Island Queens and Mission Wives

“Island Queens and Mission Wives explores the relationship of exchange between two cultures. . . . [and] provides a deeper look into the early days of colonialism in Hawai’i and a richer understanding of Hawaiian culture and diplomacy.” — Washington State Magazine

“An important contribution to the historiography of missions, colonialism, and Hawaii.” — Journal of American History

“There is much to contemplate here, not only for historians interested in the Pacific, gender, colonialism, or American religious movements, but also for those interested in the economics of barter, the politics of fashion and style, and the problems of historical interpretation.” — American Historical Review

“Carefully reexamines the familiar story of Hawaii’s transformation and gets her readers to look at it in a new way.” — The Historian

“Advances the scholarship on missionary and Hawaiian women. . . . Thigpen breaks new ground by investigating the generative encounters between the new groups.” — NAIS

“An in-depth critical analysis of the gendered nature of diplomacy in this period in Hawaiian history. . . . [Thigpen] makes a convincing argument for the importance of both mission wives and elite Hawaiian women in these early encounters.” — H-Diplo

“Thigpen’s book makes significant contributions to American religious history, the history of American missions, and American women’s history, and it converses with works in Hawaiian studies and studies of colonialism. Some previous scholars have studied missionary women, other previous scholars have studied Native Hawaiian women’s engagement with the mission, but no previous scholar has made the relationship between these two groups an object of study. Thigpen demonstrates convincingly that the relationship between these two groups of women is crucial to understanding why the New England mission to Hawai'i took the shape it did.” — David Chang, author of The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929

“An interesting, carefully researched, and well-written book that revisits an area of U.S. history that is currently the focus of considerable scholarly analysis. It will be of value for students and scholars of U.S. western history and for Pacific historians, who will be informed and engaged in nineteenth-century Hawaiian history.” — Patricia Grimshaw, University of Melbourne