Book Club at The Bryan

Name: Book Club at The Bryan
Start: 2025-10-16T14:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-10-16T15:00:00-05:00
Location: 1315 21st St., Galveston, TX, United States, Texas 77550

Schedule

Thu Oct 16 2025 at 02:00 pm to 03:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

1315 21st St., Galveston, TX, United States, Texas 77550 | Galveston, TX

The Bryan Museum Book Club is a social group who enjoys studying books about Texas and the American West. Our primary focus is non-fiction works, with the occasional fictional work included.
Third Thursday of every other month
La Sirena Bar inside The Bryan Museum
RSVP today at https://thebryanmuseum.org/events/book-club-the-train-to-crystal-city
October's Book Club meeting, History Specialist Amelia White will cover the book, 'Train to Crystal City' by Jan Jarboe Russell, available in the Bryan Museum Shop at https://the-bryan-museum-shop.myshopify.com/products/the-train-to-crystal-city-fdrs-secret-prisoner-exchange-program-and-americas-only-family-internment-camp-during-world-war-ii
About The Train to Crystal City by Jan Jarboe Russell:
The dramatic and never-before-told story of a secret FDR-approved American internment camp in Texas during World War II, where thousands of families - many US citizens - were incarcerated. From 1942 to 1948, trains delivered more than 10,000 civilians from the United States and Latin America to Crystal City, Texas, a small desert town at the southern tip of Texas. The trains carried Japanese, German, Italian immigrants and their American-born children. The only family internment camp during World War II, Crystal City was the center of a government prisoner exchange program called "quiet passage." During the course of the war, hundreds of prisoners in Crystal City, including their American-born children, were exchanged for other more important Americans - diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, physicians, and missionaries - behind enemy lines in Japan and Germany. Focusing her story on two American-born teenage girls who were interned, author Jan Jarboe Russell uncovers the details of their years spent in the camp; the struggles of their fathers; their families; subsequent journeys to war-devastated Germany and Japan; and their years-long attempt to survive and return to the United States, transformed from incarcerated enemies to American loyalists. Their stories of day-to-day life at the camp, from the ten-foot high security fence to the armed guards, daily roll call, and censored mail, have never been told. Combining big-picture World War II history with a little-known event in American history that has long been kept quiet, "The Train to Crystal City" reveals the war-time hysteria against the Japanese and Germans in America, the secrets of FDR's tactics to rescue high-profile POWs in Germany and Japan, and how the definition of American citizenship changed under the pressure of war.