Hawaii

“To most Americans, Hawaii means ukuleles and native dancers, Waikiki and Diamond Head. It 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 principles. In 1778 Captain Cook discovered what the Hawaiians already knew: that here was an enormously attractive place secured only by its mid-Pacific isolation. During the next two centuries, that isolation vanished, and the thousands of immigrants who made Hawaii their home utterly changed its history. In the early nineteenth century missionaries and whalers from New England brought new religion and new money that undermined the Hawaiian kingdom. Sugar and pineapple planters later brought a new social order to replace it, and, with thousands of Chinese and Japanese laborers, built the enlightened plantation society that so marked Hawaii’s experience as an American territory. World War II and the years that followed brought changed expectations that led in 1959 to statehood and full fellowship in the American Union. For Kamehameha, Bingham, Judd, Gibson, Spreckels, Liliuokalani, Ariyoshi, and others of their tribes, Hawaii has been more than the travel-poster image, though today that image is as powerful and profitable as ever. For them, Hawaii means a process, as well as a place: a trial of diversity in union whose outcome the future will judge.” BOOK JACKET