On a January afternoon in 1893, men hunkered down behind sandbagged emplacements in the streets of Honolulu, with rifles, machine guns, and cannon ready to open fire. Troops and police loyal to the queen of the sovereign nation of Hawaii faced off against a small number of rebel Honolulu businessmen-American, British, German, and Australian. In between them stood hundreds of heavily armed United States sailors and marines. Just after 2:00 p.m., the first shot was fired, and a military coup began. This is the true, tragic, and at times amazing story of the 1893 overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii and her government. It's also the story of a five-year police state regime in Hawaii following the overthrow, an attempted counter-coup by Hawaiians in 1895, and of how Hawaii became a United States possession. In Taking Hawaii, award-winning author Stephen Dando-Collins (Standing Bear Is a Person, Legions of Rome, Tycoon's War) reveals previously little-known facts uncovered during years of research on several continents, in the most dramatic and comprehensive chronicle of the end of Hawaii's monarchy ever published. Using scores of firsthand accounts, this often minute-by-minute narrative also shows for the first time how the queen's overthrow teetered on a knife's edge, only to come about purely through bluff. Taking Hawaii reads like an exciting novel, yet this tale of a grab for power, of misjudgment and injustice, truly took place. Judge for yourself whether you think the queen of Hawaii was wronged, or was wrong.

Created especially for the Australian customer

Exciting and informative history of the land down under

"Australian History For Dummies" is your tour guide through the important events of Australia's past, introducing you to the people and events that have shaped modern Australia. Be there as British colonists explore Australia's harsh terrain with varying degrees of success. In this informative guide you'llFind out about Australia's infamous bushrangers Learn how the discovery of gold caused a tidal wave of immigration from all over the world Understand how Australia took two steps forward to become a nation in its own right in 1901, and two steps back when the government was dismissed by the Crown in 1975

Discover the fascinating details that made Australia the country it is today

On the afternoon of 8 April 1802, in the remote southern ocean, two explorers had a remarkable chance encounter. Englishman Matthew Flinders and Frenchman Nicolas Baudin had been sent by their governments on the same quest: to explore the uncharted coast of the great south land and find out whether the west and east coasts, four thousand kilometres apart, were part of the same island. And so began the race to compile the definitive map of Australia. These men's journeys were the culmination of two hundred years of exploration of the region by the Dutch - most famously Abel Tasman - the Portuguese, the Spanish and by Englishmen such as the colourful pirate William Dampier and, of course, James Cook. The three-year voyages of Baudin and Flinders would see them endure terrible hardships in the spirit of discovery. They suffered scurvy and heat exhaustion, and Flinders was shipwrecked and imprisoned - always knowing he was competing with the French to produce the first map of this mysterious continent. Written from diaries and other first-hand accounts, this is the thrilling story of men whose drawings recorded countless previously unknown species and turned mythical creatures into real ones, and whose skill and determination enabled Terra Australis Incognita to become Australia.

Using letters between soldiers and their loved ones, parents, sweethearts, wives or children, this book traces the emotional and psychological ways by which New Zealanders made sense of the upheavals of war. It shows movingly and graphically that NZ soldiers were not inarticulate and insensitive 'hard men' but kept their sense of life before and after the war by the messages of love, hope and longing that they sent back home. This is the first title in the new series AUP Studies in Cultural and Social History edited by Caroline Daley and Deborah Montgomerie, a series of richly illustrated medium-length books, reflecting New Zealand's distinctive and sometimes quirky

A revelatory biography of Australia's longest-serving prime minister.

Robert Menzies claimed the prime ministership in 1939 and led the nation during the early years of the war, but resigned two years later when he lost the confidence of his party. His political career seemed over, and yet he staged one of the great comebacks to forge a new political party, devise a new governing philosophy, and craft a winning electoral approach that as to make him Australia's longest-serving prime minister.

The lessons Menzies learned -- and the way he applied them -- made him a model that every Liberal leader since has looked to for inspiration. But debate over Menzies' life and legacy has never settled.

Who was Robert Menzies, what did he stand for, what did he achieve? Troy Bramston has not only researched the official record and published accounts, but has also interviewed members of Menzies' family, and his former advisers and ministers. He has also been given exclusive access to family letters, as well as to a series of interviews that Menzies gave that have never been revealed before. They are a major historical find, in which Menzies talks about his life, reflects on political events and personalities, offers political lessons, and candidly assesses his successors.

Robert Menzies is the first biography in 20 years of the Liberal icon -- and it contains important contemporary lessons for those who want to understand, and master, the art and science of politics.

New York Times bestseller: The true story of the WWII naval battle portrayed in the Roland Emmerich film is "something special among war histories" (Chicago Sun-Times). Six months after Pearl Harbor, the seemingly invincible Imperial Japanese Navy prepared a decisive blow against the United States. After sweeping through Asia and the South Pacific, Japan's military targeted the tiny atoll of Midway, an ideal launching pad for the invasion of Hawaii and beyond. But the US Navy would be waiting for them. Thanks to cutting-edge code-breaking technology, tactical daring, and a significant stroke of luck, the Americans under Adm. Chester W. Nimitz dealt Japan's navy its first major defeat in the war. Three years of hard fighting remained, but it was at Midway that the tide turned. This "stirring, even suspenseful narrative" is the first book to tell the story of the epic battle from both the American and Japanese sides (Newsday). Miracle at Midway reveals how America won its first and greatest victory of the Pacific war-and how easily it could have been a loss.

