---

Early Photography of Oahu

---

---

Welcome to our collection of early photography of Oahu. This is Hawai’i’s interface with the outside world, its wars, and madding crowds. Its pace is frenetic even as it tries to preserve some of the languor of the past. Pearl Harbor was a rude awakening, and the island never recovered from the postwar inundation of new arrivals of men who experienced it during the war and returned to live here. The war upended the old white Republican sugar oligarchy and replaced it with a grass-roots revolution that swept the Democrats, the party of the local folk, into power. Plantation workers moved into the city and pooled their money to buy land and build, and development became the island’s salient characteristic. Urban Hawai’i was born.

---

---

---

---