GUAM
name: label: Collection Creator
content: Thompson, Laura, 1905-2000
setName: label: See more items in
content: Laura Thompson papers
unitdate: label: Date
content: 1938-1996
dataSource: label: Archival Repository
content: National Anthropological Archives
identifier: label: Identifier
content: NAA.1983-51, Series 3
objectType: label: Type
content: Archival materials
arrangement: label: Arrangement note
content: Materials are ordered alphabetically by document type and chronologically therein; notes and photographs ordered alphabetically by subject. Dates non-inclusive. Photographs are located at the end of the series.
scopecontent: label: Scope and Contents note
content: Invited by the island's Naval governor to evaluate the local educational sysytem, Laura Thompson first conducted field research in Guam from 1938 to 1939. This study resulted in the publication of Guam and its People (1947). During her stay in Guam, Thompson also traveled to Asia; letters and materials from this trip are located in this series. Thompson maintained her interest in Guam, its administrative problems, and particularly the plights of the Chamorro people. She returned to the island a number of times in her career, including in 1977 and 1987, and maintained personal and professional relationships with colleagues and informants. Professional correspondence is both ingoing and outgoing; personal correspondence is almost entirely composed by Thompson. Correspondents include Thompson's family, colleagues, informants and Guamanian government officials. Thompson's letters to her family during her first trip to the field were later annotated for inclusion in a projected volume of letters from the field. Correspondents Becky Stephenson and her husband, Hiro Kurashina, were close friends as well as colleagues of Thompson's. They became Thompson's literary executors in the mid 1990s and some correspondence between Stephenson and Thompson relates to the publication of Thompson's autobiography, Beyond the Dream. Thompson's field studies include her itinerary, field notes, and an index to her field diary from 1938 and 1939, as well as notes she collected during her trip to the Orient. Few materials in the collection relate to Thompson's seminal work, Guam and Its People.