Showing papers in "Pacific Historical Review in 2008"

““Beyond This World of Transiency and Impermanence””: Japanese Americans, Dharma Bums, and the Making of American Buddhism during the Early Cold War Years

Abstract: This article examines the growing interest in Buddhism in the United States during the Cold War, analyzing discussions and debates around the authenticity of various Buddhist teachings and practices that emerged in an interracial Buddhist study group and its related publications. Japanese American Buddhists had developed a modified form of Jōōdo Shinshūū devotional practice as a strategy for building ethnic community and countering racialization as religious and racial Others. The authenticity of these practices was challenged by European and European American scholars and artists, especially the Beats, who drew upon Orientalist representations of Buddhism as ancient, exotic, and mysterious. In response, Japanese American Buddhists crafted their own definition of ““tradition”” by drawing from institutional and devotional developments dating back to fourteenth-century Japan as well as more recent Japanese American history. The article contextualizes these debates within the broader discussion of cultural pluralism and race relations during the Cold War.

““America's Chinese””: Anti-Communism, Citizenship, and Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold War

Abstract: With the onset of the Cold War, the federal government became concerned with the impact that the status and treatment of Chinese Americans as a racial minority in American society had on perceptions of the United States among populations in the Asian Pacific. As a response, the State Department9s cultural diplomacy campaigns targeting the Pacific Rim used Chinese Americans, including Betty Lee Sung (writer for the Voice of America) and Jade Snow Wong and Dong Kingman (artists who conducted lectures and exhibitions throughout Asia). By doing so, the government legitimated Chinese Americans9 long-standing claims to full citizenship in new and powerful ways. But the terms on which Chinese Americans served as representatives of the nation and the state——as racial minorities and as ““Overseas Chinese””——also worked to reproduce their racial otherness and mark them as ““non-white”” and foreign, thus compromising their gains in social standing.

Pixel Cowboys and Silicon Gold Mines: Videogames of the American West

Abstract: This article explores representations of the American West in computer and videogames from the late 1970s through 2006. The article reveals how several titles, including the early Boot Hill (1977), invoked classic nineteenth-century western motifs, employing the six-shooter, wagon train, and iron horse to sell late twentieth-century entertainment technology to a global audience. Such games allowed players, typically adolescent males, to recreate a version of history and to participate actively in the more violent aspects of the ““Wild West.”” The arcade Western emerged as a subgenre within computer entertainment, offering a distinctive, interactive amalgam of popular frontier-based fictions, including the nineteenth-century dime novel, Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show, and the modern Hollywood western. Computer technology thus served established myths surrounding the ““Wild West,”” even as New Western History was challenging their authenticity.

Contact, Encounter, and Exchange at Esalen: A Window onto Late Twentieth-Century American Spirituality

Abstract: Approximately 20 percent of Americans today resist traditional religious classification and practice a personalized, eclectic faith. California9s Esalen Institute reflects this development. Since its inception in 1962, this human potential center, which drew on San Francisco9s vibrant East-West scene, has offered a cornucopia of spiritual possibilities. Leaders and participants from around the world shared religious beliefs and scientific theories there. Through these exchanges, Esalen, both a physical and spiritual borderland along the Pacific Rim, served as an experimental hothouse for germinating a variety of religious hybrids and contributed to the changing nature of religion in late twentieth-century America. In the process, it helped revitalize religious notions within a scientific culture. By highlighting this cross-fertilization of ideas and practices, this article adds to our understanding of the dynamic process in which religion is made, remade, and rejuvenated by combining and adding beliefs and practices.

The Engineering of Herbert Hoover

Abstract: This article offers a revisionist account of Herbert Hoover's career as a mining engineer, looking particularly at his activities in Australia and China where he first established his reputation and his fortune. The young Hoover went to Western Australia in 1897 to work for the British firm of Bewick, Moreing. Hoover's employers sent him to China in early 1899. He became a partner two years later and returned to Australia to direct Bewick, Moreing's operations there. After his return to London, he grew increasingly involved in financial dealings and gradually withdrew from the business of mining. Hoover's career as a mining engineer coincided with a period when the authority of engineers assumed a new significance; American mining engineers in particular became trusted experts. Hoover was one such engineer, although this article argues that his role was more ambiguous and compromised than earlier studies have acknowledged.

