When twenty-three-year-old Carrie Prudence Winter caught her first glimpse of Honolulu from aboard the Zealandia in October 1890, she had "never seen anything so beautiful." She had been traveling for two months since leaving her family home in Connecticut and was at last only a few miles from her final destination, Kawaiaha'o Female Seminary, a flourishing boarding school for Hawaiian girls. As the daughter of staunch New England Congregationalists, Winter had dreamed of being a missionary teacher as a child and reasoned that "teaching for a few years among the Sandwich Islands seemed particularly attractive" while her fiancé pursued a science degree. During her three years at Kawaiaha'o, Winter wrote often and at length to her "beloved Charlie"; her lively and affectionate letters provide readers with not only an intimate look at nineteenth-century courtship, but many invaluable details about life in Hawai'i during the last years of the monarchy and a young woman's struggle to enter a career while adjusting to surroundings that were unlike anything she had ever experienced. In generous excerpts from dozens of letters, Winter describes teaching and living with her pupils, her relationships with fellow teachers, and her encounters with Hawaiian royalty (in particular Kawaiaha'o enjoyed the patronage of Queen Lili'uokalani, whose adopted daughter was enrolled as a pupil) and members of influential missionary families, as well as ordinary citizens. She discusses the serious health concerns (leprosy, smallpox, malaria) that irrevocably affected the lives of her students and took a keen (if somewhat naive) interest in relaying the political turmoil that ended in the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands by the U.S. in 1898. The book opens with a magazine article written by Winter and published while she was still teaching at Kawaiaha'o, which humorously recounts her journey from Connecticut to Hawai'i and her arrival at the seminary. The work is augmented by more than fifty photographs, four autobiographical student essays, and an appendix identifying all of Winter's students and others mentioned in the letters. A foreword by education historian C. Kalani Beyer provides a context for understanding the Euro-centric and assimilationist curriculum promoted by early schools for Hawaiians like Kawaiaha'o Female Seminary and later the Kamehameha Schools and Mid-Pacific Institute.

Elegant, brutal, and profound—this magnificent debut captures the grit and glory of modern Hawai'i with breathtaking force and accuracy. In a stunning collection that announces the arrival of an incredible talent, Kristiana Kahakauwila travels the islands of Hawai'i, making the fabled place her own. Exploring the deep tensions between local and tourist, tradition and expectation, façade and authentic self, This Is Paradise provides an unforgettable portrait of life as it’s truly being lived on Maui, Oahu, Kaua'i and the Big Island. In the gut-punch of “Wanle,” a beautiful and tough young woman wants nothing more than to follow in her father’s footsteps as a legendary cockfighter. With striking versatility, the title story employs a chorus of voices—the women of Waikiki—to tell the tale of a young tourist drawn to the darker side of the city’s nightlife. “The Old Paniolo Way” limns the difficult nature of legacy and inheritance when a patriarch tries to settle the affairs of his farm before his death. Exquisitely written and bursting with sharply observed detail, Kahakauwila’s stories remind us of the powerful desire to belong, to put down roots, and to have a place to call home.

In Word Across the Water, Tom Smith brings the histories of Hawai'i and the Philippines together to argue that US imperial ambitions towards these Pacific archipelagos were deeply intertwined with the work of American Protestant missionaries. As self-styled interpreters of history, missionaries produced narratives to stoke interest in their cause, locating US imperial interventions and their own evangelistic projects within divinely ordained historical trajectories. As missionaries worked in the shadow of their nation's empire, however, their religiously inflected historical narratives came to serve an alternative purpose. They emerged as a way for missionaries to negotiate their own status between the imperial and the local and to come to terms with the diverse spaces, peoples, and traditions of historical narration that they encountered across different island groups. Word Across the Water encourages scholars of empire and religion alike to acknowledge both the pernicious nature of imperial claims over oceanic space underpinned by religious and historical arguments, and the fragility of those claims on the ground.

Ten-year-old Kanani loves living in beautiful Hawaii and she especially loves sharing the wonders of her island home with visitors. So when her cousin Rachel from New York comes to stay for a month, Kanani is excited to get to know her. But no matter what she does to help Rachel feel at home, it only seems to make her unhappy instead. Can Kanani find a way to connect with her cousin?

Ivy must make a choice between a family reunion and the gymnastics meet.