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Q&A with Sarah Vowell about her new book, 'Unfamiliar Fishes'

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I interviewed Sarah Vowell about her new book, “Unfamiliar Fishes,” for today’s Life & Style section. You can read the article here.

“Unfamiliar Fishes” is about the Americanization of Hawaii by New England missionaries and others in the 19th century and its annexation by the United States in 1898. The book was published last week, and Vowell will be in Austin Saturday for a book signing at BookPeople. A review from our friends at Kirkus Reviews can be read here.

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Vowell (pictured right) was happy to be talking to “a real newspaper” when I called and not some online-only outfit, but I think she would agree that a blog can serve a useful purpose — like hosting a more complete transcript of a 25-minute conversation than the roughly 650-word article our print edition could accommodate. …

American-Statesman: What prompted you to write a book about Hawaii?

Sarah Vowell: The first time I went there I went to see the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor and while I was there I toured the Iolani Palace, the mansion where the Hawaiian monarchs used to live in downtown Honolulu. I got interested in the story of the overthrow of the queen, and the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands by the U.S.

I had kind of been writing about and around the Spanish-American War era for, oh gosh, almost 10 years and Hawaii has this little part of that. I’m interested in that phase of our history just because it’s one where we became what we are now.

The year of the Spanish-American War, 1898, was an important year for America. What do we need to know about it?

It’s really when we became a world power, and fairly intentionally. There was this snowballing series of weeks over a four-month period when we invaded Cuba and the Philippines, and took over Guam and Puerto Rico — all these former Spanish colonies — and in the middle of that we annexed Hawaii.

Hawaii wasn’t a Spanish colony; it was its own independent nation. The decades leading up to annexation fascinated me, too, because it’s the story of almost eight decades of Americans in Hawaii Christianizing Hawaiians.

The difference between Hawaii and the other Spanish colonies we acquired was Hawaii was already so American because of these decades of American involvement and settlement. The missionary descendants overthrew the queen with the goal of handing the islands to the United States.


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