Henry Knight Lozano – California and Hawai’i Bound

Describe your book

California and Hawai‘i Bound explores the connections and contestations between those two places as sites of U.S. settler colonialism from the era of the Mexican-American War to Hawaiian statehood in 1959. Beginning with the annexation of California in 1848, U.S. settlers, writers, officials, and boosters strove to harmoniously bind California and Hawai‘i together as white-led, “Americanizing” territories on and in the Pacific Ocean. These designs were challenged, however, by both native peoples seeking to defend their sovereignty and many white Americans – as well as the influx of Asian immigrants across several generations – reflecting how the limits as much as the visions of U.S. settler colonialism shaped the history of the Pacific West. 

Why did you decide to publish it with a university press?

This is a book that seeks to engage and perhaps unsettle how we think about the American West and U.S. territorial expansion, including the rich scholarship in those fields. As such I wanted the book to find a home with a press that publishes high-quality academic work with those kinds of interests and questions. University of Nebraska Press is a leading press for historiography on the American West. Moreover, the book forms part of a new and exciting UNP series entitled, “Studies in Pacific Worlds,” which speaks to its other key geographical focus: the Pacific and, especially, Hawai‘i. The UNP team have been brilliant in their support and guidance and I’m very glad the book was published with them. 

Do you enjoy the writing process?

Writing is hard and writing a book perhaps especially so. There are days when it feels like you are swimming against a tide – perhaps even slipping under! But I also love writing. It is such a unique thing: that mental process of working through half-formed ideas and the words in your head, slowly building a narrative, line-by-line, on the page. Writing takes time and is a craft that is challenging and often draining; yet I almost always feel, afterwards, has been worthwhile. Not unlike a good long swim. 

What is the last thing you read not for research/work? 

Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding. Both a campus novel and a baseball novel – and beautifully written. What more could you ask for?  

What is the best piece of advice anyone has ever given to you?

Don’t try to find meaning in every single aspect or moment in life. That is a road to discontent. Instead, try to seek out, and to revisit, those things in life that provide meaning for you.   

What piece of advice might you give to young academics looking to follow in your footsteps?

Try to work on a topic or an area that fascinates you. Because, if it does, it’s more likely to fascinate other people, not least your students, when you talk and write about it; and because academic research can be a very lonely old slog at times, but curiosity can keep those pages turning. 

Who inspires you?

My wife, Rachel, for her wisdom and her work ethic and her wicked sense-of-humour. We are very different in a lot of ways, yet we share so much too, including our two young daughters, April and Aria, and our Labrador, Maggie. 

What’s next?

Good question! Well, I’m still very much interested in California and in Hawai‘i; I don’t think that will ever change. I’ve been working on a chapter about Hawai‘i for a forthcoming book on the pineapple, and another that explores climate and architecture in U.S. semi-tropical frontiers, including Southern California. Longer-term, I’m developing a book-length project that seeks to explore the modern history of Florida through the lens of human-crocodilian encounters and interactions. I’m interested in how different disciplines and perspectives can augment our understanding of this interspecies history – from early colonial Euro-American conceptions of the peninsula as a watery, reptile-filled frontier, to the Seminole Wars and the railroad booms of the nineteenth century, to more recent tensions surrounding alligators and their movements within an increasingly crowded and environmentally strained Florida.  

Henry Knight Lozano is a senior lecturer in American history at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Tropic of Hopes: California, Florida, and the Selling of American Paradise, 1869–1929 and California and Hawai’i Bound (2021), published by the University of Nebraska Press, and the coeditor of The Shadow of Selma.