American Pioneers And The Japanese Frontier

In 1871-1882 fifty Americans, along with other foreign experts, were employed by the Japanese government to develop Japan's northern frontier, Hokkaido. Their work covered a wide scope of activities, from introducing Western agriculture and industry, constructing roads and a railroad, and surveying topography and mines, to establishing an agricultural college. While examining the overall undertaking, Professor Fujita specifically focuses on the prominent members who left copious private and public records. She thoroughly examines their ideas as well as their attitudes toward an alien culture. At the same time, she shows the Japanese responses to these experts and their alien culture. This is the first booklength examination of a development project that, in many ways, approaches some of the twentieth century undertakings in scope and complexity. As such, it will be of interest to students and scholars of inter-cultural relations, and Japanese and American nineteenth-century history.

Answers questions about the American pioneers and Westward expansion, including who settled the frontier towns of the Wild West and whether pioneer children attended school.

In Search of Our Frontier explores the complex transnational history of Japanese immigrant settler colonialism, which linked Japanese America with Japan’s colonial empire through the exchange of migrant bodies, expansionist ideas, colonial expertise, and capital in the Asia-Pacific basin before World War II. The trajectories of Japanese transpacific migrants exemplified a prevalent national structure of thought and practice that not only functioned to shore up the backbone of Japan’s empire building but also promoted the borderless quest for Japanese overseas development. Eiichiro Azuma offers new interpretive perspectives that will allow readers to understand Japanese settler colonialism’s capacity to operate outside the aegis of the home empire.

Shipwrecked sailors, samurai seeking a material and sometimes spiritual education, and laborers seeking to better their economic situation: these early Japanese travelers to the West occupy a little-known corner of Asian American studies. Pacific Pioneers profiles the first Japanese who resided in the United States or the Kingdom of Hawaii for a substantial period of time and the Westerners who influenced their experiences. Although Japanese immigrants did not start arriving in substantial numbers in the West until after 1880, in the previous thirty years a handful of key encounters helped shape relations between Japan and the United States. John E. Van Sant explores the motivations and accomplishments of these resourceful, sometimes visionary individuals who made important inroads into a culture quite different from their own and paved the way for the Issei and Nisei. Pacific Pioneers presents detailed biographical sketches of Japanese such as Joseph Heco, Niijima Jo, and the converts to the Brotherhood of the New Life and introduces the American benefactors, such as William Griffis, David Murray, and Thomas Lake Harris, who built relationships with their foreign visitors. Van Sant also examines the uneasy relations between Japanese laborers and sugar cane plantation magnates in Hawaii during this period and the shortlived Wakamatsu colony of Japanese tea and silk producers in California. A valuable addition to the literature, Pacific Pioneers brings to life a cast of colorful, long-forgotten characters while forging a critical link between Asian and Asian American studies.

The family of Barnabas Horton, Puritans who suffered the indignities of religious intolerance and persecution in England, sailed for America in 1635 on the ship, Swallow. In America they met and coped with all the challenges of frontier life, as they journeyed from New England to Virginia, then further west to Indiana, Kansas, and Indian territory. Joseph Horton, born in 1578, is believed to have been the father of Barnabas Horton. Barnabas was born in 1600 in Mousley, England. He married Anne Smith from Stanion, Northamptonshire. Two sons, Joseph (b.1626) and Benjamin (b.1627) were born to them. Anne died shortly after the birth of Benjamin. Barnabas married a second wife, Mary. The family sailed to Hampton, Massachusetts and built their first home. Barnabas died in 1680. His descendants married into the families of Goodknight, Lydy, Stepp, Feearnow, and Cheek.

From borax mule trains to the canoe stop that was Chicago in the 1830s, this book vividly recreated the tale of the westward movement of pioneers into the heartland of North America. With nearly a century separating historian Richard Bartlett from the end of the movement, Bartlett's broad perspective stresses the continuity and inevitability of this greatest element of America's Golden Age. The book focuses on the settlement of the country, the racial and ethnic composition of the people, agriculture, transportation, developments of the land, the growth of towns and cities, and the nature of frontier society as it brilliantly brings to life the frontier experience as lived by millions of Americans. Bartlett concludes that the pioneer's freedom from restrictions in a new country resulted in the unprecedented burst of energy that settled America in some 114 years.

United States; History, 1809-1901.

Florida Historical Society Harry T. And Harriette V. Moore Award Opening a window onto the little-known Japanese-American heritage of Florida, Yamato Colony is the true tale of a daring immigrant venture that left behind an important legacy. Ryusuke Kawai tells how a Japanese farming settlement came to be in south Florida, far from other Japanese communities in the United States. Kawai’s captivating story takes readers back to the early twentieth century, a time when Japanese citizens were beginning to look to possibilities for individual wealth and success overseas. Poor, unlucky in love, and dreaming of returning rich to marry his sweetheart, a young man named Sukeji Morikami boarded a passenger steamer at the port of Yokohama and set off to make his fortune. Morikami was drawn by promises from his compatriot Jo Sakai, founder of an agricultural community called Yamato between Boca Raton and Delray Beach, Florida. Sakai extolled the prospects of raising pineapples and other crops amid the state’s economic boom and exciting developments like Flagler’s East Coast Railway. This book follows the experiences of Morikami and his fellow Yamato settlers through World War II, when the struggling colony closed for good. Morikami held on to his hopes for Yamato until the end, when at last, the lone survivor, he donated the land that would become the widely visited Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens. Celebrating the lives of ordinary men and women who left their homes and traveled an enormous distance to settle and raise their families in Florida, this book brings to light a unique moment in the state’s history that few people know about today.