California and Hawai'i Bound: U.S. Settler Colonialism and the Pacific West, 1848-1959

by Henry Knight Lozano

Overview

Beginning in the era of Manifest Destiny, U.S. settlers, writers, politicians, and boosters worked to bind California and Hawai‘i together in the American imagination, emphasizing white settlement and capitalist enterprise. In California and Hawai‘i Bound Henry Knight Lozano explores how these settlers and boosters promoted and imagined California and Hawai‘i as connected places and sites for U.S. settler colonialism, and how this relationship reveals the fraught constructions of an Americanized Pacific West from the 1840s to the 1950s.

The growing ties of promotion and development between the two places also fostered the promotion of “perils” over this transpacific relationship, from Native Hawaiians who opposed U.S. settler colonialism to many West Coast Americans who articulated social and racial dangers from closer bonds with Hawai‘i, illustrating how U.S. promotional expansionism in the Pacific existed alongside defensive peril in the complicated visions of Americanization that linked California and Hawai‘i.

California and Hawai‘i Bound demonstrates how the settler colonial discourses of Americanization that connected California and Hawai‘i evolved and refracted alongside socioeconomic developments and native resistance, during a time when U.S. territorial expansion, transoceanic settlement and tourism, and capitalist investment reconstructed both the American West and the eastern Pacific.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496227430
Publisher:	Nebraska
Publication date:	08/01/2021
Series:	Studies in Pacific Worlds
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	420
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Henry Knight Lozano is a senior lecturer in American history at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Tropic of Hopes: California, Florida, and the Selling of American Paradise, 1869–1929 and the coeditor of The Shadow of Selma.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Destiny and Devastation, 1840s–1850s
2. Cane and Coolie Labor, 1850s–1880s
3. Emulation and Empire, 1880s–1890s
4. Pineapples and Perils, 1890s–1920s
5. Fantasylands and Frontiers of Leisure, 1900s–1930s
6. Soldiery and Statehood, 1900s–1950s
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

With subtlety and remarkable clarity, Knight Lozano employs settler-colonial theory to elucidate social and political developments in two distinct but intertwined Pacific societies. Time and again, we see that settler visions ran aground on historical realities, as Indigenous resistance and resilience shaped the new societies that emerged. But settler colonialism, extractive capitalism, and racial Manifest Destiny also proved resilient. A superb history of American empire in the Pacific West, California and Hawai‘i Bound is a must-read for scholars of the United States and global history in the modern era.”—Seth Archer, assistant professor of history at Utah State University

From the Publisher