In the middle decades of the twentieth century, Hawai'i changed rapidly from a conservative oligarchy firmly controlled by a Euro-American elite to arguably the most progressive part of the United States. Spearheading the shift were tens of thousands of sugar, pineapple, and dock workers who challenged their powerful employers by joining the left-led International Longshoremen and Warehousemen's Union. In this theoretically innovative study, Moon-Kie Jung explains how Filipinos, Japanese, Portuguese, and others overcame entrenched racial divisions and successfully mobilized a mass working-class movement. He overturns the unquestioned assumption that this interracial effort traded racial politics for class politics. Instead, the movement "reworked race" by incorporating and rearticulating racial meanings and practices into a new ideology of class. Through its groundbreaking historical analysis, Reworking Race radically rethinks interracial politics in theory and practice.
Unbending Cane not only provides a well-researched and accurate historical account of one of the most controversial labor leaders to come out of Hawaii before World War II, but also explores the complex layers of the man who took on the powerful sugar barons to seek justice for those working in Hawaii's cane fields.
A dramatic tale of how a little-remembered strike in Hawaii fanned the flames of anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States and, the author argues, ultimately led to the infamous Japanese Exclusion Act of 1924.
In the traditional sense, the strike was a "piecemeal" affair, lacking clear goals and having virtually no leadership or plans. These young, largely illiterate, Filipinos wrought massive changes in the industry, forcing the plantations into a more modern, industrial mode; into what was widely known thereafter as the Big Five. Evidence from the University of Hawaii's new archive collection, the H.S.P.A. Plantation Archives, not available to Dr
Jack Hall came ashore at Honolulu Harbor as an insignificant seaman and quickly took his place at the forefront of those who forged Hawaii's destiny. A Spark is Struck is Hall's storyand the story behind the International Longshore & Warehouse Union in the Hawaiian Islands. Together, the man and the union helped incite a bloodless revolution, transforming one of the most liberal states in the nation. It was an era of landmark events: the Red Scare, the consolidation of power, major labor strikes in the fields and on the docks. Here is the inside story of a power broker's career and a union's role in shaping today's Hawaii.
Tracing the lives of some two hundred Native Hawaiian teachers, preachers, pastors, and missionaries, Nā Kahu provides new historical perspectives of the indigenous ministry in Hawai‘i. These Christian emissaries were affiliated first with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and later with the Hawaiian Evangelical Association. By the mid-1850s literate and committed Hawaiians were sailing to far reaches of the Pacific to join worldwide missionary endeavors. Geographical locations ranged from remote mission stations in Hawai‘i, including the Hansen’s disease community at Kalaupapa; the Marquesan Islands; Micronesia; fur trade settlements in Northwest America; and the gold fields of California. In their reports and letters the pastors and missionaries pour out their hopes and discouragements, their psychological and physical pain, and details of their everyday lives. The first part of the book presents the biographies of nineteen young Hawaiians, studying as messengers of Christianity in the remote New England town of Cornwall, Connecticut, along with “heathen” from other lands. The second part—the core of the book—moves to Hawai‘i, tracing the careers of pastors and missionaries, as well as recognizing their intellectual and political endeavors. There is also a discussion of the educational institutions established to train an indigenous ministry and the gradual acceptance of ordained Hawaiians as equals to their western counterparts. Included in an appendix is the little-known story of Christian ali‘i, Hawaiian chiefs, both men and women, who contributed to the mission by lending their authority to the cause and by contributing land and labor for the construction of churches. The biographies reveal the views of pastors on events leading to the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, which brought about great divisions between the haole and Hawaiian ministry. Many Hawaiian pastors who sided with the new Provisional Government and then the Republic, were expelled by their own congregations loyal to the monarchy. During the closing years of the century, alternate forms of Christianity emerged, and those pastors drawn to these syncretic faiths add their perspectives to the book. Perhaps the most illuminating biographies are those in which the pastors give voice to a faith that blends traditional Hawaiian values with an emerging ecumenical Christianity.
