Showing papers in "Pacific Historical Review in 2014"

Japanese Immigrant Settler Colonialism in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands and the U.S. Racial-Imperialist Politics of the Hemispheric “Yellow Peril”

Abstract: The scholarship on the “Yellow Peril” looks at Japanese immigrants (Issei) as an object of anti-Asian racialization in domestic politics or as a distraction in U.S.-Japanese bilateral diplomacy. Seldom do historians consider its ramifications outside those contexts. They also lack perspective on the impact of Issei practice on the geopolitics of Yellow Peril, which spread from California to the U.S.-Mexican borderlands and beyond. This article examines the role of Issei settler colonialism, as well as its unintended consequences, in the formation of discourse on the transborder Yellow Peril. That discourse propelled white America to reaffirm its commitment to the Monroe Doctrine, shifting the nature of U.S. diplomacy from the endeavor to keep European rivals out of the Western Hemisphere to one that sought to exclude the Japanese racial enemy from America’s “backyard.” It culminated in the construction of a hemispheric national security regime.

Before Restriction Became Exclusion: America’s Experiment in Diplomatic Immigration Control

Abstract: The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) marked a turning point in the history of U.S. immigration control, but it was not as definitive a move toward gatekeeping as historians have suggested. Contemporaries called the 1882 law the “Chinese Restriction Act,” reserving the term “exclusion” for its successor in 1888. The rhetorical change paralleled an important shift in policy. During Chinese Restriction (1882–1888), the United States so valued its relationship with China that it made immigration restriction subject to diplomatic negotiation. Only after the Restriction Act failed and China signaled capitulation did the United States enact Chinese Exclusion (1888), which prohibited Chinese workers, asserted America’s sovereign power to exclude, and developed modern systems of enforcement. The transition from diplomatic Restriction to unilateral Exclusion represents a powerful aggrandizement of American power.

“This Is Our Enemy”The Writers’ War Board and Representations of Race in Comic Books, 1942–1945

Abstract: During World War II, the U.S. government, through the Writers’ War Board (WWB), co-opted comic books as an essential means of disseminating race-based propaganda to adult Americans, including members of the armed forces. Working with comic creators, the WWB crafted narratives supporting two seemingly incompatible wartime policies: racializing America’s enemies as a justification for total war and simultaneously emphasizing the need for racial tolerance within American society. Initially, anti-German and anti-Japanese narratives depicted those enemies as racially defective but eminently beatable opponents. By late 1944, however, WWB members demanded increasingly vicious comic-book depictions of America’s opponents, portraying them as irredeemably violent. Still, the Board embraced racial and ethnic unity at home as essential to victory, promoting the contributions of Chinese, Jewish, and African Americans.

Transatlantic and Transpacific Connections in Early American History

Abstract: This article explores America’s earliest engagement with the transpacific world and in particular with China. From the mid-eighteenth century, Americans seeking new economic opportunities considered Asia and the Pacific region important to their development. Taking advantage of their geographical proximity to both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, Americans developed ways to connect the two regions. These transoceanic networks of trade proved crucial to the economic and political development of the young United States and set the stage for its future influence in the region.

“Unholy Traffic in Human Blood and Souls”Systems of California Indian Servitude under U.S. Rule

Abstract: From 1846 onward, at least 20,000 California Indians worked in varied forms of bondage under U.S. rule. This essay provides the first article-length survey of the statewide rise and fall of California’s systems of Indian servitude under U.S. rule, including their Russo-Hispanic antecedents, establishment under martial law, expansion under civilian rule, and dismantling by state and federal authorities. Further, this article proposes the first taxonomy of these systems and, in conclusion, discusses how California Indian servitude illuminates the histories of California, the western United States, the nation as a whole, and the western hemisphere while suggesting new analytical methods and research directions.

Chinese and American Collaborations through Educational Exchange during the Era of Exclusion, 1872–1955

Abstract: Overlapping communities of American missionaries and higher education administrators and faculty laid the foundations for international education in the United States during the first half-century of that movement’s existence. Their interests and activities in China, in conjunction with Chinese efforts to develop modern educational systems in the early twentieth century, meant that Chinese students featured prominently among foreign students in the United States. Through the education and career of Meng Zhi, an American-educated convert to Christianity, staunch patriot, and long-term director of the China Institute in America, this article examines the transition of international education programs from U.S.-dominated efforts to extend influence overseas to initiatives intended to advance Chinese nationalist projects for modernization.

