Showing papers in "Pacific Historical Review in 1964"

Sheldon Jackson as Preserver of Alaska's Native Culture

Abstract: A MONG THE OLDEST negative stereotypes connected with the conquest of the Americas and Oceania is one which is identified with Christian priest and parson. It views them as both parochial and impractical: "God's servant" served neither God nor man. Worst of all, purports the stereotype, these men were so aflame with inquisitional or Calvinistic hell-fire that they felt compelled to burn everything identified with the native's way of life. In recent years this wild generalization has been abandoned by more reasoned and comprehensive studies. Even the most critical anthropologists and historians are now usually willing to admit that the Christian missionary, more than any other single shield, manfully struggled to protect the native peoples from the crushing repercussions of the white avalanche.'

Benjamin Harrison and Hawaiian Annexation: A Reinterpretation

Abstract: ON JANUARY 28, 1893, Benjamin Harrison received news of a revolution overthrowing Queen Lydia Liliuokalani of Hawaii. By February 15 he negotiated a treaty of annexation with commissioners representing the revolutionary government and consequently appeared to historians to be an ardent expansionist. Carl Russell Fish, for example, was among the first historians to point out that because Harrison negotiated the treaty "without delay," he was clearly on the "path of empire." 1 Charles and Mary Beard perpetuated this conclusion in their famous textbook by stating that "the envoys were cordially received by President Harrison and within a few days a treaty adding Hawaii to the American empire was laid before the Senate." 2 More recently, the diplomatic historian Thomas A. Bailey has also maintained, in his text essay entitled "Rush-Order Annexation," that Harrison's hasty negotiation of the treaty made him an expansionist." Finally, Julius W. Pratt, who has explored Hawaiian annexation more than anyone else, has cogently argued that Harrison was an expansionist not just because of his rapid negotiation of the treaty but more importantly because of his probable support of the revolutionary movement that led to the overthrow of the queen. The historians are partially justified, if only because of the annexation treaty, in calling Harrison an expansionist. But their conclusion must be modified in two respects.

Effects of Nuclear Explosions on Pacific Islanders

Abstract: because of the potential danger from radioactive fallout to mankind in general. This article is directed more narrowly to the effects of nuclear experiments and radiation on Pacific islanders, with special reference to the inhabitants of the Marshall Archipelago in the United States Trust Territory, where the most devastating lethal weapons have been detonated. This group of 34 atolls is spread over an ocean area covering some 100,000 square miles, but comprises a total land area of less than 70 square miles. According to estimates based on the United States Commercial Company Survey of 1946, there are 1,156 islands in the Marshalls as compared with 963 in the Carolines, and 22 in the Marianas. Seventy per cent of the land is arable as compared with 40 per cent in the East Carolines, 28 per cent in the West Carolines, and 45 per cent in the Marianas.' Marshallese social and traditional political structure is built around a system of matrilineal land tenure and clan membership. While there is very little individual ownership of

The Movement to Reverse Philippine Independence

Abstract: O N MARCH 24, 1934, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Tydings-McDuffie Act and started the Philippine Islands down the historical road to political independence. A year later, under the traditional glaring kleig lights and in the presence of many interested Filipino and American officials, the president approved the new Philippine constitution. In the customary manner, Roosevelt presented the gold pen he used to the president of the Philippine Senate, Manuel Quezon. Quezon deserved the token. He had fought successfully to reject the personally obnoxious HawesCutting Act, passed by Congress in March, 1933, and had carried the battle for passage and acceptance of the not too different TydingsMcDuffie Act. That the two acts were quite similar was of no significance to Quezon. His name was associated with the Tydings Act and this was negotiable political capital. After the ceremonies, Quezon told the press:

Slaves on Horseback

Abstract: O NE OF THE EARLY Negro cowboys has been forgotten, and his name will probably never be recovered. He was a slave and a rather poor cowboy, hardly worth a place in history. But because he was inefficient, even lazy, he made his master famous. He and his family lived on the San Antonio River in Texas, and they were owned by a lawyer, not a cattleman. In 1847, when the lawyer received 400 head of cattle in payment of a debt, he entrusted them to the Negro and continued his practice and his business of land speculation. The Negro neglected to do much branding, and the cattle roamed free, growing and multiplying on the open Texas range and straying far from their home ranch. Consequently the herd had scattered when the lawyer sold his land, cattle, and brand in 1856. The lawyer's name was Samuel A. Maverick, and the buyer of his ranch was A. Toutant Beauregard, an active and ambitious cattleman. Beauregard sent his men riding over several counties, searching for Maverick's cattle. Whenever they found an animal unbranded, they claimed it as Maverick's. Thanks to a Negro cowboy's carelessness and Beauregard's enterprise, every wandering animal, unbranded and unclaimed, soon came to be called a maverick, and hunting for such animals was called mavericking. Even men, for that matter, were called mavericks if they were free and independent and wore no man's brand.'

