Introduction

About the Collective

Introduction

The Asian Pacific American Collective History Project began as an exciting, ground-breaking attempt to bring together virtually every scholar in a growing academic field and organize a focused dialogue on reconceptualizing the field. Because of the recent expansion in the numbers of scholars in the field, from a handful to over 100 in two decades, there was recognition that new ways of understanding the history of Asian Americans and  Pacific Islander Americans was required. In addition, new migrations had created populations and communities that were vastly different from previous migration waves and there was a pressing necessity not only to bring together research on these groups and assess their impact on our understandings of U.S. history, but also to extend educational materials into those communities. These were relative newcomers who knew little about the relationship of their own lives to a larger and longer history of Asian and Pacific Islander experiences in the United States.

The Asian Pacific American Collective History Project is a cooperative effort whose goal is to improve the teaching and research of Asian Pacific American history in light of these institutional and historical developments. Its participants include scholars and teachers who are associated with a wide array of universities and colleges from across the nation, and who have links with museums, historical societies, and local community organizations.

About The Collective

The Asian Pacific American History Collective is a loosely-structured group of over seventy academic historians, public historians, museum curators, journalists, and others interested in reconceptualizing Asian Pacific American history, and is an outgrowth of the History Caucus of the Association for Asian American Studies.

Its mission is to:

• develop a new theoretical framework for Asian Pacific American history;
• locate historical scholarship about diverse Asian Pacific American experiences in relation to theoretical developments in History and Asian Pacific American studies as a whole; and
• disseminate materials and resources for the incorporation of the history of these experiences into history, ethnic studies, and Asian Pacific American studies courses.

As part of this reconceptualization, the Collective hosted a series of conferences at different regional sites across the country over a two-year period from 2002-2004. This web site is one outgrowth of the discussions initiated in those conferences. The conference series and production of this site was underwritten by a grant from the Ford Foundation.