“In the Wake of the Whalers: American Intermediaries on the Arctic Edges of the Pacific World, 1880-1940”

Andrew Stuhl (Bucknell University)

Abstract coming.

“American Soldiers and the Production of Scientific Knowledge in the Philippines”

Amy Kohout (Colorado College)

When we think of imperial science, perhaps we think of top-down bureaucracies aimed at systematically gathering information designed to efficiently exploit the resources of their colonies. But this structure assumes an established empire. What does imperial science look like during imperial formation? How is knowledge about science and nature produced in a “new” place? This paper situates American soldiers stationed in the Philippines as producers of scientific knowledge during the first decade of the twentieth century, amidst the transition from military occupation to more formal American imperial government. I focus on both formal military expeditions tasked with topographical (strategic) and biological surveying and more informal natural history work done by soldiers in their less-structured time. I use these soldiers—and their field books, notes, correspondence, and specimens—to explore the intersection of ideas about science, nature, and empire in both the Philippines and the United States. (After all, these soldiers followed their letters and specimens back across the Pacific to the United States.) In particular, I track the work of Major Edgar Mearns, an army surgeon who organized expeditions, collected for and corresponded with Smithsonian curators, and founded the Philippine Scientific Association during his tours in the Pacific. Major Mearns and his colleagues make visible both formal and informal processes of scientific knowledge production in the Philippines. Their work—and their interest in the natural history of archipelago—also help me to make an argument for expanding our frame for the American frontier across the Pacific.

“Science and Settler Colonialism in Hawaii National Park”

Ashanti Shih (Yale University)

This paper explores the relationship between American science, conservation, and settler colonialism in the formation of Hawaii National Park, the first national park in a United States territory. In the early twentieth century, Euro-American scientists framed the proposed park as a “national asset” comparable to Yosemite and Yellowstone. They advised the area be put under federal control to benefit American tourism, science, and spirit, effectively tying the exotic Hawaiian landscape into the sublime nature of the American West. According to this view, federal management was needed to protect Hawai‘i’s “vanishing” flora and fauna and to ensure the long-term study of the islands’ volcanoes. Hawai‘i was a “remote island” uniquely vulnerable to biogeographical change and a “natural laboratory,” perfect for studying “species mixing.” Scientists’ expert claims over Hawai‘i’s nature resulted in the transfer of former Hawaiian crown lands to the Department of the Interior’s National Park Service in 1916. I argue that this created a permanent, state-sanctioned space for ecological research, prioritizing a particularly western scientific way of knowing nature and form of environmental management. Consequently, it disrupted the existing practices and epistemologies of two other groups: native Hawaiians who had traditionally stewarded that land, and Asian plantation laborers who subsisted off that land during labor strikes. In exploring the complex relationship between the Park Service, settler scientists, Asian immigrants, and native Hawaiians, I recapture diverse ways of knowing Hawai‘i’s nature and explore how ecological science, through its universalizing claims to expertise, has helped justify American settler colonialism in the Pacific.

“Crossroads of American Sovereignty: Suffering and Spectacle in the Nuclear Pacific”

Mary Mitchell (Purdue University)

During the summer of 1946, the US military conducted the first post-war nuclear weapons detonations on Pacific islands over which it did not hold sovereignty. “Operation Crossroads” took place as policy-makers debated whether the United States should take the mid-Pacific islands it occupied at the end of World War II as US territories or give them over to the UN as an American-controlled trusteeship. Crossroads’ widely publicized nuclear weapons tests intervened at a critical moment as the United States considered what form its Pacific imperialism should take in an atomic age. This paper uses the media spectacle of Operation Crossroads to explore what nuclear weapons and their effects meant for competing visions of American sovereignty and power in the postWorld War II Pacific. Approaching Crossroads through the records of its planners, through media accounts, and through citizens’ protest letters, the paper traces the contours of an emerging debate about the locations and meanings of nuclear suffering. It argues that US military officials attempted to reframe the destructive effects of technologies abroad on others peripheral to the US polity as the new price of technological and scientific modernity. Advancing science and technology, they argued, supported the United States’ moral claim to an expanded presence in the Pacific. Some US citizens’ resisted this narrative, however, as the operation opened new controversy over the value of life and the meanings of suffering in American democracy.