Um, It's not uncommon for immigrants to find their way to agriculture, but why was it such an important place for Japanese Americans to work and the contributions from them particularly notable?

Well, many of the Japanese immigrants that came in the late part of the 19th century came from farming backgrounds.

A lot of them came from southwest Japan.

And so, naturally, they moved into farming and they invented a lot of new techniques, such as potato farming in the San Joaquin Valley, rice farming.

And they became specialists in truck crops, fresh fruits and vegetables.

And they kind of began to dominate that business, not only in the growing of the produce, but also in the marketing, the retailing of it.

But white farmers were alarmed by this.

Paul, just real briefly, share with us about how film and written depictions of Japanese Americans played into either the negative narratives which were part of the era or attempted to counter those narratives.

And how did you come to this topic, though?

Well, as Brad said, the last book that I wrote was about diplomats, American diplomats in the Middle East.

And so as part of that work, I began reading all these diplomatic histories of the US.

And I came across one written by a Stanford historian that mentioned this episode in 1906 when the city of San Francisco decided to try to kick the Japanese immigrants out, basically, to discourage them from coming.

And so they... removed all of the Japanese school children from the mainstream schools and segregated them in an all Asian school.

And it developed into a huge international crisis really because the Japanese were concerned that their nation be, their nation's subjects be treated properly.

They were trying to become a major world power with the respect that world powers get.

that everybody liked, and they would go to

As Richter described it to me, Stevens was attracted to the lifestyle Libya offered and the feeling of timelessness he found there.

He liked going out and enjoying goat meat cooked over a Bedouin campfire in the desert.

He enjoyed talking to these Arabs who could tell you the history of their families going back many generations.

These Arabs would talk about their distant relatives as if they died only a few years ago.

And then later, Stevens would discover that they were talking about people who died centuries ago.

He once wrote that Islamist doesn't necessarily translate to extremist.

I think he was always willing to open a conversation with people from pretty scary Islamist backgrounds.

I tell a story about his meetings with one militia leader where he stayed up way into the night to debate East German political theory with this guy who'd been fighting as a jihadist in Afghanistan a couple of years before.