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The Pacific is a constantly shifting domain of cultures, encounters, and natural phenomena. As such, histories of the Pacifi c are marked by transits, circuits, and displacements, both intentional and unintentional. By sketching out examples from the sailing voyages of the open-ocean canoe Hokule‘a, to the enslavement of a South Asian woman transported on the Spanish galleons, to the Australian government’s contested policy for dealing with seaborne refugees, to the challenges posed to low-lying islands by rising sea levels, we see how peoples in motion underscore so much of global history.

Vera Schwarcz's Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden examines the moral, philosophical, and historical meanings of a garden built by a Manchu Chinese prince, subsequently destroyed by British imperialists, commandeered by Red Guard radicals, and finally transformed into the grounds of an art museum. Reading Singing Crane Garden in the context of Schwarcz's previous writings on Chinese intellectuals and Jewish traditions, as well as insights provided by critical philosophers and geographers, this essay explores the moral and ethical dimensions of locating history in specific “emplacements”. The argument begins by examining the phenomenology of place articulated by Edward Casey, weaves through discussions of Chinese spatiality, embodiment, and garden aesthetics, and comments on Schwarcz's study of broken monuments and stele through comparisons with Classical Chinese writers and the contemporary American poet Louise Gluck. Comparisons are made between the destruction of the garden by the British forces of James Elgin, the murder of the journalist Thomas Bowlby, and the purging, imprisonment, torture, and brutality against scholars and intellectuals by the Red Guards under Mao. The essay closes with commentaries on Schwarcz's reflections concerning continuing global atrocities, and new insights into the ways that understanding landscape architecture as a form of history can bring meaning to questions of memory, loss, and the desire to evoke unrecoverable experiences.

Matt Matsuda and David Williams report on a successful collaboration between academic and student services that resulted in a Rutgers University Byrne Seminar on social entrepreneurship.

On the Pacific island of New Caledonia, Kanak Chief Jean-Philippe Tjibaou relates tales of generations of Tongans, Fijians, Samoans, and Kanak in struggle against each other. Upon arriving in another territory, warriors would lay down a challenge--"We'll take this island"--and battle would ensue. His point was not to suggest a stereotypical picture of warring island peoples but to indicate how he thought Europeans were different: we'll take this island, they said--because there's no one here (Tjibaou 2002). For Tjibaou, islands could not be separated from islanders; it was islanders who shared and minded the ways that, as Edward Casey puts it, "places are lived through by human beings: discovered, explored, acted on" (2002, 265). This "living through" the intersection of place and event, the inseparability of geography and history, meant that no places could be deserted. Islander warriors were not averse to violent means to gain political authority, but they gave recognition to and challenged their foes. It was the outlanders who were so strange and dangerous in their vision of places and by the way they proclaimed islands empty--thus void of history--the fiction of terra nullius. The importance of place for discussing islands is suggested by Yi-Fu Tuan's comment: "Place ... has more substance than the word location suggests: it is a unique entity, a 'special circumstance.' ... Place incarnates the experiences and aspirations of a people. Place is not only a fact to be explained in the broader frame of space, but it is also a reality to be clarified and understood from the perspectives of the people who have given it meaning" (1974, 213; see also his introduction in Olwig 2002, xi-xx). In applying such analyses, any notions of Pacific islands as distant, isolated, uninhabited, and abstract spaces must be reexamined to see how recognition of peoples and their histories requires places. As Tuan suggests, places are unique configurations of human experience tied to geographical locales that exist only in relation to the activities and meanings created within them. No places can exist without being defined by the members and actions of a human community (Stoller 1995, 27-30; Creswell 2002). Jean-Philippe Tjibaou's father, the cultural and nationalist leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou, famously lectured French colonizers on forgotten Kanak history and celebrated that history in 1975 by organizing Melanesia 2000, an Oceanic festival of music, art, and cultural heritage. (1) In planning the programs, even the year 2000 was a deliberate and evocative choice: For Jean-Marie Tjibaou and his collaborators, Kanak history predated the millennial imperatives of the Western calendar. Such celebrations gave focus to long-standing Kanak grievances and claims for political and cultural recognition by the French authorities in New Caledonia. Change, however, was fitful and marked by political struggles and violence between the Kanaks and the metropolitan French and settler-immigrant populations in the 1980s (Maclellan and Chesneaux 1998). A series of subsequent agreements led to the Noumea Accords, signed on 21 April 1998, between Kanak parties and the French government, which established the framework for possible future independence for New Caledonia and a definitive recognition of local cultural heritage. The preamble to "Les accords de Noumea" states: "This territory was not empty.... La Grande Terre [the main island] and the outlying islands were inhabited by men and women who would eventually be called Kanaks. They had evolved their own civilization, with its traditions, its languages, its customs that structured social and political life. This culture, the spirit of these people, found expression in a multitude of creative forms" (Gouvernement de la Nouvelle-Caledonie 1998, 4; my translation and italics). This declaration was not merely a strategic political accommodation or a concession to negotiated interests. …

Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps. By Edward Casey Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain's Renaissance to America's New World. By Kenneth Robert Olwig

As Jay Winter has written and edited multiple works on the First World War, one might wonder what new contribution the author wishes to make in a field already well traversed by scholars, including...

That a reconstructed voyaging canoe from Polynesia should make a twenty-first-century journey to Micronesia to define the Pacific is historically fitting, for the water world of small islands and atolls had long played a key role in Oceanian histories. Archeologists have determined that Taiwan was a likely origin point for voyagers out towards the Marianas, and the indigenous language is a first-order branch of the Austronesian family that spread east. In addition, ceramics from the third millennium BCE seem to share common features with Marianas Red Ware and shell artifacts. Successive generations of voyaging settlers were original human colonizers. In the islands and atolls, Micronesian ancestors developed sophisticated trading and tribute systems and have been renowned across generations for their wayfinding genius. Navigator Mau Piailug himself hailed from Satawal and carried in him traditions of an epic heritage.

The most famous tree in the Maluku Islands of Indonesia stands off a little road that turns up the flank of the Gamalama Volcano, rising high in a hot, humid, and aromatic wood of clove and nutmeg. Amidst the other greenery that blankets the island of Ternate, this giant clove, knotted and gnarled, is famous for sprouting hundreds of kilos of fragrant leaves and fruit, as it has done for nearly four hundred years. The tree has a local and personal name, Afo, simply understood as “the giant.” It is famed not only for its size and generous productivity, but because it is a living sign of survival and defiance: a tree that at one time would have been cut down and burned if its existence had been known. Afo stands over a history that took the lives of many islanders – and other trees – across the centuries.

In 1907, William Jones made his way up the Cagayan River in northern Luzon Province of the Philippines. In a letter posted back to the United States he wrote, “I am sojourning with a Negrito-Malay people called Ilongots, who dwell in lofty booths on poles and in the forks of trees.” He was excited to be among a headhunting jungle society, yet also repelled by the “savagery” that he witnessed. Two years later he was speared and cut down with bolo knives at a bend in the river by Ilongot warriors. The attack came in response to unfortunate events that might have been reminiscent of the fate of James Cook: Jones had argued about boats, been impatient and unwise in dealing with local clans and, at the last moment, seemed to be taking a local elder, Takadan, hostage until he could have his demands satisfied. In Jones' case those demands centered on balsa rafts that the Ilongot were supposed to build and guide for him downriver. The need for so many rafts was unusual, but Jones had a large cargo: extensive collections of baskets, weapons, fish traps, and models of local dwellings bound for the Field Museum in Chicago.

On November 3, 1579 a ship dropped anchor at Ternate, the Spice Islands, guided by fishermen in canoes off the island of Siau, north of Celebes. Onboard, its captain was one of the best-known pirates of his generation, and he had just sailed across the ocean from the coast of South America. The Chinese Lim Ah Hong had just a few years before vanished from historical records. Here was a pirate from another line, that of the Anglo-Saxons: Francis Drake. At Ternate, Drake met with Sultan Baab, himself recently victorious at having ousted the Portuguese, and they regaled each other with tales and traded for spices. Drake avoided the nearby island of Tidore, where a Spanish position would easily have recognized him. Drake was emblematic of a new presence in the Pacific, coming not across the Indian Ocean, but across the Pacific by the Straits of Magellan. This presence was Dutch and British, arriving for exploration, but more, for the specific purpose of preying upon the empire of the powerful Spanish Crown by capturing its treasure ships, the fabulous Spanish galleons.

What stories from Asia to Oceania to the Americas make up Pacific history? Along the shores of Baja California, sixteenth-century porcelain from East Asia turns up in archeological digs, along with timbers and containers marking the resting place of great Spanish galleons that sailed with cargoes of treasure, silk, and slaves drawn from the Malabar coastline, Portuguese Macao, southern Japan, and the Philippines in transits from Manila across the Mariana Islands to the Americas.