Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen

Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen is Liliʻuokalani's intimate yet explicitly political account of Hawaiʻi's monarchy, the constitutional crisis that dispossessed her, and the American-backed overthrow of 1893. Combining autobiography, documentary testimony, speeches, letters, and historical reflection, the book moves between personal recollection and national history. Its prose is dignified, elegiac, and frequently argumentative: beneath the conventions of the late-Victorian memoir lies a sustained indictment of imperial ambition and a defense of Hawaiian sovereignty. The work is especially significant as a counter-narrative to triumphalist accounts of annexation, preserving Hawaiian perspectives, political vocabulary, and cultural values within a contested literary and historical record. Liliʻuokalani (1838–1917), the last reigning monarch of the Hawaiian Kingdom, wrote from the position of a sovereign deprived of her throne and placed under severe political constraint. Her education, Christian faith, musical achievement, and lifelong involvement in Hawaiian governance informed a narrative attentive both to international diplomacy and to the welfare of her people. The book emerged amid the campaign for United States annexation, when public representations of the overthrow threatened to erase Hawaiian claims to legitimacy and self-determination. This essential volume is recommended to readers of indigenous history, anticolonial literature, political memoir, and Pacific studies. It offers not merely a record of personal suffering, but a lucid, emotionally powerful argument about sovereignty, memory, and the ethics of historical representation.