1885: Japanese migration to Hawaii.

June 27, 1894: A U.S. district court rules that Japanese immigrants cannot become citizens because they are not "free white" persons, as the Naturalization Act of 1790 requires.

1924: Immigration Act of 1924

September 1, 1939: World War II begins.

October 7, 1941: The Munson Report, based on first hand research and consultation with navy and FBI agents concluded that Japanese Americans presented no security risk.

December 7, 1941: The Japanese navy launched a surprise military attack against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor located on the island of O'ahu.

February 19, 1942: Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, authorized what was to become the mass forced removal and incarceration of all Japanese Americans on the West Coast.

1942-1946: During World War II, over 120,000 persons of Japanese descent were held in a variety of incarceration sites spread across the United States.

1943: The War Department and the War Relocation Authority (WRA) joined forces to create a bureaucratic means of assessing the loyalty of Nikkei in the WRA concentration camps. All adults were asked to answer questions on a form that become known informally as the "loyalty questionnaire."

December 18, 1944: In the unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision on Ex parte Mitsuye Endo in December 1944, the court ruled that "citizens who are concededly loyal" could not be held in War Relocation Authority concentration camps.

August 6, 1945: The United States dropped its atomic bomb on Japanese city of Hiroshima.

August 9, 1945: The United States dropped its atomic bomb on Japanese city of Nagasaki.

August 14, 1945: World War II ends.

1952: A Cold War measure, the 1952 Immigration Act formally ended Asian exclusion as a feature of U.S. immigration policy, even as it strengthened the powers of the federal government to detain and prosecute suspected subversives.

February 16, 1976: President Gerald R. Ford officially rescinds Executive Order 9066.

1980-1981: Established in 1980, this bipartisan federal commission was directed by Congress to review the facts and circumstances surrounding Executive Order 9066 and its impact on American citizens and permanent resident aliens as well as Alaskan natives in the Pribilof and Aleutian Islands.

August 10, 1988: The federal act (Public Law 100-383) that granted redress of $20,000 and a formal presidential apology to every surviving U.S. citizen or legal resident immigrant of Japanese ancestry incarcerated during World War II.

1999: Fred Korematsu received a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.