Kategoria BISAC: History >> Oceania

How does a man serving in the Imperial Japanese Army feel when he suddenly sees his brother in the uniform of the enemy United States? How does a Japanese mother, surrounded by barbed wire in an American internment camp for enemy aliens, feel when her only son writes: I am now an American soldier. I must fight and, if necessary, die for my country? How does a Hawaii-born youth feel as he lies near death in Hiroshima, a victim of history's first nuclear attack, launched by the United States? Or a twelve-year-old girl on a sugar plantation, whose ailing father returned to the place of his...

In 1908, Arthur Maurice Hocart and William Halse Rivers Rivers conducted fieldwork in the Solomon Islands and elsewhere in Island Melanesia that served as the turning point in the development of modern anthropology. The work of these two anthropological pioneers on the small island of Simbo brought about the development of participant observation as a methodological hallmark of social anthropology. This would have implications for Rivers' later work in psychiatry and psychology, and Hocart's work as a comparativist, for which both would largely be remembered despite the novelty of that...

In the late 1800s, missionaries and government officials stationed along the south coast of Papua New Guinea began to observe large fleets of indigenous Motu sailing ships coming and going out of present-day Port Moresby. Each year the women of nearby villages manufactured tens of thousands of clay pots to be loaded onto the ships that men built, then sailed with their cargos westward some 400 kilometers. Upon arrival at prearranged destination-villages in distant lands to the west--lands populated by peoples speaking foreign languages--the pots together with the shell valuables were...

In recent times, the Asia-Pacific region has far surpassed Europe in terms of reciprocal trade with the United States, and since the 1980s immigrants from Asia entering the United States have exceeded their counterparts from Europe, reversing a longstanding historical trend and making Asian Americans the country's fastest growing racial group. What does transpacific history look like if the arc of the story is extended to the present?

The essays in this volume offer answers to this question challenging current assumptions about transpacific relations. Many of these assumptions are...