The Early California Population Project is a database that has been developed by the Henry E. Huntington Library over the course of eight years. The database, which is now accessible online, makes available all of the information contained in the California mission registers, records that are of unique and vital importance to the study of California, the American Southwest, and colonial America. The vast potential of these records has in many ways remained unexploited, since they are scattered across California and are often too old and brittle to handle. Microfilm copies of the registers exist in archives but are of poor quality and often hard to locate. Lacking adequate staff and the resources to facilitate genealogical and historical research, libraries, archives, missions, and dioceses each year turn away countless individuals who are eager to study early California's Indian, Hispanic, and Anglo-American inhabitants. The Early California Population Project was created as a solution to the problem of access, and is a significant new resource for the study of California before 1850.

This dissertation traces the cultural impact of introduced infectious disease in Hawai‘i from the arrival of Europeans to 1840. Colonialism in Hawai‘i began with challenges to Islander health, and I argue that health remained the national crisis of the Hawaiian Islands for over a century. More chronic than labor strife and land-use disputes, more pressing than self-determination and the struggle for sovereignty, the introduction of Old World diseases—bearing directly on the above challenges—resulted in drastically reduced lifespans, crushing infertility and infant mortality, and persistent poor health for generations of Hawaiians. The ma‘i malihini (introduced diseases) also left a deep imprint on Hawaiian culture and on the Hawaiian national consciousness. While scholars have noted the role of epidemics in the depopulation of Hawai‘i and broader Oceania, few have considered the effects of Old World diseases on Hawaiian culture—including religion, medicine and ideas about the body, and gender and sexuality. Equally neglected by scholars have been Islanders’ own ideas about—and responses to—disease and other health challenges on the local level. Scholars’ grasp of the Hawaiian past is therefore incomplete. My work aims to fill this important gap, while at the same time providing a comparative case study for disease and culture change among indigenous populations across the Americas and the Pacific.

While much of colonial California historiography includes detailed narratives of the mission Indian workers, very little is known regarding those Indians who moved from the missions to work on the large California ranchos and elsewhere. The stories of these Indian workers have often been ignored; further, the narratives which do exist contain some form of debt peonage to explain their working arrangement. This dissertation attempts to challenge these debt peonage theories and offer a more accurate account of the working arrangement that developed on the California rancho during the Mexican (1821-1848) and early American (1849-1880) periods. Employing important primary sources—including rancho account books, letters, court documents, census records, and probate inventories—this dissertation ventures to show that Indian labor arrangements on these ranchos were less repressive than previously presented. In addition, it reveals the misunderstood nature and importance of the rancho store to both the Rancho owners and their Indian workers.

Articles from American periodicals about the Hispanic west in North America published between 1800 and 1850 exemplified the changes that the government of the United States and its people experienced. These articles reveal the nation's transition from a republican form of government to an emerging American empire. Utilizing periodicals, this study reveals the cultural and political transitions of the United States in the early national period. Yet, rather than examine ideas about news and ideas that circulated in articles about the United States, my study analyzes Anglo American news, ideas, and developments in Mexico and greater New Spain. By doing so, conceptions about the country, with respect to its representation in periodicals, can be viewed in broader terms; here, they can be viewed in terms of empire building.

This study looks at the history of California through the prism of education. Control of California changed hands several times during the long nineteenth century, and each change brought about turbulence and social unrest. Schools often proved to be the battlegrounds on which existing cultures clashed with incoming power structures. This study examines these different cultures and their attitudes toward educating the masses, beginning with the different California Indian tribes and ending with California as a U.S. state. In each case, education that was provided by the ruling powers was meant to serve those powers. Consent of the governed was preferable but not necessary. Especially under the United States, educators had to walk a fine line between the rights of parents and the needs of the state. Catholics resisted the Protestant ethos of American common schools. Democrats resisted public schools because they became the postwar agenda of the Republican Party. White parents resisted sending their sons and daughters to school with children of color. Farmers and other manual laborers resisted supporting high schools which their working-class children would never attend. Compulsory school laws were passed and ignored. Each of these struggles shaped the public school systems that finally became universal among U.S. states in the twentieth century.