Looks back at the American involvement in the islands, historical events, cultural artifacts, and the people and topography of the islands.

A History of America Samoa is a high school level textbook initiated and completed by the Amerika Samoa Humanities Council. The content detailed in the book ranges from the migration, discovery, and inhabitation of the western Pacific and specifically Samoa, today known as a territory just over a hundred years old. This textbook is written from the perspective of both oral and written accounts of Samoan history. It covers the geographical formation, historical inhabitation, and development of American Samoa through legends, geography, and timelines that help span a time period beginning with the earliest signs of human integration to today's modern setting. This text weaves together the historical account of a little known island with its people spread throughout the globe, through local myth, legend, and authentic biographical information in this comprehensive history of American Samoa.

This book is a researched study of land issues in American Sāmoa that analyzes the impact of U.S. colonialism and empire building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Carefully tracing changes in land laws up to the present, this volume also draws on a careful examination of legal traditions, administrative decisions, court cases and rising tensions between indigenous customary land tenure practices in American Sāmoa and Western notions of individual private ownership. It also highlights how unusual the status of American Sāmoa is in its relationship with the U.S., namely as the only “unincorporated” and “unorganized” overseas territory, and aims to expand the U.S. empire-building scholarship to include and recognize American Sāmoa into the vernacular of Americanization projects.

A new history of globalization and empire at the crossroads of the Pacific. Located halfway between HawaiÔi and Australia, the islands of Samoa have long been a center of Oceanian cultural and economic exchange. Accustomed to exercising agency in trade and diplomacy, Samoans found themselves enmeshed in a new form of globalization after missionaries and traders arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century. As the great powers of Europe and America competed to bring Samoa into their orbits, Germany and the United States eventually agreed to divide the islands for their burgeoning colonial holdings. In Coconut Colonialism, Holger Droessler examines the Samoan response through the lives of its workers. Ordinary SamoansÑsome on large plantations, others on their own small holdingsÑpicked and processed coconuts and cocoa, tapped rubber trees, and built roads and ports that brought cash crops to Europe and North America. At the same time, Samoans redefined their own way of being in the worldÑwhat Droessler terms ÒOceanian globalityÓÑto challenge German and American visions of a global economy that in fact served only the needs of Western capitalism. Through cooperative farming, Samoans contested the exploitative wage-labor system introduced by colonial powers. The islanders also participated in ethnographic shows around the world, turning them into diplomatic missions and making friends with fellow colonized peoples. Samoans thereby found ways to press their own agendas and regain a degree of independence. Based on research in multiple languages and countries, Coconut Colonialism offers new insights into the global history of labor and empire at the dawn of the twentieth century.

First published in 1928, "Coming of Age in Samoa" is Margaret Mead's classic sociological examination of adolescence during the first part of the 20th century in American Samoa. Sent by the Social Science Research Council to study the youths of a so-called "primitive" culture, Margaret Mead would spend nine months attempting to ascertain if the problems of adolescences in western society were merely a function of youth or a result of cultural and social differences. "Coming of Age in Samoa" is her report of those findings, in which the author details various aspects of Samoan life including, education, social and household structure, and sexuality. The book drew great public interest when it was first published and also criticism from those who did not like the perceived message that the carefree sexuality of Samoan girls might be the reason for their lack of neuroses. "Coming of Age in Samoa" has also been criticized for the veracity of Mead's account, though current public opinion seems to fall on the side of her work being largely a factual one, if not one of great anthropological rigor. At the very least "Coming of Age in Samoa" remains an interesting historical account of tribal Samoan life during the first part of the 20th century. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper.

In 1928 Margaret Mead announced her stunning discovery of a culture in which the storm and stress of adolescence didn't exist. The resulting book, Coming of Age in Samoa has since become a classic - and the best-selling anthropology book of all time. Within the nature-nurture controversy that still divides scientists, Mead's evidence has long been a crucial negative instance, an apparent proof of the sovereignty of culture over biology.