Elayne McCabe ’06 (right) majored in history and will travel to Indonesia on a Fulbright grant to study the economic and social ramifications of the 1997 Asian financial crisis on Indonesian filmmaking.

“To the Farthest Port of the Rich East: Yankee Voyages to Nagasaki, Japan, at the Turn of the 19th Century”

Franziska Seraphim, assistant professor, history department

“This is a tremendous piece of original work that reconstructs the voyages of two American trade ships from New England to Nagasaki in 1799 and 1801, respectively, half a century before the ‘opening’ of Japan. Elayne’s careful mining of the ships’ logbooks held at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem provides rich insights into New England’s earliest ‘globalization,’ the consumption of exotic goods as part of everyday life, and an emerging national identity. She also shows how Tokugawa Japan, far from isolating itself, projected political power through an intricate set of rituals and restrictions that frustrated foreign merchants.”