This special issue of Pacific Historical Review , “Making the Pacific, Making Japanese-U.S. Relations: Science and Technology as Historical Agents in the Twentieth Century,” is guest edited by Martin Collins and Teasel Muir-Harmony. The special issue gives prominence to science and technology as sources of agency inextricably bound to the modern project—and thus bound to another expression of the modern, the nation state and its interrelation with other states. In the modern context, scientific and technical knowledge, practices, and things are fundamental to composing more robust historical accounts, including accounts of the nation state. This interpretive frame is vital in understanding the Japan-U.S. relationship in the twentieth century and the critical role of the Pacific Ocean therein. The special issue includes a preface from Marc S. Rodriguez, this introduction by Martin Collins, and articles by Daqing Yang on wireless telegraphy, Chihyung Jeon on postwar trans-Pacific air flight, Teasel Muir-Harmony on the U.S. spaceflight display at the 1970 Osaka World Exposition, and Colin Garvey on the international race to develop artificial intelligence.

A moon rock, resting on a pedestal in the American Pavilion at the 1970 Osaka World Exposition, became the latest trophy for the United States in its fierce space race with the Soviet Union. The exhibit was part of a broader approach to U.S. diplomacy in this period, where science and technology, or in this case a scientific specimen, were deployed to spread Western democratic values, win over international public opinion, and counter anti-American sentiment. But the moon rock’s physical resemblance to earth rocks prompted a broader discussion among Japanese audiences at the Expo about the aims of U.S. scientific and technological progress, and the practicality and applicability of American cultural norms to Japanese visions of modernity. By considering what happens when a scientific specimen travels outside of the laboratory context, outside the world of scientists, and into the world of foreign relations, this article investigates the complicated dynamics of science, material culture, and power during this critical juncture in the United States’ engagement with Japan.

During the late nineteenth century, the print culture associated with women’s suffrage exhibited increasingly transnational connections. Between the 1870s and 1890s, suffragists in the United States, and then Australia and New Zealand, celebrated the early enfranchisement of women in the U.S. West. After the enfranchisement of antipodean women at the turn of the twentieth century, American suffragists in turn gained inspiration from New Zealand and Australia. In the process, suffrage print culture focused on the political and social possibilities associated with the frontier landscapes that defined these regions. However, by envisioning such landscapes as engendering white women’s freedom, suffrage print culture conceptually excluded Indigenous peoples from its visions of enfranchisement. The imaginative connections fostered in transnational suffrage print culture further encouraged actual transpacific connections between the suffragists themselves.

This article is the guest editors’ introduction to a special volume of Pacific Historical Review entitled “Protection: Global Genealogies, Local Practices.” Guest editors Christina Twomey and Katherine Ellinghaus argue that the global discourse of protection had a strong presence beyond British humanitarian circles and a longer chronological and larger geographical reach than historians have previously noted. Articles in the special volume include Christina Twomey’s examination of protection as a concept with its origins in European, rather than British, colonialism, Trevor Burnard’s study of the Protectors of slaves in Berbice in the early to mid-nineteenth century, Goolam Vahed’s analysis of the Protectors appointed to lobby on behalf of immigrant Indian indentured labourers in late nineteenth century Natal, Rachel Standfield’s investigation of the use of language in Protectorates in Australia and New Zealand in the 1840s, Amanda Nettelbeck’s exploration of the concept of Aboriginal vagrancy in Australia in the 1840s, and Katherine Ellinghaus’s comparison of the discourse of protection in policies of exemption and competency utlised in Oklahoma and New South Wales in the 1940s and 1950s.

Despite the turn toward diasporic, transnational, global, and comparative perspectives, this article argues that historians of Asian America have largely neglected and need to reflect upon inter-imperial relations—the relations of cooperation, competition, and conflict between empires, including subaltern attempts at creating spaces for maneuver and agency between them. With a focus on the development of the United States as an empire, this article identifies the key inter-imperial relations over time that have shaped the Asian American experience. An awareness of inter-imperial relations helps scholars to account for the political dynamics, the multiple sources of power, and the challenges to existing hegemonies that have structured Asian American lives. An approach sensitive to inter-imperial relations opens up the possibility of recognizing, and comparing, the simultaneous subaltern struggles that cut across nations and immigrant groups.

Chicana/o historians have transformed understandings of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, identity, labor, and space in the United States. In dialogue with the articles for this special issue, my commentary reflects on some of the significant contributions of Chicana/o history, highlighting the themes of complexity and spatial metaphors. I concur with the authors that there still is much historical reconstruction to do, and suggest that this work is important intellectually and politically, given the hostile climate toward Mexicans and immigrants in many parts of the country. This commentary also provides an opportunity to share the course of my scholarly engagement with Chicana/o history and consider its far-reaching influence on my work in the history of medicine and public health in the U.S. West.