American culture has long associated the nineteenth-century U.S. frontier with episodes of violent death and random bloodshed. But what about the vast watery expanse west of the West? The Pacific Ocean contains its own violent past, especially during the period stretching from Captain James Cook's historic voyages to the California Gold Rush. The nature and degree of this violence stemmed not merely from contact relations between indigenous communities and newcomers, but more specifically from commercial desires, the diffusion of diseases, and the great hunt for marine mammals. Historicizing this violent past remains an imperative for new studies of the Pacific.

While dozens of naturalists had examined discrete Pacific environments prior to the 1830s, the American geologist James Dwight Dana was the first to hypothesize the underlying forces that created and unified this vast ocean basin as a whole. During his four-year journey with the U.S. Exploring Expedition (1838––1842), Dana developed a holistic view of geological systems throughout the Pacific, including those continental lands soon claimed by the United States as its Far West. But Dana's innovative work on Pacific geology and his extra-continental reading of the Far West changed in the 1850s. Like other American explorer-geologists who found cause for reifying a continental geology, Dana's work lost sight of the Pacific Basin and instead focused on the exceptional and spiritually preordained structure of American landforms.

While transnational frameworks have been a defining characteristic of Asian American history for a long time, the essays in this forum suggest new interventions in the meanings of transnational, trans-Pacific, and international. These interventions reflect internationalist discourses in the historical discipline as a whole while illustrating the fact that no common roadmap exists for pursuing this goal. The essayists also offer some solutions to the marginalization of the field within U.S. history. By decentering the nation-state——but not rejecting it outright——the range of significant themes explored in these essays places Asian American history at the cutting edge of the transnational history that is currently reshaping national histories.