It’s difficult to avoid getting caught up in the details of the lives of the students who wrote the papers in the RASRL Collection. It could be a compelling narrative that is particularly well written or the careful delineation of feelings or reactions that makes a paper memorable. Sometimes it is simple curiosity: who are you…
As mentioned in other Thinking Locally posts, the RASRL Collection contains more than just student papers. “What People in Hawaii are Saying and Doing” is a series of thirty-eight reports, covering the years 1943 to 1963 and published by UH’s Sociology Department for the purpose of sharing new research on topics of current interest with…
In this paper, I shall attempt to fulfill the purpose set forth before me, that is, “to develop an objective, critical, and analytical attitude” in the study of my family. I shall attempt to erase all biases and sentimentalism and deal with it as an object (R. T., “A Sociological Study of the Family,” Folder:…
As we’ve said in previous posts, Margaret Lam was a bit of a character. She looms large in the RASRL Collection possibly because she made her presence felt. She was vocal, and in spite of her size cast a long shadow over the RASRL research in the 1930s. Reading correspondence by and about her,…
The RASRL Collection can overwhelm with its thousands of papers by individual students, so when we come across writers who have a body of work in RASRL, we take note. Margaret Lam, featured at Thinking Locally, is someone we’ve come to know through her research and writing as well as her correspondence with Andrew Lind.…
In an earlier post, we discussed the life and career of Margaret Lam who was a University of Hawai‘i graduate student and worked in the Social Research Laboratory. She wrote articles for several sociology journals including Social Process in Hawaii. She also provided supporting material for Romanzo Adams’ pioneering work, Interracial Marriage in Hawaii. In the RASRL…
One task of the archival researcher is to identify and grapple with absence: absent information, absent evidence, absent data, absent voices. It is easy to be seduced by the wealth of information in the RASRL Collection – the breadth of coverage, the number of papers, the scope of information. But periodically, we’ve stopped to contemplate…
I found that the Army is a very fertile soil in the field of sociology, I think that students who are veterans enjoy a great deal of advantage over the non-veterans . . .. The veteran had traveled widely and met people from all walks of life and when he got his discharge, he had…
We at Thinking Locally have struggled with the question of anonymity for the RASRL writers. We want to credit them for their work, but we’ve learned that the RASRL papers donated by the faculty to UHM’s Archives don’t completely belong to the library and probably never really belonged to the faculty who donated them. The…
Researchers who have spent time studying the sociology of race in Hawai‘i are familiar with the name Margaret Lam. Her MA thesis (“Six Generations of Race Mixture in Hawaii,” UH 1932) was the first study to trace the genealogy and background of the Beckley’s, a prominent and well known hapa Haole family. Bob Dye’s…
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Everyone lives in their own universe, welcome to mine
about Territorial Hawai‘i
the Story within the Story
Thinking Locally 