The Needs of a Research

Unfortunately, I was unable to find any documents that would help in understanding what the influence of Japanese-American historians on the field of Japanese history would be. The most notable documents that I found were his class notes on Western Civilization (These were the only class notes that I came across) and his doctoral dissertation, of which I did not get a chance to read any of. Perhaps you could use these two documents as origin points for Mikiso Hane’s influence on the field of Japanese history. Researching how a Japanese-American historian teaches topics such as Western Civilization certainly could be a topic of interest, particularly if one is making an argument against the practice of placing historians into a position of authority of fields that they are not experts on. Or the inverse argument could be made, that historians are capable of teaching any field of history regardless of their expertise. A case can be made that the notes may be of importance. The dissertation would be a great starting point for studying how Mikiso Hane influenced the field of history. It could be contrasted and compared with later published works. Perhaps even creating a timeline of sorts using the publications.

Of note were also some newspaper article clippings that featured Mikiso Hane as the main topic. These are definitely useful, though perhaps they would not be found in a typical archive since newspapers are typically digitized.