Showing papers in "Pacific Historical Review in 2019"

California’s First Mass Incarceration System: Franciscan Missions, California Indians, and Penal Servitude, 1769–1836

Abstract: Over time, California’s missions came to resemble a mass incarceration system in general and penal servitude in particular. This article will describe that process by examining changing policies of recruitment, spatial confinement, regimentation, surveillance, physical restraint, and corporal punishment as well as California Indian resistance. With the help of secular government authorities, Franciscans and their military allies established the system between 1769 and 1790 before deploying more overtly carceral practices between 1790 and 1836. In its conclusion, this article explores the meaning of California’s missions as carceral spaces before suggesting new avenues of research on the history of incarceration within and beyond California.

Artificial Intelligence and Japan’s Fifth Generation: The Information Society, Neoliberalism, and Alternative Modernities

Abstract: In 1982, Japan launched its Fifth Generation Computer Systems project (FGCS), designed to develop intelligent software that would run on novel computer hardware. As the first national, large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) research and development (R&D) project to be free from military influence and corporate profit motives, the FGCS was open, international, and oriented around public goods. Although the FGCS did not plan any commercialized technologies, many American computer experts portrayed it as an economic threat to U.S. dominance in computing and the global economy—and policymakers around the developed world believed them and funded AI projects of their own. Later, however, the FGCS was remembered as a failure. Why? This article recasts the FGCS as an interstice in the shift from a state-funded regime of American science organization to the neoliberal privatized regime of R&D now ascendant around the world. By exploring how notions of economic competitiveness and national security shaped R&D, this article reveals AI to be a product of contingent choices by multiple actors—nation-states, government bureaucracies, corporations, and individuals—rather than the outcome of deterministic technological forces.

A Question of Democracy in U.S. Foreign Policy

Abstract: This essay is part of a roundtable titled “The Scholarship, Influence, and Legacy of David F. Schmitz.” The roundtable includes an introduction from Andrew L. Johns; essays by Vanessa Walker, Steven J. Brady, Kimber M. Quinney, and Kathryn C. Statler; and a response from David F. Schmitz.

“America’s Gunpowder Women”: Pearl S. Buck and the Struggle for American Feminism, 1937–1941

Abstract: This article uncovers the little-known story of how the novelist Pearl S. Buck used her authority as a popular expert on China to pose a direct challenge to her white middle-class American readers in the post-suffrage era. Through provocative comparisons between Chinese and white American women, Buck alleged that educated white women had failed to live up to their potential, and she demanded that they earn social equality by advancing into male-dominated professions outside the home. Although many of her readers disagreed, the novelist’s challenge was welcomed by the National Woman’s Party (NWP), which sought to abolish all gender-based discrimination and preferential treatment through the introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). This story revises our understanding of the post-suffrage era by showing the vibrancy of feminist debates in the final years of the Great Depression, and it provides a new way into seeing how racialized thinking shaped American conceptions of women’s progress between first- and second-wave feminist movements.

Exploding the 1950s Consumer Dream: Mannequins and Mushroom Clouds at Doom Town, Nevada Test Site

Abstract: While the nuclear mushroom cloud rising above the Nevada desert is an iconic and familiar image, what went on beneath the cloud is hazier and less well understood. At the surface level nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site in the 1950s entailed extensive scientific, military, and social experiments. This article focuses on two projects overseen by the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA), Doom Town I and II, and their ties with 1950s cultural values and the consumer landscape. This article situates the two mock American townscapes as part of the cultural battlefield of the Cold War and explores how they served as powerful but also deeply flawed symbols of U.S. capitalism and a new suburban way of life.

“No Japanese in the Cockpit”: The Airplane and the Role of Race, Culture, and Bodies in Postwar U.S.-Japan Relations

Abstract: This article examines the techno-cultural process of accommodating, training, and qualifying the Japanese as pilots responsible for Pacific flights in the decade after the end of the allied occupation of Japan in 1952. There were two related modes of qualifying Japanese pilots, both of which created traffic of people, knowledge, and machines across the Pacific: One was the slow, politicized process of permitting Japanese pilots to fly again and training them with reference to American models of flying. Another mode of qualification consisted of measuring and recording the bodily differences between Japanese and American pilots, so that Japanese bodies could fit into American-designed cockpits and flying garments. Under the postwar technopolitical regime and given lingering racial perceptions, the terms and norms of the flying body and practice were mostly set by the American system, to which the Japanese worked hard to adapt. In this process, the cockpit and the Pacific served as crucial frames of reference for the Japanese. With its focus on pilot training and qualification, this article aims to bring together the histories of aviation, science, and U.S.-Japan relations and to situate them in the Pacific as a physical, imaginary, and technopolitical space.

The 1930s Origins of California’s Farmworker-Church Alliance

Abstract: In the 1930s, Social Gospel ministers in the Los Angeles area organized to help farmworkers in Southern California. The reformist pastors worked across class, denominational, and racial lines and transcended language barriers as they built urban, coastal support for immigrant farmworkers in interior valleys. In the end, they failed, largely because employers were able to use the Communist affiliations of the farmworker union leaders to Red-bait and intimidate the ministers. Only when a later generation of labor leaders distanced their movement from Communism and grounded it in Christian rhetoric and imagery would this religious-labor alliance achieve victory.

Caging Out, Caging In:: Building a Carceral State at the U.S-Mexico Divide

Abstract: Border fences have a long history in the United States, and that history is deeply entangled with the rise of the carceral state. As fences along the U.S.-Mexico border grew over the course of the twentieth century, they increasingly restricted the mobility of migrants both as they crossed the U.S.-Mexico divide and once they were within U.S. territory. This article analyzes how fear of being apprehended, arrested, detained, or deported has forced migrants to remain in the shadows; and it argues that as border fences expanded in length and height, they transformed the United States into a massive, carceral state.

Politics in Other Ways: Negotiating Black Power, Radical Politics, and Multiracial Solidarities in Seattle’s Japanese American Community

Abstract: This article explores the ways that Seattle’s Asian American—and in particular Japanese American—community negotiated the shifting terrain of racial politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While Seattle’s city leaders—and indeed many in the civil rights establishment—heralded the city for its racial liberalism, a young cadre of activists organized across racial and ethnic boundaries and challenged established leadership to articulate a robust, anti-racist, working-class multiracial politics. Significantly, the rise of Black and Asian anti-racist solidarities exploded the city’s narrative of exceptional racial harmony in an age of social crisis. Activists adopted a capacious definition of community that could acknowledge specific identities while simultaneously coalescing around a shared sense of injury. They also practiced a form of grassroots politics that was flexible and improvisational, that was enacted both within and outside established organizations and channels, and that ultimately blurred the distinction between moderation and radicalism.