Making Wilderness Work: Frank Church and the American Wilderness Movement

Abstract: Idaho Senator Frank Church (served 1957––1981) is one of the most important and underappreciated participants in the politics of the American wilderness movement. Church neither originated the wilderness idea nor crafted the language of the original Wilderness Act, but he made wilderness work. Although his legislative compromises and pragmatic politics sometimes infuriated wilderness purists, they were essential to the passage of all three wilderness bills: the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Eastern Wilderness Areas Act of 1974, and the Endangered American Wilderness Act of 1978. As his legislative record demonstrates, Church was not only at the vanguard of the evolving definition of wilderness in America but also established a viable process for designating wilderness areas. Church's coalition-building vision of wilderness as a communally defined natural space, not necessarily ““untrammeled by man,”” became the standard for wilderness designation, and his enduring legacy is a model of citizen cooperation.

From Backlash to Bingo: Ronald Reagan and Federal Indian Policy

Abstract: Ronald Reagan9s contribution to federal Indian policy proved mixed. Remarks by members of his administration recalled the heyday of termination, and Reagan9s budget cuts fell hard on Native Americans. Reagan also played to non-Indian backlash by supporting legislation that restricted tribal rights to file claims on land disputes. Still, the administration continued the policy of tribal self-determination, begun under Richard M. Nixon. Reagan signed legislation to restore the Klamaths to federal trust responsibility, to help tribes ““contract out”” to run many federal services themselves, and to recognize and regulate gaming on Indian reservations. Most importantly, Reagan affirmed ““government to government”” relationships between the federal government, states, and tribes. Federal Indian policy mirrored other aspects of U.S. politics in the 1980s, including reductions in domestic spending, white reaction against minority civil rights gains, and the extolling of entrepreneurship. But the administration9s ability, and even its willingness, to reverse the trend toward tribal self-determination proved limited.

Chukchi Gold: American Enterprise and Russian Xenophobia in the Northeastern Siberia Company

Abstract: During the gold rush in Nome, Alaska, neither Russians nor Americans found significant quantities of gold on the Chukchi Peninsula, across the Bering Strait from the Seward Peninsula. Despite its failure, the documents of the Northeastern Siberian Company (1902––1914) and the memoirs of its managers and employees illuminate important contrasts between the political and cultural perspectives of its founders in St. Petersburg and those of its agents in Seattle. The Russian criticisms of American managers of the company also place the Soviet government9s antipathy to American capitalism in historical context. Despite many differences between the tsarist and Marxist-Leninist ideologies, the hostile stereotypes of Americans expressed by tsarist officials and Russian capitalists in St. Petersburg persisted into the Soviet and post-Soviet periods.

The Battle for Fort Lawton: Competing Environmental Claims in Postwar Seattle

Abstract: Focusing on Seattle in the 1960s and early 1970s, this article argues that the postwar environmental movement grew out of concerns among urbanites about physical and social changes in the metropolitan context. The ““battle of Fort Lawton”” was a series of protests over the conversion of an old army fort to a ““wilderness park.”” In these protests, women and urban Native Americans offered competing arguments about the meaning and uses of nature in the city. This article traces a growing constituency of environmental activists, broadly defined, whose goals ranged from ““beautification”” in the early 1960s to ““ecology”” in the early 1970s. These struggles over open space demonstrate how definitions of nature and of environmentalism often reflected competing visions of politics and of citizenship in the emerging postindustrial city.

Legitimate Collaboration: The Administration of Santo Tomáás Internment Camp and Its Histories, 1942––2003

Abstract: During World War II the Japanese Imperial Army concentrated several thousand Allied civilians at the Santo Tomaas Internment Camp in Manila, the Philippines. Internee and Japanese administrators subsequently collaborated extensively to run the camp. Since its liberation in 1945, however, the camp9s English-language historians have tended to tell the camp experience as a resistance story. This article explores both the history of the camp and its historiography through archival and published sources. It argues that the tendency to recast collaboration into resistance stems from an understanding of collaboration as inherently illegitimate. By conceiving of collaboration as a behavioral category within which lies a spectrum of moral and political legitimacy, the historian can work against this inclination to misunderstand the past.