In 1897, as a white oligarchy made plans to allow the United States to annex Hawai'i, native Hawaiians organized a massive petition drive to protest. Ninety-five percent of the native population signed the petition, causing the annexation treaty to fail in the U.S. Senate. This event was unknown to many contemporary Hawaiians until Noenoe K. Silva rediscovered the petition in the process of researching this book. With few exceptions, histories of Hawai'i have been based exclusively on English-language sources. They have not taken into account the thousands of pages of newspapers, books, and letters written in the mother tongue of native Hawaiians. By rigorously analyzing many of these documents, Silva fills a crucial gap in the historical record. In so doing, she refutes the long-held idea that native Hawaiians passively accepted the erosion of their culture and loss of their nation, showing that they actively resisted political, economic, linguistic, and cultural domination. Drawing on Hawaiian-language texts, primarily newspapers produced in the nineteenth century and early twentieth, Silva demonstrates that print media was central to social communication, political organizing, and the perpetuation of Hawaiian language and culture. A powerful critique of colonial historiography, Aloha Betrayed provides a much-needed history of native Hawaiian resistance to American imperialism.

These are among the records seized by order of Republic of Hawaii officials in 1895 with the intent of obtaining evidence that she had prior knowledge of the 1895 counterrevolution.

An award-winning author tells the stories of the audacious American politicians, military commanders, and business executives who took it upon themselves to depose monarchs, presidents, and prime ministers of other countries with disastrous long-term consequences.

The colorful history of the Hawaiian Islands, since their discovery in 1778 by the great British navigator Captain James Cook, falls naturally into three periods. During the first, Hawaii was a monarchy ruled by native kings and queens. Then came the perilous transition period when new leaders, after failing to secure annexation to the United States, set up a miniature republic. The third period began in 1898 when Hawaii by annexation became American territory. The Hawaiian Kingdom, by Ralph S. Kuykendall, is the detailed story of the island monarchy. In the first volume, "Foundation and Transformation," the author gives a brief sketch of old Hawaii before the coming of the Europeans, based on the known and accepted accounts of this early period. He then shows how the arrival of sea rovers, traders, soldiers of forture, whalers, scoundrels, missionaries, and statesmen transformed the native kingdom, and how the foundations of modern Hawaii were laid. In the second volume, "Twenty Critical Years," the author deals with the middle period of the kingdom's history, when Hawaii was trying to insure her independence while world powers maneuvered for dominance in the Pacific. It was an important period with distinct and well-marked characteristics, but the noteworthy changes and advances which occurred have received less attention from students of history than they deserve. Much of the material is taken from manuscript sources and appears in print for the first time in the second volume. The third and final volume of this distinguished trilogy, "The Kalakaua Dynasty," covers the colorful reign of King Kalakaua, the Merry Monarch, and the brief and tragic rule of his successor, Queen Liliuokalani. This volume is enlivened by such controversial personages as Claus Spreckels, Walter Murray Gibson, and Celso Caesar Moreno. Through it runs the thread of the reciprocity treaty with the United States, its stimulating effect upon the island economy, and the far-reaching consequences of immigration from the Orient to supply plantation labor. The trilogy closes with the events leading to the downfall of the Hawaiian monarchy and the establishment of the Provisional Government in 1893.