Primary Sources: Asian American and Pacific Islander History

This UCLA Center aims to expand scholarly capabilities and deepen the public understanding of Asian American and Pacific Islander lives towards a healthy, just, democratic, and compassionate society for all. Webpage includes lots of academic resources for researchers and the public.

Located in the heart of San Francisco, the museum is home to one of the world’s finest collections of Asian art, boasting more than 18,000 awe-inspiring artworks ranging from ancient jades and ceramics to contemporary video installations. Dynamic special exhibitions, cultural celebrations and public programs for all ages provide rich art experiences that unlock the past and spark questions about the future. Offering an online experience during COVID-19 related closure.

May is Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in paying tribute to the generations of Asian and Pacific Islanders who have enriched America's history and are instrumental in its future success. Offers access to exhibits and collections, audio and video, resources for teachers, images, events, and more.

The Johnson Museum began to collect Asian art in the 1950s; now the collection contains more than eight thousand works of Asian art, most acquired through the generosity of Cornell alumni, faculty, parents, and friends.

To know a people, know their stories. Celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month this May and every day with a special PBS collection of stories that explores the history, traditions and culture of Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States.

The Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center brings history, art and culture to you through innovative museum experiences and digital initiatives.

Established in 1971, the museum is one of few U.S. institutions dedicated to the arts and culture of Asia and the Pacific Islands, serving the city of Los Angeles and the Greater Southern California region. The museum’s mission is to further intercultural understanding through the arts of Asia and the Pacific Islands.

As a National Park Service Affiliated Area and the first Smithsonian affiliate in the Pacific Northwest, the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience offers an authentic and unique perspective on the American story. Nationally recognized for work in creating dynamic, community-driven exhibitions and programs, they put the community at the heart of each exhibition they create. From the struggles of early Asian pioneers to accomplished works by national Asian Pacific American artists, their contributions give us a look at what it means to be uniquely American.

Explore an extensive range of archival material connected to the trading and cultural relationships that emerged between China, America and the Pacific region between the 18th and early 20th centuries. Manuscript sources, rare printed texts, visual images, objects and maps document this fascinating history.

Spanning three centuries (c1750-1929), this resource makes available for the first time extremely rare pamphlets from Cornell University Library’s Charles W. Wason Collection on East Asia. The resource is full-text searchable, allowing for the collection to be comprehensively explored and studied. In addition, China: Culture and Society features a host of secondary resources, including scholarly essays, an interactive chronology, mini guides, and editors’ choices from the collection.

Sources from the School of Oriental and African Studies and the British Library, London: 1793-1980. With documents encompassing events from the earliest English embassy to the birth and early years of the People’s Republic, this resource collects sources from nine archives to give an incredible insight into the changes in China during this period.

Explore the history of South Asia between the foundation of the East India Company in 1615 and the granting of independence to India and Pakistan in 1947, through the wonderfully rich and diverse manuscript collections of the National Library of Scotland.

Edward Sylvester Morse (1838-1925) was a great polymath – notable for his work in natural history, ethnography and art history – but, perhaps most famous for his work in bringing Japan and the West closer together. Morse was one of the first Americans to live in Japan. He went there on a scientific expedition in 1877 and his enthusiasm and approach so impressed his hosts that he was made Chair of Zoology at the new Imperial University of Tokyo. But his interests were never limited to evolutionary theory and scientific methodology – in 1882 he turned his attention to ethnology and the documentation of life in Japan before it was transformed by Western modernization. In addition to preserving the household records of a samurai family and many accounts of the tea ceremony, Morse made notes on subjects as diverse as shop signs, fireworks, hairpins, agricultural tools, artists’ studios, music, games, printing, carpentry, the Ainu, gardens, household construction, art and architecture. An accomplished draughtsman, his pencil and ink drawings, enliven his diaries and correspondence and make his papers a pleasure to read.

Access thousands of materials ranging from ebooks to audio clips, videos to pamphlets focused on Asian Americans' history and culture via the Internet Archive.

From 1910 to 1940, Angel Island was the site of an U.S. Immigration Station that functioned as the West Coast equivalent of Ellis Island, although the Angel Island facility also enforced policies designed to exclude many Pacific Coast immigrants coming from eighty countries. Now, AIISF's mission is to promote a greater understanding of Pacific Coast immigration and its role in shaping America’s past, present and future.

In 1943, Ansel Adams (1902-1984), America's most well-known photographer, documented the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California and the Japanese-Americans interned there during World War II. For the first time, digital scans of both Adams's original negatives and his photographic prints appear side by side allowing viewers to see Adams's darkroom technique, in particular, how he cropped his prints. Adams's Manzanar work is a departure from his signature style landscape photography. Although a majority of the more than 200 photographs are portraits, the images also include views of daily life, agricultural scenes, and sports and leisure activities (see Collection Highlights). When offering the collection to the Library in 1965, Adams said in a letter, "The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and dispair [sic] by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment....All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document, and I trust it can be put to good use." The web site also includes digital images of the first edition of Born Free and Equal, Adams's publication based on his work at Manzanar.

