Sarah Miller-Davenport, "Gateway State: Hawai...

People make sense of the world through stories, and stories about places inevitably shape how we treat, live on, and use those places. In Outback and Out West: The Settler Colonial Environmental Imaginary (U Nebraska Press, 2022), emeritus professor of English at the University o ...  Show more

In a matter of decades, a spectacular cold-water paradise thirty million years in the making is succumbing to warming oceans. Kelp forests are largely out of sight, hidden under the ocean’s surface, yet they are one of Earth’s most wondrous and underappreciated marine habitats. I ...  Show more

By longstanding listener request, we look at how Hawaii was basically stolen by the United States in the 19th century. Rather than reverse this bit of geopolitical fraud, the US ended up making Hawaii a state instead.

“Is America an Empire?” is a popular question for pundits and historians, likely because it sets off such a provocative debate. All too often, however, people use empire simply because the United States is a hegemon, ignoring the country’s imperial traits to focus simply on its p ...  Show more

Sarah Kovner’s Prisoners of the Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps (Harvard UP, 2020) is a nuanced look at the experiences, narratives―and the popular/historical memories of those experiences and narratives―of World War II-era Allied POWs in Japanese custody, especially in the Eng ...  Show more

Today we're revisiting a 2010 episode from previous hosts Katie and Sarah. Born in 1838, Lili'uokalani became the queen of Hawaii in 1891. Unfortunately, she was destined to be Hawaii's last monarch. Listen in and learn how Hawaii became a state in this podcast. Learn more about ...  Show more