Pacific Postcards (S21 final essays)
For their final essays, students in spring 2021 selected a primary source (textual, visual, aural, material, or in another media) and used the source to respond to the arguments of a scholar we read together in class. Some students showed how new evidence offered ways to strengthen a scholar's existing claims, while other students used their sources to critique a scholar's arguments.
One student, for example, argued that the Pearl Harbor Memorial, along with its importance to American and Native Hawaiian histories, should also be seen as a meaningful site for Japanese memory and national identity. Another argued engaged Joshua Reid's work to argue that Spanish exploration narratives enrich our perspective of Northwest Coast Native peoples. And a third student argued that focusing on the lands and waters of BIkini Atoll can lead us to miss the experiences of Bikinians themselves.
These and the other essays in this section chart new courses for future Pacific investigations.
