Hawaii A History

To most Americans, Hawaii means ukuleles and native dancers, Waikiki and Diamond Head. Hawaii is a romantic image learned from travel posters and the movies, and much of it, surprisingly, is true. But Hawaii is more than that. The people who have come here from Polynesia, Asia, Europe, and the Americas have made it a crossroads culture and a testing ground for fundamental American principals.

This book about Hawaii is written in the words and pictures of the children of Hawaii.

Not since Willam A. Bryan's 1915 landmark compendium, Hawaiian Natural History, has there been a single-volume work that offers such extensive coverage of this complex but fascinating subject. Illustrated with more than two dozen color plates and a hundred photographs and line drawings, Hawaiian Natural History, Ecology, and Evolution updates both the earlier publication and subsequent works by compiling and synthesizing in a uniform and accessible fashion the widely scattered information now available. Readers can trace the natural history of the Hawaiian Archipelago through the book's twenty-eight chapters or focus on specific topics such as island formation by plate tectonics, plant and animal evolution, flightless birds and their fossil sites, Polynesian migrational history and ecology, the effects of humans and exotic animals on the environment, current conservation efforts, and the contributions of the many naturalists who visited the islands over the centuries and the stories behind their discoveries. An extensive annotated bibliography and a list of audio-visual materials will help readers locate additional sources of information.

In his most challenging work to date, journalist and author Tom Coffman offers readers a new and much-needed political narrative of twentieth-century Hawaii. The Island Edge of America reinterprets the major events leading up to and following statehood in 1959: U.S. annexation of the Hawaiian kingdom, the wartime crisis of the Japanese-American community, postwar labor organization, the Cold War, the development of Hawaii's legendary Democratic Party, the rise of native Hawaiian nationalism. His account weaves together the threads of multicultural and transnational forces that have shaped the Islands for more than a century, looking beyond the Hawaii carefully packaged for the tourist to the Hawaii of complex and conflicting identities--independent kingdom, overseas colony, U.S. state, indigenous nation--a wonderfully rich, diverse, and at times troubled place. With a sure grasp of political history and culture based on decades of firsthand archival research, Tom Coffman takes Hawaii's story into the twentieth century and in the process sheds new light on America's island edge.

The arrival of Captain Cook and the debates concerning the territory's admission to statehood are given equal attention in this detailed history.

In 1907 Hawai‘i's fledgling College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts, boasting an enrollment of five students and a staff of twelve, opened in a rented house on Young Street. The hastily improvised college, and the university into which it grew, owed its existence to the initiative of Native Hawaiian legislators, the advocacy of a Caucasian newspaper editor, the petition of an Asian American bank cashier, and the energies of a president and faculty recruited from Cornell University in distant Ithaca, New York. Today, nearly a century later, some 50,000 students are enrolled yearly at ten campuses--in a unique system of community colleges and professional schools. Malamalama: A History of the University of Hawai‘i documents the many contributions the University has made over the decades to culture and education in the islands. From its start, the University rejected the racial stereotyping and prejudice common in territorial Hawai‘i, thus fostering an ease of association among students of diverse backgrounds and providing, through student government and campus societies, a venue where future political leaders of the islands could hone their skills. The story of how the University of Hawai‘i grew from a regional undergraduate college to an internationally recognized graduate and research university, weathering repeated crises along the way, is told by emeritus professors Kamins and Potter in Part I. They highlight the University's relationship with the legislature, the actions and personalities of its very different presidents, and the effects of social upheaval and changing budgets on an evolving institution. Three alumni provide personal accounts of their years at the University. Parts II and III offer particular histories by knowledgeable contributors, including faculty members and administrators, of the Hilo and West Oahu campuses, of each fo the seven community colleges, and of programs at the Manoa campus. The strands of history woven together here reveal the University's abiding determination to serve as a cultural link across the Pacific and among Hawai‘i's own ethnic communities. The University seal, dominated by the Hawaiian word malamalama, "light of knowledge," depicts a map of the Pacific hemisphere, celebrating the great diversity of people and cultures that contributed to its founding and the westward reach of its connections.