Charles Nordhoff (1830-1901) was an American journalist, descriptive and miscellaneous writer. He was born in Erwitte, Germany (Prussia) in 1830, and emigrated to the USA in 1845. He was educated in Cincinnati, and was for nine years at sea, in the navy and merchant service; from 1853 to 1857 in various newspaper offices; was then employed editorially by the Harpers (1861), and for the next ten years on the staff of the New York Evening Post. From 1871 to 1873 Nordhoff travelled in California and visited Hawaii. He then became Washington correspondent of the New York Herald. His most widely known books are Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands (1874), Communistic Societies of the United States (1857) and God and the Future Life (1881).

Henry Knight Lozano explores how U.S. boosters, writers, politicians, and settlers promoted and imagined California and Hawai'i as connected places, and how this relationship reveals the fraught constructions of an Americanized Pacific West from the 1840s to the 1950s.