History 284: History of the Hawaiian Islands: Primary Resources

The noted UH scholar, Puakea Nogelmeier, describes the importance of the Hawaiian language newspapers in the 19th and early 20th centuries in recording the oral history of the Hawaiian people. "In just over a century, from 1834 to 1948, Hawaiian writers filled 125,000 pages ...with their writings..[It was] an acknowledged public repository for history, cultural description, literature, and lore..." In his PhD dissertation (2003),  Mai paʻa i ka leo : historical voice in Hawaiian primary materials, looking forward and listening back,  later published as a book, he points out that only a fraction of the papers have been translated. But these newspapers have now been digitized and the individual pages are available as images or as text files (in Hawaiian).