History
Hawaiʻi is said to have been named for Hawaiʻiloa, the legendary Polynesian navigator who first discovered it. Other accounts attribute the name to the legendary realm of Hawaiki, a place from which the Polynesians originated (see also Manua), the place where they go in the afterlife, the realm of the gods and goddesses. Captain James Cook, who called them the "Sandwich Islands", was killed on the Big Island at Kealakekua Bay. Hawaiʻi was the home island of Paiʻea Kamehameha, called Kamehameha the Great, who by 1795 united most of the Hawaiian Islands under his rule after several years of war. He gave his Kingdom of Hawaii the name of his native island, and the islands in chain are known collectively as "Hawaiian Islands".
Read more about this topic: Hawaii (island)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboshi, Warton, or Schlegel,—is a sum of a very few ideas, and of very few original tales,—all the rest being variation of these.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)