UC Press Blog

The fall issue of Pacific Historical Review tracks down a lost sea that appeared on eighteenth-century French maps. It gazes back to a time when the US government and universities worked together. And it traces the early development of maritime ports in New Spain. 

In Search of the Mer de l’Ouest: The Pacific Northwest in the French Imperial Imagination
By Owen Stanwood

From the late-1600s onward, French mapmakers and explorers told of the fabled Mer de l’Ouest, an inland sea in the northwest part of North America. This so-called “Western Sea” provided a convenient route to Asia, and was also home to advanced people who built cities and sailing ships. Generations of historians have assumed this story to be fiction, but historian Owen Stanwood believes it should be taken seriously. As Stanwood explains, Indigenous intelligence of the Mer de l’Ouest was not completely accurate but was also not entirely wrong. After all, there was a vast inland body of saltwater in the Northwest, now known as the Salish Sea. French speculations about the Far Northwest gave a correct, if incomplete, portrait of a densely populated region that was a center of Indigenous settlement and trade.

Channeling Expertise: Sinologists and America’s China Policy, 1966–1968
By Yuan Yan

At the present moment, when Washington and America’s universities appear increasingly divided, the history of U.S.-China policy offers a reminder of how closely the two were once connected. In her new article about U.S. foreign policy in the 1960s, historian Yuan Yan takes us back to a time when U.S. presidents turned to university professors to guide relations with China. Yan examines how these China experts, known as “Sinologists,” worked with the Lyndon B. Johnson administration and Hubert H. Humphrey’s political campaign, seeking to move U.S.-China policy to the center. By highlighting how ideas moved through bureaucratic channels and crossed partisan boundaries, her article underscores the role of people outside the government in shaping diplomatic history. 

From Naval Platform to Commercial Hub of New Spain: Structural and Maritime Transformations of the Naval Department of San Blas, 1768–1790
By Guadalupe Pinzón Ríos

In the eighteenth century, colonial Spain established navy ports and commercial ports–but couldn’t control the distinction between the two. San Blas was established as a major navy port on the Pacific Coast of Mexico, in the current state of Nayarit. Historian Guadalupe Pinzón Ríos explains how and why the Naval Department of San Blas, beyond its maritime purposes, became a commercial hub in western New Spain. Despite the efforts of the colonial state, trade networks developed at San Blas, ultimately forcing the Naval Department to also serve as a commercial port. 

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We publish PHR in partnership with the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association.