Islands, Empires, and Uninvited Guests

The paradise was always a sales pitch.

Hawaii is one of the most visited places on Earth and one of the least honestly described. Most Americans know it through airline commercials, hotel lobbies, and textbooks that spend two paragraphs on the overthrow of a sovereign nation before moving on to something more comfortable. This book is not interested in comfortable.

Islands, Empires, and Uninvited Guests: An Uncomfortable History of Hawaii traces how Hawaii was taken, not lost, not discovered, not welcomed into the American family, but taken, through disease, missionaries, land law, a coup backed by U.S. Marines, and a congressional vote that didn't bother asking the people most affected. It follows the logic of colonization from its rehearsal in church schools to its present form in resort economics and military occupation, and it names each step plainly.

This is not a tragedy narrative. Hawaiian resistance never disappeared. Language survived suppression. Culture outlasted criminalization. Identity proved more durable than the laws designed to erase it.

Bracingly honest and impossible to dismiss, this is the history of Hawaii that the brochure was designed to replace.