Year on the Island of Guam

Reflective diaries of U.S. Colonial administrators chronicling their tenures in the Pacific are the rarest of source materials for students of the U.S. imperium who typically must rely on documentation framed in terms of manifest destiny, benevolent assimilation and American exceptionalism. "William Edwin Safford's A Year on the Island of Guam, however, is a highly personal, richly evocative and remarkably thoughtful account of his assignment as the first de facto colonial governor of Guam following the U.S. annexation of the island as spoils of the Spanish-American War."- Frank Quimby