Just a decade after the first printing press arrived in Honolulu in 1820, American Protestant missionaries produced the first newspaper in the islands. More than a thousand daily, weekly, or monthly papers in nine different languages have appeared since then. Today they are often considered a secondary source of information, but in their heyday Hawai‘i’s newspapers formed one of the most diversified, vigorous, and influential presses in the world. In this original and timely work, Helen Geracimos Chapin charts the role Hawai‘i’s newspapers played in shaping major historic events in the islands and how the rise of the newspaper abetted the rise of American influence in Hawai‘i. Shaping History is based on a wide selection of written and oral sources, including extensive interviews with journalists and others working in the newspaper industry. Students of journalism and Hawaiian history will find this comprehensive history of Hawai‘i’s newspapers especially valuable.

Combining archaeology and social anthropology this historical and archaeological two volume set constructs an integrated history of the Anahulu Valley in northwestern O'ahu that traces the cultural transformation in a typical local center of the Hawaiian Kingdom founded by Kamehame. Volume one is a historical ethnography and volume two is an archaeology of history.

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.

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.

Hawaiian Language: Past, Present, Future presents aspects of Hawaiian and its history that are rarely treated in language classes. The major characters in this book make up a diverse cast: Dutch merchants, Captain Cook’s naturalist and philologist William Anderson, ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia (the inspiration for the Hawaiian Mission), the American lexicographer Noah Webster, philologists in New England, missionary-linguists and their Hawaiian consultants, and many minor players. The account begins in prehistory, placing the probable origins of the ancestor of Polynesian languages in mainland Asia. An evolving family tree reflects the linguistic changes that took place as these people moved east. The current versions are examined from a Hawaiian-centered point of view, comparing the sound system of the language with those of its major relatives in the Polynesian triangle. More recent historical topics begin with the first written samples of a Polynesian language in 1616, which led to the birth of the idea of a widespread language family. The next topic is how the Hawaiian alphabet was developed. The first efforts suffered from having too many letters, a problem that was solved in 1826 through brilliant reasoning by its framers and their Hawaiian consultants. The opposite problem was that the alphabet didn’t have enough letters: analysts either couldn’t hear or misinterpreted the glottal stop and long vowels. The end product of the development of the alphabet—literacy—is more complicated than some statistics would have us believe. As for its success or failure, both points of view, from contemporary observers, are presented. Still, it cannot be denied that literacy had a tremendous and lasting effect on Hawaiian culture. The last part of the book concentrates on the most-used Hawaiian reference works—dictionaries. It describes current projects that combine print and manuscript collections on a searchable website. These projects can include the growing body of material that is being made available through recent and ongoing research. As for the future, a proposed monolingual dictionary would allow users to avoid an English bridge to understanding, and move directly to a definition that includes Hawaiian cultural features and a Hawaiian worldview.