This chapter discusses the role and nature of the historian’s work, the professionalization of the craft, and why it is essential to a free society. Influenced by the German historian Leopold von Ranke, the American Historical Association founded in 1884 embraced the scientific ideal and a mission of achieving objective truth about the past. The possibility of objectivity, however, was questioned after World War I by Carl Becker and Charles Beard and ultimately by nearly all historians. The most extreme critique came from postmodernists who argued that historians are not uncovering the past, they are inventing it. History is a form of literature. Since the 1960s, the historical discipline has acquired many other new approaches besides postmodernism. Increasingly, it has focused its attention on studying groups in society estranged from power and influence, individuals and groups previously neglected and oftentimes voiceless. New questions of culture, mentalité, and subalternity have drawn historians’ attention. Among the new categories, gender was the most prominently pursued.

This chapter introduces Mooring the Global Archive’s main themes and questions, and positions the book’s historiographical interventions within a wider literature on archives, global history and modern Japanese history. Reflecting first on the problem of when and where the history of the Yamashiro-maru steamship might really begin, it identifies three so-called ‘archival traps’: that is, three potential archival starting points – in the ship’s British birthplace, on the internet, and in the Hawai‘i State Archives – which would unwittingly reinforce a Eurocentric narrative of late nineteenth century Japanese catch-up with the West. As an alternative, the chapter tells of the author’s chance encounter with a migrant gravestone in Kaua‘i Island as an entry-point into ways of binding non-linear temporalities, non-paper sources and especially non-elite voices into global history. The gravestone and the story it reveals serve to frame the notion of ‘authorial metadata’, which will be present throughout the book.

This chapter focuses on the archival challenge of how to frame the time and space of transit – in this case, the two-week journey from Yokohama to Honolulu as Japanese migrant labourers began their new lives in mid 1885. Considering transit as a fundamental ‘in-between’ space in global history, the chapter takes as its empirical starting point a large oil painting by the American painter Joseph Dwight Strong (1853–99). Strong’s painting purports to depict a Japanese family on the Spreckelsville plantation in Maui – the plantation on which the labourer whose gravestone is discussed in Chapter 1 once worked. To contextualize the transit features of Strong’s work, the chapter discusses the wider dynamics of post-1868 economic disruption in Japan on the one hand and, on the other, the post-US Civil War expansion of the sugar industry in the Hawaiian Kingdom. In this way, the chapter unpacks the painting’s wider claims about Japan and Hawai‘i’s respective positions in the changing Pacific world, including a fundamental fiction at the image’s core. It thereby makes the case both for Native Hawaiian voices and for Japanese migrant-labourer voices to be brought to global history’s archival foreground.