Gateway State: Hawai’I and Cultural Transformation of American Empire

Gateway State explores the development of Hawai’i as a model for liberal multiculturalism and a tool of U.S. power in the era of decolonization. Hawai’i statehood in 1959 was a watershed moment, reflecting a transformation both in America’s role on the international stage and in how Americans understood racial difference at home. Hawai’i’s remarkable transition from territory to state heralded the emergence of multiculturalism, which was a response to independence movements abroad and to the limits of civil rights in the United States.

Sarah Miller-Davenport is Senior Lecturer in U.S. history at the University of Sheffield, where she has been since receiving her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2014. Her work has appeared in The Journal of American History, Diplomatic History, and History Workshop Journal. Her JAH article on U.S. evangelical missionaries after World War II won the Bernath prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and Gateway State received honorable mention for the British Association of American Studies book prize.

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.