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Tuesday, December 10, 2024

December 10, 2024: Hawaiian Histories: King Kalākaua’s Visit

[150 years ago this week, Hawaii’s King Kalākaua arrived in Washington, DC for an extended series of events, a defining part of a more than two-month state visit to the US. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that visit and other Hawaiian histories, leading up to a special post on cultural representations of the islands.]

On three striking moments in the state visit beyond the time in DC (on which check out that piece and this one, among much other coverage).

1)      San Francisco: A significant layer to my recently completed podcast was the story of San Francisco in the 1870s (and into the September 1881 moment in which the Celestials played their last game). This was the city with the nation’s oldest and largest Chinatown community, and also the city that became the violent epicenter of the period’s anti-Chinese American movement; obviously those two facts are related, but they also reflect the true duality of a community that both embodied and challenged our foundational diversity throughout this decade. Which makes it pretty interesting to think about King Kalākaua’s celebratory week in the city in late November and early December 1874. To quote one telling response, from the Black newspaper Pacific Appeal, “there has either been a sudden abandonment of colorphobia prejudice, or an extraordinary amount of toadyism to a crown head by the San Francisco American people.”

2)      Transcontinental Train Trip: On December 5th, the King and his traveling party boarded a train for the weeklong journey across the continent to Washington. They would make extended stops along the way at such significant Western and Midwestern American communities as Cheyenne (in what was then Wyoming Territory), Omaha, and Chicago. But it’s the trip itself that interests me most here—this was just five years after the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad (with the famous 1869 Golden Spike Ceremony), and thus still quite early in the histories both of this way of traversing the nation and of the concept of a more genuinely interconnected nation and continent at all. Changes which contributed to the so-called “closing of the frontier,” and which likewise can be directly connected to the need for further expansion which prompted, among countless other things, the annexation of Hawaii 25 years after the King’s visit (on which more in tomorrow’s post).   

3)      New Bedford: That was all still ahead in the nation’s Transpacific future in 1874; but toward the end of his time in the US, the King also visited a city that was absolutely essential to the nation’s Transatlantic past. That city was New Bedford, Massachusetts, center of the whaling industry for well more than a century and also profoundly interconnected with the histories of American slavery, among other defining origin points and communities. Among the many compelling details of the King’s visit to New Bedford on New Year’s Day, 1875, my favorite for all those reasons has to be the epic dinner hosted by Mayor George Richmond and featuring 100 master mariners from the community (with each and every one of whom the King shook hands at the dinner’s end). Ain’t that America?

Next Hawaiian history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Hawaiian histories or stories you’d highlight?

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