Asian-Nation is an authoritative, one-stop information resource and sociological exploration of the historical, demographic, political, and cultural issues that make up today's diverse Asian American community. You can think of Asian-Nation as an online version of "Asian Americans 101."

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The Densho Archives contain primary sources that document the Japanese American experience from immigration in the early 1900s through redress in the 1980s, with a strong focus on the World War II mass incarceration. The archives are growing as Densho continues to record life histories and collect images and records.

SEAAdoc is an educational resource of the Southeast Asian Archive at the UC Irvine Libraries focusing on post-1975 refugees and immigrants from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam and the communities they have developed in the United States. It contains 1,500 visual images and 4,000 pages of searchable text selected from the Archive to represent a cross section of our holdings. SEAAdoc documents the exodus of Southeast Asian refugees and immigrants from their homelands, their experiences in Asian refugee camps, and subsequent resettlement in the United States. Other materials reveal cultural, economic, educational, political, and social aspects of the new Southeast Asian American communities that have developed, and continue to grow, in the United States.

The Japanese American Relocation Digital Archives (JARDA) contains thousands of primary sources documenting Japanese American internment, including: personal diaries, letters, photographs, and drawings; US War Relocation Authority materials, including camp newsletters, final reports, photographs, and other documents relating to the day-to-day administration of the camps; and personal histories documenting the lives of the people who lived in the camps, as well as of the administrators who created and worked there.

The Korean American Digital Archive brings more than 13,000 pages of documents, over 1,900 photographs, and about 180 sound files together in one searchable collection that documents the Korean American community during the period of resistance to Japanese rule in Korea and reveal the organizational and private experience of Koreans in America between 1903 and 1965.

SAADA collects information from the South Asian diaspora in the United States, including those who trace their heritage to Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the many South Asian diaspora communities across the globe.

The National Japanese American Historical Society (NJAHS) is a non-profit membership organization dedicated to the collection, preservation, authentic interpretation, and sharing of historical information of the Japanese American experience. NJAHS plays a significant role in the health and vibrancy of San Francisco’s Japantown and its programs. Their work includes ground-breaking exhibitions and educational events for the public, historical research, and development of educational resources for teachers and students.

Historical overview and primary source documentation of the Japanese American Internment during WWII.

The Vietnamese American Heritage Project (VAHP) supports the Vietnam Archive’s mission to document the war from all perspectives by providing documentation of the post-war social and political history of Vietnamese Americans who immigrated to the United States during and after the Vietnam conflict. The VAHP aims to enhance the study of the Vietnamese immigration and resettlement experience by providing reference services to researchers and increasing Vietnamese American participation in the archive’s Oral History Project, conducting outreach activities, and developing cooperative relationships with other institutions dedicated to preserving Vietnamese Americans’ rich heritage.

Access hundreds of materials ranging from ebooks to audio clips, videos to pamphlets focused on Pacific Islander Americans' history and culture via the Internet Archive.

This collection, created and maintained by the University of Hawaii, contains over a dozen Hawaiian language newspapers published during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Besides providing digitized versions of Hawaiian newspapers, this site also contains references to other indigenous language source sites, bibliographies, and more.

Online resources useful to those interested in studying Maori or New Zealand history. Sources include access to public databases, online libraries, repositories, bibliographies, and primary sources all relating to Maori culture, language, education, and history.

Drawn primarily from the Tuzin Archive for Melanesian Anthropology, this collection illuminates aspects of the vibrant cultures and diverse peoples of the Pacific Islands through 20th-century photographs, dissertations, and films. The Solomon Islands are exceptionally well-documented by the many images captured by anthropologists Roger Keesing and Harold Scheffler, along with early pictures taken by public health physician Sylvester Maxwell Lambert. Dissertations written in the context of anthropological fieldwork in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea are an important corpus for comparative research. Public health physician Sylvester Lambert's images recount the stories of his extensive travels in Papua New Guinea, Rennel and Bellona, Vanuatu, Tonga and many other locations in Oceania. The films of J. Edward Hoffmeister present scenes of village life in early 20th-century Fiji and Tonga. Digitized from originals held by the UC San Diego library.

The Pacific Manuscripts Bureau copies archives, manuscripts and rare printed material relating to the Pacific Islands. The aim of the Bureau is to help with long-term preservation of the documentary heritage of the Pacific Islands and to make it accessible. The database also includes the most extensive collection of non-government primary documentation on the Pacific Islands available to researchers.