Books in the Studies in Pacific Worlds series

Examines the shibui phenomenon, in which American consumers embraced Japanese culture while still exoticizing this new aesthetic. By examining shibui through the popularity of samurai movies, ikebana flower arrangement, bonsai cultivation, home and garden design, and Zen Buddhism, Mettler provides a new context for understanding how Americans encountered a foreign nation in their everyday lives.

Henry Knight Lozano explores how U.S. boosters, writers, politicians, and settlers promoted and imagined California and Hawai'i as connected places, and how this relationship reveals the fraught constructions of an Americanized Pacific West from the 1840s to the 1950s.

An exploration of competing parental, cultural, and educational interests affecting the hundreds of white missionary children born and raised in the Hawaiian Islands during the nineteenth century, and the impact these children had on U.S. foreign policy of the era.