History of the Hawaiian Kingdom Vol. 1

By Ralph S. Kuykendall

Book Id: WPLBN0002096807
Format Type: PDF eBook:
File Size: 148.63 MB
Reproduction Date: 5/16/2011

Title:	History of the Hawaiian Kingdom Vol. 1
Author:	Ralph S. Kuykendall
Volume:	1
Language:	English
Subject:	Non Fiction, History of the Americas (Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, etc.), Hawaiian History
Collections:	Authors Community, Education
Historic Publication Date:	1938
Publisher:	University of Hawai'I Press

Member Page:	Hale Kuamoʻo Hawaiian Language Center
Citation APA MLA Chicago S. Kuykendal, B. R. (1938). History of the Hawaiian Kingdom Vol. 1. Retrieved from http://gutenberg.us/

Description
R. S. Kuykendall spent four decades of his life writing the history of Hawaii. He came to the Islands in 1922 as executive secretary of the newly formed Historical Commission of the Territory of Hawaii. The Commission planned, among other projects, to publish a large-scale history: a general narrative of a thousand pages or more, sufficiently documented to ensure "authoritativeness. " Working to this mandate, Kuykendall brought to bear on his task everything he could muster in the way of personal and professional resources. He was well suited to the sort of pioneer labor that faced him. He had a great appetite and aptitude for spadework of an archival kind, locating, acquiring, and organizing collections of documents. His use of materials was marked by a quite outstanding scrupulosity with regard to matters of fact. Whatever industriousness and commonsensical perceptiveness could wring from often inadequate, often intransigent sources, Kuykendall set himself to extract. Though the Historical Commission itself did not survive the Great Depression, Kuykendall, continuing his researches as a faculty member of the University of Hawaii, published the first volume of The Hawaiian Kingdom in 1938. Essentially this marked the advent of professional scholarly historiography in Hawaii. Kuykendall continued to devote most of his energies in middle and old age to a second and then a third volume. When he died in 1963, at age 78, Emeritus Professor of History and Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters of the University of Hawaii, he was working on the final chapter of the third and last volume, discussing the revolution that brought down the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893. The completed trilogy became his monument.

Excerpt
This volume is one of the fruits of a project undertaken more than a dozen years ago by the Historical Commission of the Territory of Hawaii and carried on since 1932 by the University of Hawaii. The project called for the preparation of a comprehensive general history of Hawaii based upon a thorough study of original sources. The first phase of the undertaking was to discover the source material not already available in Honolulu and to obtain copies of as much of it as possible, particularly of documents which shed new light on the history of the islands. For this purpose, extensive research has been carried on in the national archives of the United States, Great Britain, and France, and minor investigations have been made in the archives of Belgium and Mexico and in a number of libraries and collections in the United States. Many thousand pages of transcripts have been obtained from these places, supplementing at many points and in many important respects the materials previously available in Honolulu. Independently of this project, a large quantity of new material has been added to collections in the Territory, and there has been during the past fifteen years a great increase of interest in the history of the islands, manifested in the publication of many books and articles, some of which have been thorough studies, making important contributions to our knowledge of the subject. Of the collections previously existing in Honolulu the most important are the official records and the newspaper files in the Archives of Hawaii. Next in value, from the point of view of such an enterprise as this, are the library of the Hawaiian Mission Children's Society, which is not by any means exclusively missionary in character, the library of the Hawaiian Historical Society, which is especially rich in voyages, and the library of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum. The Hawaiian department of the University of Hawaii Library is rapidly gaining the position of a good working collection, having been recently enlarged by the addition of Dr. W. D. Westervelt's fine library of books relating to Hawaii and Polynesia.

Table of Contents
Preface. xi -- List of Abbreviations. xiii -- Introduction: A Glimpse of Ancient Hawaii. 1 -- Coming of the Foreigners. 12 -- Kamehameha and the Founding of the Kingdom. 29 -- 1819. 61 -- Kamehameha II. 71 -- Early Commercial Development. 82 -- New Religion and New Learning. 100 -- The Early Years of the Reign of Kamehameha III: Regency of Kaahumanu. 117 -- The Troubled Thirties. 133 -- The Birth of Constitutional Government. 153 -- Industry, Agriculture, Manufactures. 170 -- The Recognition of Hawaii's Independence. 185 -- The Paulet Episode. 206 -- Governmental Reorganization in the Midst of Difficulties. 227 -- The Land Revolution. 269 -- Commercial and Agricultural Progress, 1830-1854. 299 -- Religious and Educational Development, 1840-1854. 335 -- The Struggle for Equitable Treaties. 368 -- The Shadow of Destiny. 383 -- On the Date of the Birth of Kamehameha. 429 -- On the Regency, 1823-1833. 430 -- On the Origin of the Hawaiian Sandalwood Trade. 434 -- On the Debt Settlement of 1826. 434 -- Index. 437 --