Since its inception in 1928, the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association (PPWA) has witnessed and contributed to enormous changes in world and Pacific history. Operating out of Honolulu, this women’s network established a series of conferences that promoted social reform and an internationalist outlook through cultural exchange. For the many women attracted to the project—from China, Japan, the Pacific Islands, and the major settler colonies of the region—the association’s vision was enormously attractive, despite the fact that as individuals and national representatives they remained deeply divided by colonial histories. Glamour in the Pacific tells this multifaceted story by bringing together critical scholarship from across a wide range of fields, including cultural history, international relations and globalization, gender and empire, postcolonial studies, population and world health studies, world history, and transnational history. Early chapters consider the first PPWA conferences and the decolonizing process undergone by the association. Following World War II, a new generation of nonwhite women from decolonized and settler colonial nations began to claim leadership roles in the Association, challenging the often Eurocentric assumptions of women’s internationalism. In 1955 the first African American delegate brought to the fore questions about the relationship of U.S. race relations with the Pan-Pacific cultural internationalist project. The effects of cold war geopolitics on the ideal of international cooperation in the era of decolonization were also considered. The work concludes with a discussion of the revival of "East meets West" as a basis for world cooperation endorsed by the United Nations in 1958 and the overall contributions of the PPWA to world culture politics. The internationalist vision of the early twentieth century imagined a world in which race and empire had been relegated to the past. Significant numbers of women from around the Pacific brought this shared vision—together with their concerns for peace, social progress and cooperation—to the lively, even glamorous, political experiment of the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association. Fiona Paisley tells the stories of this extraordinary group of women and illuminates the challenges and rewards of their politics of antiracism—one that still resonates today.

This book explores the emergence of 'Australasia' as a way of thinking about the culture and geography of this region. Although it is frequently understood to apply only to Australia and New Zealand, the concept has a longer and more complicated history. 'Australasia' emerged in the mid-18th century in both French and British writing as European empires extended their reach into Asia and the Pacific, and initially held strong links to the Asian continent. The book shows that interpretations and understandings of 'Australasia' shifted away from Asia in light of British imperial interests in the 19th century, and the concept was adapted by varying political agendas and cultural visions in order to reach into the Pacific or towards Antarctica. The Making and Remaking of Australasia offers a number of rich case studies which highlight how the idea itself was adapted and moulded by people and texts both in the southern hemisphere and the imperial metropole where a range of competing actors articulated divergent visions of this part of the British Empire. An important contribution to the cultural history of the British Empire, Australia, New Zealand and Pacific Studies, this collection shows how 'Australasia' has had multiple, often contrasting, meanings.

Robert Penn Warren once wrote West is where we all plan to go some day, and indeed, images of the westernmost United States provide a mythic horizon to American cultural landscape. While the five states (California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and Hawai'i) which touch Pacific waters do share commonalities within the history of westward expansion, the peoples who settled the region—and the indigenous peoples they encountered—have created spheres of culture that defy simple categorization. This wide-ranging reference volume explores the marvelously eclectic cultures that define the Pacific region. From the music and fashion of the Pacific northwest to the film industry and surfing subcultures of southern California, from the vast expanses of the Alaskan wilderness to the schisms between native and tourist culture in Hawa'ii, this unprecedented reference provides a detailed and fascinating look at American regionalism along the Pacific Rim. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Regional Cultures is the first rigorous reference collection on the many ways in which American identity has been defined by its regions and its people. Each of its eight regional volumes presents thoroughly researched narrative chapters on Architecture; Art; Ecology & Environment; Ethnicity; Fashion; Film & Theater; Folklore; Food; Language; Literature; Music; Religion; and Sports & Recreation. Each book also includes a volume-specific introduction, as well as a series foreword by noted regional scholar and former National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman William Ferris, who served as consulting editor for this encyclopedia.

Women in Transnational History offers a range of fresh perspectives on the field of women’s history, exploring how cross-border connections and global developments since the nineteenth century have shaped diverse women’s lives and the gendered social, cultural, political and economic histories of specific localities. The book is divided into three thematically-organised parts, covering gendered histories of transnational networks, women’s agency in the intersecting histories of imperialisms and nationalisms, and the concept of localizing the global and globalizing the local. Discussing a broad spectrum of topics from the politics of dress in Philippine mission stations in the early twentieth century to the shifting food practices of British women during the Second World War, the chapters bring women to the centre of the writing of new transnational histories. Illustrated with images and figures, this book throws new light on key global themes from the perspective of women’s and gender history. Written by an international team of editors and contributors, it is a valuable and timely resource for students and researchers of both women’s history and transnational and global history.

This book examines the Red Love vogue that swept across the Asia-Pacific in the 1920s and 1930s as part of a worldwide interest in socialism and follows its trails throughout the twentieth century. Encouraging both political and sexual liberation, Red Love was a transnational movement demonstrating the revolutionary potential of love and desire.

This “important comprehensive study” of WWII in the Pacific examines the high-level decision-making and strategy that led to victory (Roanoke Times). Once the stories have been told of battles won and lost, most of what happens in a war remains a mystery. So it has been with accounts of World War II in the Pacific, a complex conflict whose nature is often obscured by simple chronological narratives. In The Pacific War, William B. Hopkins, a Marine Corps veteran of the Pacific war and respected military history author, opens the story of the Pacific campaign to a broader and deeper view. Hopkins investigates the strategies, politics, and personalities that shaped the fighting. His regional approach to this complex war conducted on land, sea, and air offers an insightful perspective on how this multifaceted conflict unfolded. As expansive as the immense reaches of the Pacific, and as focused as the most intensive pinpoint attack on a strategic island, Hopkins’ account offers a fresh way of understanding the hows—and more significantly, the whys—of the Pacific War.

First published in 1976, The Search for Security in the Pacific 1901-1914 is the first volume in a pioneering two-volume history of Australia's relations with the world, from the founding of the Commonwealth to the Great War and its immediate aftermath. This book is based on wide-ranging research in collections of personal and official papers in Australia, Britain, the United States and Canada and offers original insights into Australia's political culture. In taking the story up to the outbreak of the European conflict it shows the great impact that the looming presence of East Asia had on Australia's perception of the world and on the evolution of a distinctive defence and foreign policy. It tells the story of how in an age of race nationalism the fear of Asia led first to the making of the Commonwealth and the White Australia policy and then after Japan's defeat of Russia in 1905 to the potential prospect of a military invasion from the north. This sense of an 'Australian Crisis' pervaded the whole society and found expression in poetry, plays, novels, cartoons, at least one film, newspaper editorials as well as political speeches. To meet this threat Australian leaders, against all the advice from the British authorities, introduced compulsory military training and established a navy and a fledgling air force. The outbreak of the European war found the Australians resentful about the British betrayal and anxious to know what the Empire's involvement in that conflict might mean for the Pacific. This divergence of security concerns created tension between Australia's community of culture and its community of interest, between its British identity and its geopolitical circumstances.

There has never been a war like the one in the Pacific between the American Allies and the Empire of Japan. Unrivalled in its scope, it was a clash of cultures that turned tropical islands into killing grounds and laid waste cities with weapons of mass destruction. It turned World War II into a global war and ended with Japan's surrender. Here, an expert panel of ex-servicemen and military historians describe with clarity and dramatic detail each step of the conflict, providing a unique account of the myriad operations and underlying strategy of the bitter struggle to defeat Japan.