This issue of Social Process in Hawai celebrates the 100th Anniversary of the University of Hawai'i at Manoa Department of Sociology, now part of the College of Social Sciences, which was founded by Romanzo Adams in 1920. Entitled Celebrating 100 Years of Local Studies, the issue is guest-edited by Lori Pierce of DePaul University and John P. Rosa of the University of Hawai'i. Its sixteen articles are presented in two sections-Part I: Rethinking Hawai'i’s Past and Part II: New Directions in Contemporary Hawai'i. A preface by Patricia Steinhoff provides a brief overview of the department’s history and its long-standing commitment to engaging both students and faculty in research on local communities in Hawai'i.

Pierce’s introduction to the volume traces how founder Romanzo Adams built up the department by obtaining a ten-year grant from the Rockefeller Foundation that supported faculty, graduate students, and the development of a social research laboratory. Undergraduate students learned research methods while conducting studies in local communities throughout Hawai'i, and their research papers have been preserved in the Romanzo Adams Social Research Laboratory (RASRL) in the University of Hawai'i archives at Hamilton Library. In the mid-1930s the department’s student Sociology Club began publishing research by both faculty and students in the department’s journal, Social Process in Hawai Prominent sociologists have come to Hawai'i as visitors since the 1920s and 1930s to study the unique ethnic diversity in the islands and they, too, have contributed to the journal.

After a hiatus of a decade in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Social Process in Hawai was revived by Kiyoshi Ikeda, who had been a student editor of the journal in the early 1950s and later returned as a senior faculty member. Since then it has been published with guest editors from the sociology department and other social science departments at the university. This anniversary issue includes a cumulative index of all forty-six issues of the journal, plus a cumulative index of all of the authors, editors, and other participants who have made Social Process in Hawai possible.