Don Wildman

Well, perhaps not, given that I'm a guy raised in New Jersey, which, as the crow flies, is about 5,000 miles from a certain gleaming archipelago in the middle of the vast ocean where one can hear that greeting uttered properly by a native-born speaker.

We're all Americans, right?

Well, at least officially since 1959, when the United States welcomed its 50th state into the Union, and finally our nation stretched from sea to shining sea and then beyond, all the way to that paradise of the Pacific, Hawaii.

How Hawaii's U.S.

statehood came to pass is a painful tale, more so than most U.S.

mainlanders realize.

One rife with issues of colonization and exploitation, and even a good old-fashioned coup d'etat, a controversial history brewing discontent even today on those glorious islands.

And for anyone lucky enough to be planning a trip there or going there to live and work, it is a fundamental chronology.

We'll discuss today with Noah Dolem, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, focusing primarily on 19th century Hawaii.

Professor Dolem, thank you for coming on the show.

Thank you for having me, Don.

I appreciate it.

I want to get one thing right just as we begin.

What is the proper pronunciation of Hawaii?

But it's a Polynesian.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There have been stories of cultural appropriation and destruction throughout all of American history, but Hawaii is one example, as demonstrated by our mispronunciations of language.

Okay, so this episode specifically recounts the American overthrow of the Hawaiian sovereign leadership in 1898, the year of my grandmother's birth, interestingly.

How we seize this territory and why.