Hobos in Heaven: Race, Incarceration, and the Rise of Los Angeles, 1880–1910

Abstract: Between 1880 and 1910, the U.S. West was, per capita, the nation’s leading site of incarceration. Across the region, poor white men comprised the vast majority of prisoners who lost all civil rights and often were sentenced to chain gangs, rock piles, and road crews building public infrastructure. Focused on Los Angeles, where local elites built one of the nation’s largest jail systems, this article excavates a nearly forgotten history of poor white men targeted for incarceration, stripped of civil rights, subjected to forced labor, and systematically marginalized in the U.S. West. It also chronicles how the effort to build an idyllic white settler society drove the phenomenal rise of white male imprisonment at the turn of the twentieth century. In turn, this article unearths a uniquely western tale within the history of race and imprisonment in the United States.

Early California Reconsidered: Mexicans, Anglos, and Indians at Mission San Jose

Abstract: David Weber was the leading scholar of the Spanish Borderlands in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Just before his death in 2010, Weber shared a rare interrogation he found in Mexico’s major archive with us. It concerned Jedediah Smith’s California incursion into the Central San Joaquin Valley in 1827–1828. Using digitized databases of Franciscan registers from Mission San Jose and Mission Santa Clara, we have decoded the interrogation and identified all the Indians questioned, as well as those mentioned in the document, by tribal origin and language affiliation. By lifting the veil of Indian anonymity, we were able to better understand the motivation behind each testimony allowing us to offer, for the first time in the literature, a look at the impact of Jedediah Smith’s expedition from an Indian perspective. Indian interaction (both tribal and Mission) with Mexican and American imperialism is central to understanding Smith’s disruptive impact in California.

Who Closed the Sea? Archipelagoes of Amnesia Between the United States and Japan

Abstract: There is a profound lack of awareness among younger generations about Japan’s prewar engagement with the Pacific Islands, let alone other colonial sites, yet arguably, this amnesia is not a spontaneous phenomenon. Forgetting about Micronesia and erasing it from the Japanese mass consciousness was a project in which both Japanese and American postwar forces were complicit. Focusing on stories of Japanese amnesia and selective memory in the Marshall Islands, I explore the Marshallese notion of “closing the sea,” how U.S. power has long been a mediating factor in why Japanese forget their Pacific past, and also why Marshall Islanders remember it.

Rebuilding Japantown: Japanese Americans in Transpacific San Francisco during the Cold War

Abstract: This article follows the transpacific process of race-making and urban redevelopment in the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center in San Francisco. Japanese Americans carved out spaces for themselves in the Center’s development by mediating between city representatives and Japanese interests and culture. Their role built on their professional skills as well as contemporary racial thinking about Japanese Americans and U.S. expansionism in the Pacific. As the United States sought out connections with a nation understood as particularly alien, Japanese Americans rearticulated contemporary perceptions of their foreignness toward their inclusion. This story helps us better understand how Japanese Americans moved from “alien citizens” through World War II to “success stories” just decades later, as well as some of the connections of the postwar Pacific world.

Kilsoo Haan, American Intelligence, and the Anticipated Japanese Invasion of California, 1931–1943

Abstract: To what extent did U.S. intelligence believe that Imperial Japanese forces would invade the West Coast, an idea that many believe was responsible for the alleged atmosphere of wartime hysteria that led to mass confinement of West Coast Japanese Americans? Based on unused archival materials, this article shows that these agencies dismissed the idea of an impending Japanese invasion, shown by their negative reaction to Korean nationalist Kilsoo Haan’s “Yellow Peril” prediction of a Japanese invasion of California in 1943. It also demonstrates that assumptions about Yellow Peril ideas require more nuanced analysis, for they were not universally accepted or as widespread as often believed. The article concludes with observations on Kilsoo Haan, U.S. intelligence, and Japanese American internment.

Pacific Ocean: Highway to Gold Mountain, 1850–1900

Abstract: This article takes a broad look at the Pacific Ocean in relation to Chinese migration. As trade, consumption and capital flows followed migrants, powerful networks were woven and sustained; in time, the networks fanned across the Pacific from British Columbia along the West Coast of the United States to New Zealand and Australia. The overlapping personal, family, financial, and commercial interests of Chinese in California and those in Hong Kong, which provide the focus of this study, energized the connections and kept the Pacific busy and dynamic while shaping the development of regions far beyond its shores. The ocean turned into a highway for Chinese seeking Gold Mountain, marking a new era in the history of South China, California, and the Pacific Ocean itself.

