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| 0518 Hawaii map (1) |
Posted on 24.02.2013, 31.12.2015
"These island were born of the night, sired by the sun, cradled in the sea, with clouds and trade-winds for playmates, and a hula-moon for godmother", write on this postcard. I don't know who is the godmother of this archipelago, located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, at 3,200km southwest of the North American mainland, but the godfather was James Cook, who discovered it in 1778 and named it the Sandwich Islands, in honor of his sponsor John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich. Can't be said that Europeans were even a blessing for the Polynesian locals, because by 1820, Eurasian diseases, famine, and wars among the chiefs killed more than half of them. In nowadays only 10.0% of the inhabitants are Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders, and less than 0.1% of the total population are native speakers of the Hawaiian language.
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| 2170 Hawaii map (2) |
The Kingdom of Hawaii was sovereign from 1810 until 1893 when the monarchy was overthrown by resident American businessmen, because it opposed to integration in the United States. In 1993, the President Bill Clinton gave a formal apology for the American role in the revolution and the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. The archipelago was an independent republic from 1894 until 1898, when it was annexed by the United States as a territory, becoming a state in 1959. As is known, Hawaii was the target of the attack on Pearl Harbor by Imperial Japan on December 7, 1941, which brought the United States into WWII.
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