ABSTRACT
The terms "race" and "nation" were virtually synonymous, and terms relating to "ethnicity" either had yet to be coined or resided chiefly in academic works. At the turn of the twentieth century, these two terms began to take on different connotations in the United States, "race" becoming a category chiefly of biology and "nation" referring more to a political/cultural entity. In popular US magazines published after reconstruction, there seem to have been at least two chief discourses about race. One was thoroughly interwoven with the concept of nation, and the other concerned a distinction between two seemingly biologically distinct peoples, each denoted by skin color: the blacks and whites of the American South. Over the next ten years, American magazines paid only passing attention to Japan. But, though the number of Japanese in the US was relatively small at the turn of the century - reaching just 24,000 residents in the country as a whole and 10,000 in California.
