Showing papers in "Pacific Historical Review in 2007"

The ““Yellow Peril”” and Asian Exclusion in the Americas

Abstract: This article examines the history of Asian migration and exclusion in the Americas by focusing on the intersections of national histories, transnational migration, and the globality of race. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, a transnational conversation about race, migration, and national security circulated throughout North and South America. The subject was the global migration of Asians and the alleged threat they posed. By examining the circularity of Asian migration within the Americas as well as the transnational nature of anti-Asian racism, this article seeks to revise our understandings of transnationalism and contribute to the larger global history of race.

Cities of Color: The New Racial Frontier in California's Minority-Majority Cities

Abstract: Demographic changes of enormous magnitude have altered the ethnic and racial composition of large cities and metropolitan suburbs across the nation over the past thirty years, especially in California. Many cities and suburbs that were once home to large majorities of whites are now places where ethnic and racial minorities form the majority. "Minority-majority" cities in California have emerged as a new frontier in ethnic and race relations, where African Americans, Latinos, and other non-white groups now fi nd themselves, many for the fi rst time, living together and struggling to coexist. Although confl ict, tension, and misunderstanding characterize this new racial frontier, historians and other scholars must look deeper to fi nd examples of cooperation and collaboration in these new "cities of color." This article considers three cities in California-Compton, East Palo Alto, and Seaside-as examples of the historical and contemporary forces that have shaped "minority-majority" cities and the relations between African Americans and Latinos in particular.

The Cultural Politics of Tourism in San Francisco's Chinatown, 1882-1917

Abstract: During the 1880s San Francisco bohemians began to portray Chinatown as a place in which the forces of marginalization allowed a premodern authenticity to fl ourish. Their depictions of Chinatown resonated with a growing number of tourists. Historians have examined these developments, but few have considered the ways in which touristic interest in "authentic Chinatown" created new opportunities for entrepreneurial activity and social action. As this article argues, white and Chinese San Franciscans seized these opportunities. By the 1890s white tour guides had begun to stage scenes of depravity and present them as "authentic." Some Chinese San Franciscans performed within these scenes; others responded to tourists with practiced indifference, contempt, or hostility. A loose coalition of Chinatown merchants pursued a third strategy. They sought to rechannel touristic interest by locating Chinatown9s authenticity within its exotic architecture, theatrical performances, curios, and cuisine. In doing so, they affi rmed perceptions of Chinese American "otherness."

Exhibiting World War II in Japan and the United States since 1995

Abstract: Museum professionals, like most people, dislike being the focus of criticism, yet many have recently found themselves in this predicament over exhibits focusing on the histories of major social confl icts. An especially tense issue for both Japanese and American museums has been treatment of World War II, particularly how to portray the motives, policies, and conduct of their own governments during the war. Curators have not always been prepared for the intense criticism and for the charge that differences of opinion are caused by a clash of irreconcilable ideologies, only one of which is valid. Japanese and American museums have deployed similar strategies-some effective, some self-defeating-for meeting those challenges. Neither has found ideal solutions, although some approaches, such as presenting multiple points of view and providing opportunities for interaction, seem to hold greater promise than others.

Cattle in Hawai'i: Biological and Cultural Exchange

Abstract: Capt. George Vancouver fifirst introduced cattle to the Hawaiian Islands in 1793, and the animals rapidly multiplied, roaming wild and causing environmental destruction for decades. In 1832 the Hawaiian monarch imported Mexican vaqueros to train Native Hawaiians in the skills necessary to manage and control the wild livestock, which led to the development of Hawaiian cowboys, known as paniolos, with a unique and locally celebrated cowboy culture that mixes Native Hawaiian elements with vaquero influences. This study of biotic and cultural exchange and native adaptation complicates and adds to our understanding of Hawai‘‘i’’s place in the American West and the cultural factors that encourage and mediate biological invasions .

Intelligence Testing at Whittier School, 1890-1920

Abstract: This article examines the intersections of youth, race, and science in early twentieth-century California. It explores how scientific researchers, reform school administrators, and social reformers at Whittier State School advocated the use of intelligence tests to determine the causes of delinquency. Through the process of testing, they identified a disproportionate number of delinquent boys of color-Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans-as mentally deficient or "feebleminded." As the evidence reveals, intelligence, race, heredity, and criminality became inextricably linked as the basis for segregating and removing youth of color from the reformatory. The records indicate that, despite officials' recommendations to send feebleminded boys to state hospitals that routinely sterilized their wards, as allowed by a 1909 state law, they sent the majority of youth to the Preston School of Industry, a reform school for older boys. In this instance, expediency in creating a premier institution at Whittier State School took precedence over larger eugenicists designs.

