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

Beginning in the era of Manifest Destiny, U.S. settlers, writers, politicians, and boosters worked to bind California and Hawaii together in the American imagination, emphasizing white settlement and capitalist enterprise. In California and Hawaii Bound Henry Knight Lozano explores how these settlers and boosters promoted and imagined California and Hawaii 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 Hawaii, illustrating how U.S. promotional expansionism in the Pacific existed alongside defensive peril in the complicated visions of Americanization that linked California and Hawaii.

California and Hawaii Bound demonstrates how the settler colonial discourses of Americanization that connected California and Hawaii 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. See more