LoC Blog: Hawai’i

Hawai`i officially joined the Union as the fiftieth state on August 21, 1959, although voters in the United States Hawaii Territory had ratified a state constitutionExternal on November 7, 1950.
The Crossroads of the Pacific, as this group of volcanic islands is often called, was originally inhabited by Polynesians from the Marquesas Islands. In 1778, British explorer Captain James Cook spotted the tropical lands and named them the Sandwich Islands in honor of his patron, the Earl of Sandwich. He returned a year later only to meet his fate there after a deadly confrontationExternal with the native islanders. In 1810, after years of civil war, Kamehameha I unified the Hawaiian islandsExternal and laid the foundation for a strong monarchical tradition while also maintaining a deeply rooted belief in the Hawaiian gods. Missionaries from the United StatesExternal arrived throughout the nineteenth century.

Hawaii’s ex-queen files a protest. Ex-queen Liliuokalani. [1897]. Prints & Photographs Division

More than eighty years of monarchical rule ended in 1893 when Queen Lili‘uokalani was deposed, after a failed effort to reestablish an eroding monarchical power with a stronger constitutional mandate. The Republic of Hawai’i was established one year later, on July 3, 1894, putting into motion the events that ultimately led to Hawaii’s statehood in 1959.
At the turn of the century, many Americans traveled to the tropical islands. Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name, Mark Twain, recorded his travels in Roughing It, published in 1891. He and his party climbed the volcano Haleakala in Maui and were awed by the experience:

Presently vagrant white clouds came drifting along, high over the sea and the valley; then they came in couples and groups; then in imposing squadrons; gradually joining their forces, they banked themselves solidly together, a thousand feet under us, and totally shut out land and ocean—not a vestige of anything was left in view but just a little of the rim of the crater, circling away from the pinnacle whereon we sat…Thus banked, motion ceased, and silence reigned. Clear to the horizon, league on league, the snowy floor stretched without a break…There was little conversation, for the impressive scene overawed speech. I felt like the Last Man, neglected of the judgment, and left pinnacled in mid-heaven, a forgotten relic of a vanished world.

Roughing It. Chapter 76. By Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens]; Hartford Conn.: American Publishing Company, 1891. p549-50

via https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/november-07#hawaii