Journeys for Peace and Liberation: Third World Internationalism and Radical Orientalism during the U.S. War in Vietnam

Abstract: This article introduces a forthcoming book project that examines the international travels of American antiwar activists during the U.S. War in Vietnam. Specifically, it explores how going beyond the nation9s borders fostered and solidified a sense of internationalism, a conviction of political solidarity, with Third World nations among U.S. radicals of varying backgrounds. This study builds on recent trends in Asian American history and contributes to the scholarship on social movements during the ““long decade”” of the 1960s by providing a transnational, racially comparative, and gendered analysis of political activism. It also introduces the concept of ““radical Orientalism”” to describe the ways in which Americans of varying racial backgrounds perceived, imagined, and understood Asia, its culture, and its peoples as sources of political inspiration.

Water and Land: Asian Americans and the U.S. West

Abstract: What happens when we examine U.S. West history from the vantage point of Asian Americans moving back and forth across the Pacific and consider a perspective shaped by both land and water? This article underscores the importance of the Pacific Ocean as a space for historical inquiry, by addressing the formation and migration of Asian American communities in and around the Pacific, particularly in the context of the considerable military, economic, and political dominance of the United States in the Pacific region.

Segregationists Confront American Empire: The Conservative White South and the Question of Hawaiian Statehood, 1947–1959

Abstract: Legislative and public debate over Hawai‘‘i””s proposed statehood coincided with the intensification of the African American freedom struggle in the U.S. South as well as the post-World War II rise of anti-colonial nationalism in Africa and Asia. To white racial conservatives, these were interrelated threats; each challenged the once-dominant association of whiteness and access to democracy. This article uncovers and analyzes the widespread grass-roots opposition to Hawaiian statehood among white Southerners. In doing so, it casts post-World War II racial conservatism in a new light: by illustrating how segregationists turned their attention to places far beyond the borders of the U.S. South to defend the ideology that legitimated Jim Crow; by highlighting the persistence of a race-based anti-imperialist sentiment; and by exploring segregationist ideas about race, religion, and the right to self-rule.

Sir William Drummond Stewart: Aristocratic Masculinity in the American West

Abstract: Sir William Drummond Stewart is known mostly as the patron of artist Alfred Jacob Miller, but he is worth examining in his own right for the ways in which his travels, collecting, and fiction reveal how western myths could resonate in contexts other than the familiar project of American nationalism. This article explores how the West served as an imaginative and literal site on which Stewart constructed his masculinity. Yet the more that Stewart tried to stabilize his identity through real and textual encounters with the West, the more this ground shifted under him. For instance, Stewart's novels depict the West as a place where gender and ethnicity were unpredictable and malleable. Thus, while discourses of western adventure have often been interpreted as a straightforward narrative of violence, Stewart's romantic tourism, although fraught with contradictions, reveals how western adventure could contain multiple meanings.

Julia Morgan: Gender, Architecture, and Professional Style

Abstract: Architect Julia Morgan (1872-1957) cultivated a professional style that enabled her to exert authority in a male-dominated profession. This article focuses on three aspects of that style: her costume, her relationship to the media, and her downtown San Francisco offi ce. Rather than a shy woman who sought anonymity, Morgan was a savvy professional with a strong gender consciousness who actively sought success and shaped her own destiny. Her story provides insight into the history of women in the professions and the gendered landscape of the Progressive Era city. Since Julia Morgan left behind few words regarding her social views, professional intentions, or architectural philosophy, this article is also an interdisciplinary exercise that investigates the intersection of biography, material culture, gender, and the built environment.

Whither the Asian American Coalition

Abstract: This article offers a brief history of the Asian American coalition and suggests how possible new directions for the coalition in the future may affect the scope and preoccupations of Asian American history as it will be written. ““Asian American”” was an idea invented in the 1960s to bring together Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino Americans for strategic purposes. Soon other Asian-origin groups, such as Korean, Vietnamese, and South Asian Americans, were added. The article considers four groups who some people have suggested have strategic links with the Asian American coalition——Pacific Islander Americans, multiracial people of part-Asian descent, international adoptees from Asian countries, and Arab and other Middle Eastern Americans. It examines whether and how each group might be considered part of the Asian American coalition, and what impact their inclusion might have on the writing of Asian American history.

Wallace Stegner's Arabian Discovery: Imperial Blind Spots in a Continental Vision

Abstract: In 1956 Wallace Stegner wrote a history of the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco), but it was only published fifteen years later——in Beirut. The book complicates the view of Stegner as a destroyer of American western myths and a forerunner of the social and environmental turn in western history. Stegner shared with those who bought his services some problematic ideas about American identity and history in the context of the Cold War. His forgotten history of oil exploration in Saudi Arabia reveals the blind spots in his ““continental vision,”” an inability or unwillingness to see the moment as part of the long, unbroken past of the U.S. West. Stegner9s journey, from chronicler of the despoiling of the West by eastern oil and copper barons to defender of cultural diversity and the collective commons, stopped, as it has for many other Americanists, at the water9s edge.