STATE of ALOHA trailer: HIFF SHOWTIMES Sunday, October 18, 2:45 pm Dole Cannery A Thursday, October 22, 2:00 pm Dole Cannery D The exciting news is that this film has been nominated for best documentary in the Documentary Feature Category, to possibly receive the Halekulani Golden Orchid Award! PBS PREMIERE- AUGUST 28th Tonight was the [...]

August 21, 2009. Hawaii’s 50th anniversary of statehood commemoration was an event that changed the way that we think about statehood. The events inside and outside the convention center brought disparate viewpoints together in a manner where voices and histories could exist side-by-side, speaking with each other not through words, but by presence. If this [...]

Go to beginning of countdown, #21 Made it through the countdown! In this final posting in the countdown, I wanted to draw your attention to a document that is easily accessible: Proclamation 3309, the official document declaring Hawaii a state. This is one of the documents that was received by the Secretary General of the [...]

With tomorrow being the end of our countdown, I unfortunately don’t have the time to reiterate the context of this correspondence between Asst. Secretary of State, International Organizations, Francis O. Wilcox to Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. This is simply further documentation to the assertion I made yesterday, as well as in previous posts, [...]

Three days to Statehood and it’s time for some self-promotion. Star-Bulletin article came out today , “5 Questions, 50 Answers,” in which Burl Burlingham sat me down on a virtual roundtable with some real luminaries like Gov. Ariyoshi, Federal Judge Sam King, DeSoto Brown, Victoria Kneubuhl, Rocky Jensen, Nanette Napoleon, Dan Boylan, Congresswoman Pat Saiki [...]

With four days left to this Statehood Countdown, I’ve posted a 1956 letter between the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles to Senator Knowland. Following Sunday’s posting, Dulles is responding to correspondence Knowland sent him on the removal of Hawaii and Alaska from the list of non-self-governing territories. The context for Dulles’ response touches upon [...]

As part of our Statehood Countdown, I was going to post another document by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, following yesterday’s posting by Senator Knowland, however, as I was going through the Congressional Record (Nov. 12, 1943), I stumbled onto a little utterance by Senator Rolph: “The only objection to annexation came from Japan; [...]

With only 6 days left in Statehood Hawaii’s Statehood Countdown, I’m posting one of the seminal letters from which this research stemmed from. This is the initial correspondence between Senator Knowland, who at this time was the House minority leader in the Senate to Francis O. Wilcox, the Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations, [...]

After yesterday’s overwhelming posting which I’ll be working on well beyond the statehood countdown, Statehood Countdown #7, is more of a recap of what we have seen before regarding the State Department’s position on statehood. This time, we are looking at a draft letter, never sent, between Thurston Morton, Assistant Secretary of State, International Organization, [...]

Continuing with #8 of our Statehood Countdown, I’ve posted the 1949 correspondence between Andre Fressinet, the General-Secretary of the International Union of Seamen, Fishermen, Rivermen, and Dock Workers and also linked to a lengthy response and analysis by Louis Goldblatt, the Secretery-Treasurer of the ILWU in which he discussed the 1949, 178-day Longshoreman’s strike in [...]

Continuing our Statehood Hawaiiʻs “Statehood Countdown,” weʻre looking at a Memorandum of Conversation between Governor William Quinn of Hawaii, David Bane, Deputy Director, Office of Northeast Asian Affairs, State Department, and Ambassador Munro from New Zealand. Although this memo is fairly short, there are several remarkable things about this correspondence. First, though I should mention [...]

Continuing Statehood Hawaii’s “Statehood Countdown,” weʻre looking at correspondence from 1950 between Hawaii’s Frank E. Midkiff and Senator Bill Knowland, (R. CA). Frank E. Midkiff was an educator and businessman who was a very prominent and influential community leader in Hawaii. Among many of his titles and community obligations, he was president of Kamehameha School [...]