This library guide was created for the fall 2024 offering of HIST296: World War II and the Making of Modern Asia/Pacific. It is an introduction to methods of current and historical research of the Pacific Islands region during the era of colonial status transition following World War II. Please note that research on these topics may involve sources that document human trauma, which may cause distress.
The above tabs include examples of countries or places where the decolonization process played out in different ways: The island of New Guinea, which is divided roughly in half between the independent country of Papua New Guinea and the Indonesian province of West Papua; Kwajalein, an atoll within the Republic of the Marshall Islands; and the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, which was an intermediary entity set up in the wake of WWII, while the islands governed by the Trust established their new political statuses. For each of these places, a sample range of materials is included to give a sense of how history emerges from multiple sources. In addition to these three examples, more generalized information is included under the remaining tabs, as an aid to doing Pacific-related research more broadly.
The information on this introductory page is designed to help in thinking through paper topics and getting started with your research.
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These videos will help you to find the various types of materials (they were created for a general course on Pacific Islands Studies, but are applicable to historical research as well):
VIDEO 3: Finding Dissertations (when you can't find books)
Keywords are the terms that researchers use to run searches in databases. These terms distill your research question down to a few essential words. There are many ways to come up keywords -- when doing research that relates to the Pacific Islands, one potential strategy is to use one word that describes the subject of your research, and another word that identifies the place you are researching. For instance, if you just search for "independence" in a library database, you will literally get a million results. But if you search for "Independence" and "Samoa," you will narrow your results down to something much more manageable. Ultimately, keyword searching involves a bit of skill, a bit of patience and a lot of trial and error -- but the more you do it, the easier it becomes. As a general rule of thumb, if you are getting too many results, this usually means you need to refine your search by coming up with additional keywords; if you are getting too few results, you are either using too many keywords, or need to come up with different terms. This website includes some excellent advice on how to brainstorm keywords.
In most academic fields there is a fairly standard "publication cycle" when it comes to how information is produced about any given topic. This cycle determines what types of resources might be available for any given subject ... basically speaking, the longer researchers have been aware of a given topic, the more variety of resources (books, journal articles, films, etc.) there will be available; the newer a topic is, the less variety. (Whether a particular research topic has more or less information available does not make it a "good" or "bad" topic -- it only means that different topics generate different types of information resources.)
In general, it looks something like this:
Topics that relate to current events (or those that have recently happened) typically have fewer types of "resources" available. Writing about these types of events is generally found in newspapers and "popular press" magazines; in government reports or publications produced by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or on websites or social media created by individuals. Videos or audio recordings, if available, are usually on Internet-based sites like Youtube or Vimeo, or on social media (Facebook etc.) Most of these types of resources are referred to as "primary source" materials . So for a topic like "COVID-19 in the Pacific," the majority of the information would be of this primary source type.
As a topic becomes more known and academics start to research it, journal articles are published and dissertations are written -- these types of resources take much longer to research, write and get published, so they typically don't appear for at least a couple years after the emergence of a research topic. Documentary films may also be produced. All of these types of resources are a mix of primary and "secondary" resources. A topic like "Nuclear Testing in the Pacific" would be an example of something that has been around long enough to have become the subject of journal articles, dissertations and documentary films. (A topic like "Saipan's Garment Industry" falls somewhere in between COVID-19 and nuclear testing, in that there has been some academic writing about it, but not as much as has been produced on nuclear testing or other topics that are more distant events.)
The final step in the publication cycle is the production of longer-forms of research: Mainly books, but also things like documentary or feature films. These are the types of resources that tend to take the longest to produce. A topic like "Blackbirding in the Pacific" would be an example of a topic that has been around long enough to generate a wide array of resources. (Nuclear testing in the Pacific is also at this point similar in terms of the amount of material that has been generated).
For any given research topic, there are numerous potential sources of information. When evaluating the quality of different types of resources, think about the different perspectives, voices and types of resources you could include in your final research project. This will help to determine the level of analysis and depth of understanding you could expect to achieve in relation to your selected topic. Thinking on this level will help you to generate more texture in your project too — combining different perspectives, voices, and types of material (including images, information from academic, journalistic, and other literary sources), will make your project more interesting for you and your audience. These questions may help you to identify different perspectives and voices:
1. Who is the author? What is her or his point of view? Why do you trust or distrust this point of view?
2. In your sources, where are the indigenous voices?
3. Where are the voices of scholars and other analysts?
4. Often information on a topic is a conversation of many voices — who are the various voices speaking on your topic? Are they all represented in your sources of information?
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