Ma`i Lepera attempts to recover Hawaiian voices at a significant moment in Hawai`i's history. It takes an unprecedented look at the Hansen's disease outbreak (1865-1900) almost exclusively from the perspective of "patients," ninety percent of whom were Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian). Using traditional and non-traditional sources, published and unpublished, it tells the story of a disease, a society's reaction to it, and the consequences of the experience for Hawai`i and its people. Over a span of thirty-four years more than five thousand people were sent to a leprosy settlement on the remote peninsula in north Moloka`i traditionally known as Makanalua. Their story has seldom been told despite the hundreds of letters they wrote to families, friends, and the Board of Health, as well as to Hawaiian-language newspapers, detailing their concerns at the settlement as they struggled to retain their humanity in the face of ma`i lepera. Many remained politically active and, at times, defiant, resisting authority and challenging policies. As much as they suffered, the Kanaka Maoli of Makanalua established new bonds and cared for one another in ways that have been largely overlooked in popular histories describing leprosy in Hawai`i. Although Ma`i Lepera is primarily a social history of disease and medicine, it offers compelling evidence of how leprosy and its treatment altered Hawaiian perceptions and identities. It changed how Kanaka Maoli viewed themselves: By the end of the nineteenth century, the "diseased" had become a cultural "other" to the healthy Hawaiian. Moreover, it reinforced colonial ideology and furthered the use of both biomedical practices and disease as tools of colonisation. Ma`i Lepera will be of significant interest to students and scholars of Hawai`i and medical history and historical and medical anthropology. Given its accessible style, this book will also appeal to general readers who wish to know more about the Kanaka Maoli who contracted leprosy-their connectedness to each another, their families, their islands, and their nation-and how leprosy came to affect those connections and their lives.

In 1908, Arthur Maurice Hocart and William Halse Rivers Rivers conducted fieldwork in the Solomon Islands and elsewhere in Island Melanesia that served as the turning point in the development of modern anthropology. The work of these two anthropological pioneers on the small island of Simbo brought about the development of participant observation as a methodological hallmark of social anthropology. This would have implications for Rivers' later work in psychiatry and psychology, and Hocart's work as a comparativist, for which both would largely be remembered despite the novelty of that independent fieldwork on remote Pacific islands in the early years of the 20th Century. Contributors to this volume-who have all carried out fieldwork in those Melanesian locations where Hocart and Rivers worked-give a critical examination of the research that took place in 1908, situating those efforts in the broadest possible contexts of colonial history, imperialism, the history of ideas and scholarly practice within and beyond anthropology.

Australians have been making pilgrimages to the battlefields and cemeteries of World War Two since the 1940s, from the jungles of New Guinea and South-East Asia to the mountains of Greece and the deserts of North Africa. They travel in search of the stories of lost loved ones, to mourn the dead and to come to grips with the past. With characteristic empathy, Bruce Scates charts the history of pilgrimages to Crete, Kokoda, Sandakan and Hellfire Pass. He explores the emotional resonance that these sites have for those who served and those who remember. Based on surveys, interviews, extensive fieldwork and archival research, Anzac Journeys offers insights into the culture of loss and commemoration and the hunger for meaning so pivotal to the experience of pilgrimage. Richly illustrated with full-colour maps and photographs from the 1940s to today, Anzac Journeys makes an important and moving contribution to Australian military history.

The book presents the first comprehensive history of Swiss settlement in New Zealand. It describes Swiss settlement in New Zealand from the time of the gold rushes in the 1860s to the present day in a very accessible way. The focus is on the Swiss-born migrants: who they were, why they came, how they have adapted to life in New Zealand, and their ongoing links with their homeland and the Swiss community in New Zealand. The migrants' stories are set in the historical and social context of the period in which they arrived. The book is a mixture of archival and other research of primary and secondary resources, and life history interviews. It will appeal to academics interested in the New World and migration studies and to Swiss living in New Zealand and elsewhere.

A grandson's photo album. Old postcards. English porcelain. A granite headstone. These are just a few of the material objects that help reconstruct the histories of colonial people who lived during Japan's empire. These objects, along with oral histories and visual imagery, reveal aspects of lives that reliance on the colonial archive alone cannot. They help answer the primary question of Lost Histories: Is it possible to write the history of Japan's colonial subjects? Kirsten Ziomek contends that it is possible, and in the process she brings us closer to understanding the complexities of their lives. Lost Histories provides a geographically and temporally holistic view of the Japanese empire from the early 1900s to the 1970s. The experiences of the four least-examined groups of Japanese colonial subjects-the Ainu, Taiwan's indigenous people, Micronesians, and Okinawans-are the centerpiece of the book. By reconstructing individual life histories and following these people as they crossed colonial borders to the metropolis and beyond, Ziomek conveys the dynamic nature of an empire in motion and explains how individuals navigated the vagaries of imperial life.