A Brief History of Kamehameha
I got a handful of books at the gift shop of Iolani Place. One of these was a short book called “Kamehameha: The Warrior King of Hawai’i” by Susan Morrison. The book is a lot shorter than I thought, I was able to finish it in a single 40 minute reading.
Morrison pieced together the history of Kamehameha through various primary and secondary sources. Since his reign predates the written history of Hawai’i much of the story will never be known. The author liberally fills in the blanks with bits of fiction and narrative to keep the story moving.
The genesis of Kamehameha story reads like Exodus with a prophecy scaring the ruling king into murdering children similar to what the Pharos did in the time of Moses. From biblical overtones we move on to Disney’s the Lion King where someone tells Kamehameha that “One day all of this will be yours”. The book ends with an episode of Maury where we discover who Kamehameha’s father is.
Overall the story was interesting. My biggest complaint is that it romanticizes the carnage, death, and destruction that Kamehameha caused in order to unify the islands. Notably, performing human sacrifices in order to have good luck in battle.
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- 2024
- Reinstalling Windows at 1am
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- How to Disable Wayland in Debian Testing
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Give Your Spouse the Gift of a Couple's Email Domain from mtlynch.io
- Have smart glasses finally hit an inflection point? from The Torment Nexus
- The McPhee method from the jsomers.net blog
- Pluralistic: LLMs are slot-machines (16 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Pluralistic: Bluesky creates the world's weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause (15 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Just a Little More Context Bro, I Promise, and It’ll Fix Everything from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
- The Futzing Fraction from Deciphering Glyph
- Sit On Your Ass Web Development from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Issue 91 – GDP on the blockchain
The regulator set to take on primary crypto oversight is down to a single Commissioner, and new pro-crypto PACs focus on installing more Republicans in the midterms
via Citation Needed August 27, 2025V&A East Storehouse and Operation Mincemeat in London
We were back in London for a few days and yesterday had a day of culture. First up: the brand new V&A East Storehouse museum in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park near Stratford, which opened on May 31st this year. This is a delightful new format for a mu…
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries August 27, 2025Generated by openring