We often think of the United States as a nation that spans “from sea to shining sea.” But what about the sea beyond? What role have the Pacific Ocean and its peoples played in the history of the United States and vice versa? In this course, we will go beyond “sea to shining sea” to highlight the importance of the Pacific World to U.S. history from the founding to the present, emphasizing Pacific Islanders often excluded from U.S. history. The course begins in the Pacific World before the founding of the United States, examining the first encounters between Pacific Islanders and Europeans. We will then explore the importance of the Pacific to U.S. citizens in the early republic, at a time when traveling by water was easier than traveling by land and the Pacific Ocean was more important to the United States than the western continent. The next part of the course will chart U.S. territorial expansion into the Pacific itself, from claiming guano islands in the 1850s to gaining a full-fledged Pacific empire at the turn of the twentieth century. We will pay special attention to the ways that the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress used the racial difference to justify not extending citizenship rights to nonwhite inhabitants of U.S. territories. Moving through the twentieth century, we will see what life was like for people in the Philippines, Guam, Hawai‘i, and American Samoa who lived under U.S. colonial rule. We will work with materials from the Bentley Historical Library about Michigan’s role in the United States’ colonization of the Philippine Islands. In the last part of the course, we will examine the post-WWII U.S. Pacific. While the Philippines became independent and Hawai‘i became the 50th state, the United States increased its presence in Guam and other Micronesian territories, sidelining the people who live there to a military-industrial complex that still prevails in the U.S. Pacific today. In this course, you will be engaging directly with historical materials. Almost every reading is a primary source—that is, a firsthand account from the time period under study—rather than a historian’s secondhand interpretation or summary.

Course Requirements:

Students will be evaluated on a combination of their choosing of written work, oral/visual presentations, in-class participation, and research projects. There will be no required synchronous work