benevolence and racial tolerance in the post-war empire. The Mixed Marriage policy helps historians understand how integration is dependent on the categories created by segregation.

Under the Merovingian Dynasty (481 AD-751 AD) in early medieval France, royal political assemblies were used to fulfill a wide variety of functions of state. More importantly, however, they served as the primary venue for interaction between the king and the noble class he ruled over. Throughout the period, kings and nobles used assemblies to shift the balance of power in their own favor. Sometimes, by using regencies of young kings for instance, aristocrats managed to gain power over their rulers. Others, kings managed to shift the balance back and reassert their full authority. The Merovingian kingdoms moved through cycles of waxing and waning levels of centralization. When a king died with multiple potential heirs, the kingdom was often split into three or four separate political units. At these moments, the kingdoms were divided and decentralized. When a king’s brothers and his heirs died, however, the kingdom reconsolidated into a single unit, requiring greater centralization to govern. In these moments of centralization, the power struggles of assemblies offered more permanent gains, which the aristocratic class exploited to gradually increase their relative status, until the distribution of power reached a point where the forbears of the great king Charlemagne managed to replace the Merovingians and become kings themselves. The effects of assemblies on Merovingian government and kingship allowed and led to the birth of the Carolingian dynasty. More even than this, the very fact that the Carolingian's used assembly politics to attain power affected how they in turn governed, thus shaping the history of Europe for centuries to come. Using close readings of narrative, legal, and formulary evidence, I argue both that Merovingian assemblies functioned as an outlet for royal-aristocratic competition, as well as the increased impact this competition had during centralized moments in Merovingian history.