Submarine Attacks on the Pacific Coast, 1942

Abstract: Barbara, California. Signalman Takeo Aiba, a veteran of eight years' service in the Imperial Navy, took his station with the other lookouts on the conning tower and scanned the waters. Several miles behind lay Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz Islands; ahead, beyond ten or twelve miles of water, lay the low coastal Santa Inez Mountains. Minutes later, the captain climbed onto the bridge. Commander Nishino, a respected submariner, looked about for aircraft and signs of ominous weather. There being neither, he shouted an order below, and nine ratings clambered up the ladder and onto the deck. These men comprised the gun crew. Their mission was to bombard American national soil, the first foreign power to do so since the Mexican War. The idea of shelling territory of the continental United States was by this time not especially novel to the Imperial Navy, but the sensation it created with the American people was something else. Plans, ultimately cancelled, had called for submarine attacks on the west coast after Pearl Harbor, and before 1942 was over, submarine 1-25 would deliver two more such attacks. These daring raids, despite their negligible results, created a nationwide stir. Submarine I-17 was several thousand miles from the United States in mid-October, 1941, on a training cruise in the Bungo Strait north of Kyushu, southernmost of the Japanese home islands. Ordered into Saeki, the ship provisioned for an extensive training cruise that would be aborted by the Japanese decision to commence hostilities. On November 15, it departed Kyushu waters and patrolled off the Nampo Shoto Islands until the 24th. The Japanese war plans were then accelerated, and 1-17 was ordered to set course for Ha-

History and the Imagination

Abstract: I SHALL BEGIN this paper, as a preacher begins his sermon, with a text. "Anyone who is going to make anything out of history," writes Geoffrey Barraclough, "will, sooner or later, have to do most of the work himself. He will have to read, and consider, and re-consider, and then read some more."' Now, this is a formidable assignment. It demands that every historian make a fresh start, that he do his own work and his own thinking. It implies even more. The emphasis is on intellectual activity, on reflection, and the uses of knowledge to the end of giving birth to ideas. "Historians have reflected little upon the nature of things and even the nature of their own subject," comments Herbert Butterfield." It is this reflection on the nature of things which I view as the be-all and the end-all of historical study. It is philosophy teaching by experience, as Bolingbroke and later Croce defined it. It means that history is personal to the individual who reads it, that he discovers it in his own mind as he goes along, and that he creates and re-creates it. Carl Becker in his whimsical and telling essay, Everyman his own Historian, pursued the same argument." There are two histories, wrote Becker: the actual series that once occurred; and the ideal series we affirm and hold in memory. The first is absolute and unchanged and, he might have added, unknowable; the second is

The Gaucho: His Changing Image

Abstract: Actually, the subject of the real, historical gaucho is a very complicated one. The word "gaucho," for example, has not always had the same significance for everyone who used it. A study reveals that the term has run the gamut of two extremes in meaning-from one of disdain to one of praise. For some critics, the word has been used to refer to the gaucho malo, or the bad gaucho type, such as Martin Fierro and his friend Cruz, in the first part of the poem Martin Fierro, by Jose Hernandez. For others, it has signified the more or less hardworking paisano or campesino, who wanted to live in peace on the pampas. For the latter group, the terms paisano and "gaucho" have identical meanings.2 In other words, there has not been complete agreement on an exact definition of "gaucho."

The Myth of Hawaii's Swing toward Australasia and Canada

Abstract: DURING THE LAST three decades of the nineteenth century, as the Hawaiian sugar industry and related activities expanded tremendously and prosperous island planters and commercial agents determined to secure the prized and convenient United States market, the spectre of an economic swing of the kingdom toward the British Empire, with its resultant political consequences, was frequently and effectively raised in Honolulu to excite fears and to produce the desired results in Washington. One of the first Americans to mention the danger was Colonel Zephaniah Spalding, United States consul at Honolulu in 1870. In September, 1867, he had been appointed by Secretary of State William H. Seward as a confidential agent to proceed to the islands and to ascertain "what effect the reciprocity treaty would have on the future relations of the United States and Hawaii." 1 Three years later, as consul, Spalding referred to the recently established line of British steamers between Honolulu and New Zealand and Australian ports, which would open a new market for Hawaiian products and might even absorb the entire trade of the islands, should the Australian colonies "be made 'free ports' by a treaty of reciprocity with Hawaii." Such a contingency might threaten the entire political and economic position of Americans in the archipelago.2