Though these gannenmono are often regarded as the first Japanese in Hawai’i, many of their countrymen had already visited the islands for at least sixty years, and probably much longer than that.

This was how I stumbled upon the extraordinary life of Anandi Gopal Joshee, known more informally as Anandibai (bai, a term of respect for Marathi women), the first Indian woman to have come to the United States to pursue a medical degree in 1883.

For all its virtues, something was lost in translation.

John Stewart sat hunched in the wooden cage that swung from the ship’s horizontal mainyard, riding out a storm off […]

“This flag is the first foreign banner that was ever carried through the great city.”

Beneath and between its profoundly conservative and aristocratic institutions, Paine’s Britain was a rude, irreverent place where power was fragmented and liberty celebrated.

Celilo Falls was the economic and spiritual center of the Indian world in the Pacific Northwest.

A meditation on early nineteenth-century Chinese portraits of George Washington.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“Peter Parker’s pickled paintings
Cause of nausea, chills & faintings”

: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America”

How did the returned gaze of Chinese laborers function in relation to envisioned awareness of industrial speed?

Twain and Wong countered the nativist visions of white masculinity characteristic of popular romance novels featuring historical or foreign settings.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

Even within itself, the China trade was a complex, multisided, many-splendored thing . . .

The Americans had to decide whether to support the British when doing so meant potentially damaging their nation’s relationship with China in its infancy.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

Melville was moved by the native cultures of the South Seas and appalled by what the missionaries had wrought in Hawaii.

Edith Maude Eaton is more than a token representative of Asian North American literatures within the overarching fields of American and Canadian literatures.

Sometimes we find new ways of seeing by facing the wrong direction.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

The mission of the expedition begun for imperial adventure, expansion, and wealth for Russia in the North Pacific was both an ambitious and an ambiguous one.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

The value of silver for individual Europeans was obvious and longstanding: it meant wealth. For governments, it meant not just wealth, but also power.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

His intellectual powers were fully equal to the challenges of helping his father gather plant specimens and linguistic vocabularies. The emotional stress of the voyage was another matter.

The archive is small but so is the country, and because of that it remains manageable.

Before independence from Britain, North American merchants belonged to an imperial trade network that spanned the globe, from nearby Jamaica […]

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

Sparks’s Ledyard is thus the supreme romantic hero. His adventures are not inhibited by worldly concerns or fear of physical suffering; like the ancient Stoics or the great saints of Christendom, he freely sacrificed himself for some greater cause.

I imagined that my investigations might end up in a decisive graph that would map the number of pages printed against the number of Buddhist converts to Christianity.

Were [Fijians] a race of their own or a mix of many?

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

“Last Night some time in the Middle watch a very extraordinary affair happend to Mr Orton my Clerk, he having been drinking in the Evening, some Malicious person or persons in the Ship took the advantage of his being drunk and cut off all the cloaths from off his back, not being satisfied with this they some time after went into his Cabbin and cut off a part of both his Ears as he lay asleep in his bed.”

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

For three thousand years, these peoples made a homeland of the sea enclosed by Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji. Hava’iki, they called it. They sailed the circuit of the sea with confidence. They traded. They raided. They adventured.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: “Pacific Routes”

For those of us interested in the early history of the United States, these Pacific communities may not be as well known or as influential as their Atlantic counterparts, but their stories still have much to teach us.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

They steered southward towards New Zealand, to try to determine if it was the northern tip of a great southern continent.

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

[T]he Manila Galleon, rather than being a curio or sideshow, represented one of the turning points in history, for with its establishment we find for the first time “substantial and continuous trade across the Pacific Ocean.”

Presented as part of the Special Issue: Pacific Routes

Cook and Malaspina pursued the same goal in the icy North Pacific—a waterway to the Atlantic Ocean—and they each viewed the purported existence of this natural phenomena with rational skepticism.

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