UC Press Blog

February kicks off Pacific Historical Review’s 30th year at Portland State University. It also marks the release date of the journal’s winter 2026 issue, with articles on tribal sovereignty, Pacific expansion, and global trade. 

Frank Van Nuys’s article investigates how the Endangered Species Act provided opportunities—and limits—for the Nez Perce to exercise tribal sovereignty. Two other articles look back to the first half of the nineteenth century. Nicholas diPucchio looks at Spanish American Independence and how it influenced US expansion to the Pacific. Finally, Marie Duggan and Kathleen Harper reveal a complex trading network between Calcutta and California. 

The Endangered Species Act and Limitations on Tribal Sovereignty: The Case of Nez Perce Wolf Management
By Frank Van Nuys

For decades, Idaho’s Nez Perce Tribe fought to recover Idaho’s gray wolf population under the Endangered Species Act. To this day, the Nez Perce are the only tribe in the United States to have assumed official responsibility for managing an endangered species. As historian Frank Van Nuys explains, the Tribe’s efforts were continuously frustrated and their authority continually challenged, as they navigated inconsistent federal support and outright antagonism from the Idaho government. The Nez Perce succeeded in recovering the gray wolf population in the Northern Rockies, but that success was bittersweet. Once the gray wolf’s numbers rebounded, the species lost its protected status, and the Tribe lost the authority to act as protectors. 

Spanish American Independence and the Discourse of U.S. Pacific Expansion, 1815-1830
By Nicholas DiPucchio

Nicholas G. DiPucchio flips the script on how we understand the U.S. annexation of California in 1848. Building on pioneering scholarship that depicts the 1810s and 1820s as a fleeting yet committed era of pan-American unity, he reimagines the build-up to the annexation. After Canadian fur traders took control of Fort Astoria, optimistic U.S. leaders saw an opportunity for a new alliance with their Latin American neighbors. They rallied around a commitment to anti-colonialism, sharing a bold dream of commerce and collaboration—even sketching out plans for transoceanic trade canals. Unfortunately, the partnership was fragile: international rivalries and broken promises marred their shared fantasy. In the end, antebellum expansionists increasingly drew from the bitter ideology of manifest destiny. They ended their fragile alliance with Latin American nations and expanded on the west coast by force. 

The Iberian Transpacific Circuit between Calcutta and California, 1825-1845
By Marie C. Duggan and Kathleen M. Harper

Conventionally, we imagine imperialism on the West Coast of the Americas as emanating from Europe. However, European traders had outposts in Asia—including the British in India, the Spaniards in Manila, and the Portuguese in Macao on mainland China—and these Iberians in Asia influenced the development of California. In 1825, agents of Spain's Royal Philippine Company plied a trade route between Calcutta and newly independent Mexico. As authors Marie Duggan and Kathleen Harper reveal, the route was financed by Anglo Basque commercial agents from Calcutta and staffed by their Portuguese allies. For these commercial actors on their transpacific route, California was a borderland between Asian and Mexican markets. When the Spanish Empire crumbled in the 1810s, it created a shortage of silver currency in Asia—because the Philippines remained tied to Spain while Mexican silver mines were independent. Some in the Royal Philippine Company network of Asia migrated across the Pacific to build up Mazatlán as a port to restore the flow of Mexican silver to Calcutta. After the 1827 expulsion of Spaniards from Mexico, members of the network even gained control of the mercury produced in Spain that was essential to silver production in mines behind Mazatlan. Iberian merchants of Asia had a hand in the economic development of the North American Pacific, including California. New archival data suggest that California and Arizona were linked with Sonora and Sinaloa, in a commercial region that looked not to Europe but to the British in Asia for stability.

Not yet a subscriber? Purchase an individual subscription and/or ask your library to subscribe. You may also purchase print copies of the Winter 2026 issue of Pacific Historical Review (issue 95.1), as well as other individual issues of PHR, on the journal’s site. 

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