Noah Dolim

So by 1887, they had formed Secret Society, which plotted against Kalakaua.

They write a new constitution that basically shifted all of this executive power into the legislative branch.

And then they forced Kalakaua to sign this constitution under the threat of violence, which is why it's called the Bannock Constitution.

So these were a mix of American and other European settlers.

So they didn't...

It's kind of funky because they are American, but they're not acting on behalf of the United States.

They are domestic to Hawaii.

A lot of them are citizens of the Hawaiian kingdom, but they come from those American families.

Right, so Queen Lili'uokalani was one of the younger sisters of Kalakaua, who had been the previous monarch.

Lili'u, even more so than her brother, came into a horrible situation as a monarch.

Her brother had been forced to sign that bayonet constitution, and it was thus the constitution that Lili'uokalani herself inherited.

So she was under a tremendous amount of pressure to kind of figure this thing out.

and where the Hawaiian kingdom was going to go.

And between 1887 and her ascent to the throne, there was a lot of pressure from Hawaiians to get rid of the Bayonet Constitution, to write a new constitution, and Alili'u heard those calls.

And that was her main goal during her reign, was to write a new constitution for the Hawaiian kingdom.

But this was a very hard task because of the limitations of the Bayonet Constitution.

That would have been a constitution placed on her as a monarch.

Right.

Actually, the first talks of annexation were in the mid-century, in the 1850s.

And Hawaii was actually quite close to annexing or giving itself up to the United States to be annexed.