Ralph S. Kuykendall
1938
This volume is one of the fruits of a project undertaken more than a dozen years ago by the Historical Commission of the Territory of Hawaii and carried on since 1932 by the University of Hawaii. The project called for the preparation of a comprehensive general history of Hawaii based upon a thorough study of original sources. The first phase of the undertaking was to discover the source material not already available in Honolulu and to obtain copies of as much of it as possible, particularly of documents which shed new light on the history of the islands. For this purpose, extensive research has been carried on in the national archives of the United States, Great Britain, and France, and minor investigations have been made in the archives of Belgium and Mexico and in a number of libraries and collections in the United States. Many thousand pages of transcripts have been obtained from these places, supplementing at many points and in many important respects the materials previously available in Honolulu. Independently of this project, a large quantity of new material has been added to collections in the Territory, and there has been during the past fifteen years a great increase of interest in the history of the islands, manifested in the publication of many books and articles, some of which have been thorough studies, making important contributions to our knowledge of the subject. Of the collections previously existing in Honolulu the most important are the official records and the newspaper files in the Archives of Hawaii. Next in value, from the point of view of such an enterprise as this, are the library of the Hawaiian Mission Children's Society, which is not by any means exclusively missionary in character, the library of the Hawaiian Historical Society, which is especially rich in voyages, and the library of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum. The Hawaiian department of the University of Hawaii Library is rapidly gaining the position of a good working collection, h
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