2026-06-26 –, Room 302 (Seats 48)
As the United States consolidated its territorial empire in the early twentieth century, students and teachers navigated the daily process of negotiating colonization in public school classrooms. Observers lauded Hawai‘i’s schools as examples of America’s successful “melting pot,” where students of Native Hawaiian, white American, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Scottish, Portuguese, Puerto Rican, and many other heritages learned in purported harmony. Progressive educational reforms challenged teachers to use their knowledge of individual students to advance Americanization and instill behaviors identified with democratic citizenship. Students and their families viewed education as means to challenge socio-economic hierarchies, claim access to political rights, and sustain cultural identities. Drawing on student essays written as part of the Survey on Race Relations in the 1920s as well as school district records, teachers’ correspondence, and accounts in professional journals, this paper analyzes how Hawai‘i’s students understood themselves and the possibilities and the limits they faced as they crafted their identities within the American empire. Students cited education and their teachers alternatively as sources of inspiration and as reinforcers of racial hierarchies, suggesting how broader transnational structures of race and gender influenced, but did not entirely dictate, the daily interactions of students and teachers in classrooms. As they considered options for international travel and study, compared constraints on their rights in Hawai‘i with the U.S. Mainland and other nations, and asserted their cultural and civic identities, these students illustrated the tensions that emerged as global interconnectedness and exclusionary policies shaped their everyday decisions.
Education
Empire
Citizenship
Michelle Morgan is an associate professor of history at Missouri State University. She completed her PhD in American History with a minor in Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research explores the roles schools have played in competing definitions of “American” in newly acquired territories, emphasizing the participation of teachers as cultural agents and the ways in which gender and identity shape teachers’ roles in classrooms and communities. Her work has appeared in Western Historical Quarterly and the History of Education Quarterly. She is currently working on a manuscript analyzing the experiences of urban teachers and educational reform in the American Pacific between 1890 and 1930.