The “Woman Pigeon”Gendered Bonds and Barriers in the Anglo–American Commercial Community in Canton and Macao, 1800–1849

Abstract: Prior to the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, Chinese officials prohibited the presence of foreign women in China. While many Chinese regulations concerning foreign merchants and missionaries were not enforced, this rule was. In 1830 and again in the 1840s, in the aftermath of the first Opium War, clusters of British and American families traveled up the Pearl River to the factories that housed visiting merchants in Canton (Guangzhou). On both occasions, trouble ensued. But the conflicts may not have been all they seemed. This article suggests that foreign women did have the potential to be a problem in China, less because of inherent cultural differences than because both Chinese officials and Western merchants used Western women to embody a boundary between peoples.

Indirect Agents of Empire: Army Officers’ Wives in British India and the American West, 1830–1875

Abstract: The experiences of army officers’ wives stationed in British India and the U.S. West during the period 1830–1875 offer a critical dimension to understandings of imperialism. This comparative analysis argues that these women designed a distinct identity that blueprinted, directed, and legitimized the ambitions of empire. In feminizing the Army’s ranking system, officers’ wives appropriated and wielded male authority. Military homes—a space where class, race, ethnicity, and gender intersected—functioned as operational sites of empire, and, in managing household servants, officers’ wives both designed and endorsed the principles of benevolent imperialism. Whether adjudicating local disputes, emasculating soldier-servants of lower rank, or enacting the social norms of the metropole, these women confidently executed their duty as imperial agents.

Dance Moves: An African American Ballet Company in Postwar Los Angeles

Abstract: This article argues that a group of young African Americans in the 1940s and 1950s used ballet as a means of crossing racial and class barriers of an art form in which few blacks had until then participated. Founded in 1946 by white choreographer Joseph Rickard (1918–1994), the First Negro Classic Ballet was one of the first African American ballet companies in the country9s history and the first black ballet company known to last over a decade. With the goal of multiethnic cooperation in the arts, the company created a series of original “dance-dramas,” several with musical scores by resident composer Claudius Wilson, to perform for white and black audiences in venues throughout Southern and Northern California during the postwar era.

Introduction: Conversations on transpacific history

Abstract: While recent historical studies of transnational processes, persons, and events within and across the Pacific Ocean have proliferated, they have yet to cohere as part of a single scholarly field. Instead, they stand as hybrid studies bridging two or more conventional fields, including histories of the American West, U.S. immigration and ethnicity, U.S. diplomatic and international relations, Asian American studies, East Asian studies, and Pacific Islander studies. This special issue of the Pacific Historical Review explores important possibilities for the emerging research area of “transpacific history” to interweave these conventional fields in ways that can better explore the social, economic, political, and transnational complexities of developments within and across the Pacific Ocean.

Japanese Reinvention of Self through Hawai‘i’s Japanese Americans

Abstract: This article investigates the relationship between Asian American and modern Japanese history by analyzing the image of Japanese Americans in postwar Japan. Based on a book of photographs featuring Japanese immigrants in Hawai‘i published in 1956, it analyzes how their image was appropriated and redefined in Japan to promote as well as reinforce the nation’s political and cultural alliance with the United States. The photographs showed the successful acculturation of Japanese in Hawai‘i to the larger American society and urged the Japanese audience to see that their nation’s postwar reconstruction would come through the power and protection of the United States. Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i served as a lens through which the Japanese in Japan could imagine their position under American hegemony in the age of Cold War.

Jim Rockford or Tony Soprano: Coastal Contrasts in American Suburbia

Abstract: Both in television shows such as The Rockford Files and The Sopranos and in the fiction of writers such as John Updike, Richard Ford, and Douglas Coupland, popular culture draws a distinction between Atlantic Coast and Pacific Coast suburbs. The differences revolve around two themes. The first concerns the roles of place and space. The second is the varying weight of history, often as manifested through families and social ties. Eastern suburbs and suburbanites are commonly depicted as embedded in place, rooted in time, and entangled in social networks. Western suburbs and suburbanites are often imagined as the opposite—isolated in space, atemporal, and free (or bereft) of social bonds.