Nation Within

Nation Within is the complex history of the events between the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi in 1893 and its annexation to the United States in 1898. Highlighting the native Hawaiians' resistance during that five year span, Tom Coffman shows why occupying Hawaiʻi was crucial to American imperial ambitions.

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In 1893 a small group of white planters and missionary descendants backed by the United States overthrew the Kingdom of Hawai‘i and established a government modeled on the Jim Crow South. In Nation Within Tom Coffman tells the complex history of the unsuccessful efforts of deposed Hawaiian queen Lili‘uokalani and her subjects to resist annexation, which eventually came in 1898. Coffman describes native Hawaiian political activism, the queen's visits to Washington, D.C., to lobby for independence, and her imprisonment, along with hundreds of others, after their aborted armed insurrection. Exposing the myths that fueled the narrative that native Hawaiians willingly relinquished their nation, Coffman shows how Americans such as Theodore Roosevelt conspired to extinguish Hawai‘i's sovereignty in the service of expanding the United States' growing empire.