This authoritative catalogue of the Corcoran Gallery of Art's renowned collection of pre-1945 American paintings will greatly enhance scholarly and public understanding of one of the finest and most important collections of historic American art in the world. Composed of more than 600 objects dating from 1740 to 1945.

A pioneering study of early trade and beach communities in the Pacific Islands and first published in 1977, this book provides historians with an ambitious survey of early European-Polynesian contact, an analysis of how early trade developed along with the beachcomber community, and a detailed reconstruction of development of the early Pacific port towns. Set mainly in the first half of the 19th century, continuing in some cases for a few decades more, the book covers five ports: Kororareka (now Russell, in New Zealand), Levuka (Fiji), Apia (Samoa), Papeete (Tahiti) and Honolulu (Hawai'i). The role of beachcombers, the earliest European inhabitants, as well as the later consuls or commercial agents, and the development of plantation economies is explored. The book is a tour de force, the first detailed comparative academic study of these early precolonial trading towns and their race relations. It argues that the predominantly egalitarian towns where Islanders, beachcombers, traders, and missionaries mixed were largely harmonious, but this was undermined by later arrivals and larger populations.