Assignment on working class history in ancestral countries/places - Ethnic Studies 495 - Hawaii's Labor History - Research Guides at University of Hawaii at Manoa

Resources

OneSearch Manoa
Web-scale discovery tool for finding millions of articles, books, media and more using a single search. Includes the UH Voyager Catalog plus a huge index of academic journals on most topics. Also includes conference papers, maps, government documents, music scores, DVDs, archives & manuscripts, and more.
Google Scholar
Full-text @ UH Manoa links should automatically display. If the links are not displaying you can manually set the links to UH Manoa subscriptions by clicking the menu icon in the upper left corner of the Google Scholar search page. Go to Settings. Click on Library links and search for Hawaii. Select University of Hawaii at Manoa - Full Text @ UH Manoa and save your preferences.

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.

UHM Center for Oral History
Many people in Hawaii retain connections with their ancestral homeland so you can look at the transcripts for oral history projects to learn about such experiences.

For example, after World War II, local Okinawans in Hawaii raised money to restart Okinawa's pig industry. The funds went to purchasing hogs in Oregon and arranged for their shipment. This is known as the Pigs from the Sea.

Search strategies

In OneSearch Manoa, search on your ancestral country/place as well as the time period that each week focuses on. For example, my ancestors are from Okinawa so for Week 1.5, I would search using these keywords: KINGDOM OKINAWA. To be more specific, we can add the time period 18TH CENTURY (or SATSUMA) to focus on pre-1778 Okinawa.

For Week 2, I would add the time period 19TH CENTURY to the above search.

When evaluating the search results, you want to ensure it covers the right time period for each question. You may need to be creative as worker's experiences/history is a relatively new area of scholarship. Workers are farmers, fishermen & fisherwomen, cooks, servants, garment makers, etc. Look for articles that examine the spheres of influence that workers will inhabit and you'll be able to pull out their experiences.

Utilize the web as a resource, as it can verify dates, changes in government, etc. For example, I did not realize that Okinawa played a vital role in the maritime trade networks between medieval East Asia and Southeast Asia, all due to its location. Also consider that colonizing governments will have useful information about your ancestral country/place. For Week 6, I searched OKINAWA COLD WAR and retrieved information about the U.S. Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands (USCAR), which governed Okinawa after World War II. Lower in the search is a news article that the U.S. housed nuclear weapons on Okinawa during the Cold War.

Ethnic Studies 495 - Hawaii's Labor History: Assignment on working class history in ancestral countries/places

Resources

Search strategies