Hawaii is one of America's most interesting and most well-known States it's the only one of America's 50 states to not be located at all in North America and the only one to be fully located within the tropics millions of people vacation to the islands every single year and they remain a perennial bucketless destination for people all around the world and the single most popular honeymoon destination for Newlywed Americans to visit but the Hawaiian Islands also have a rather bizarre population pattern at first glance you see as a young child growing up on the American Mainland
I was always under the mistaken assumption that Honolulu and most Hawaiians had to all be located on the big island of Hawaii obviously because it's the biggest of all the islands to be fair to my younger self the big island or Hawaii Island does account for a significant majority Of the greater Hawaiian Islands total land mass at about 63 percent of it so assuming that's where most Hawaiians lived seemed like a reasonable conclusion at the time so imagine my absolute shock then when later on in life I learned that most people in Hawaii do not
in fact live on the biggest island or even on the second biggest Island but rather on the third biggest island Oahu you see the modern 21st century population of Hawaii is Extremely heavily concentrated around the island of Oahu as of the most recent 2020 census Hawaii's total state population was counted at around 1 million four hundred and fifty five thousand residents higher than 10 other U.S states including geographically large ones like Montana or South Dakota but about 70 percent of all of Hawaii's populations simply just live all concentrated together on Oahu which is only the
third largest island that only Makes up about nine percent of Hawaii's total land area this means that Oahu has a population of more than a million people today while none of the other islands in the archipelago come even remotely close to matching that the Big Island only has about 200 000 people living on it a mere fifth of oahu's population despite being geographically nearly seven times as large this is what makes the Big Island an overall very rural place in comparison with an Average population density of only about 50 people per square mile which is
is about the same as the state of Maine while Oahu has an average density of about 1700 people per square mile a massive 34 times as dense as the big island and denser than any U.S state is on average oahu's population density is about the same as taiwan's the ninth most densely populated country in the world and the other islands in the Hawaiian archipelago have even fewer People Maui is the second biggest island but only honed about 164 000 people Kawaii only has a tiny 73 000 residents while smaller islands like Molokai and Lanai only
have very tiny populations of seven thousand and three thousand people respectively so then what is it about Oahu that made it the massive population core of the Hawaiian Islands today where an overwhelming 70 percent of the state's entire population live only on that island that only makes them nine Percent of the state's total land area well as it turns out a lot of things led to this situation but it's interestingly only a very recent phenomenon because historically speaking the big island was was actually the primary population center of the archipelago for hundreds of years before
Oahu managed to take its place and in order to understand how we got here today we have to start from the very beginning you see the Hawaiian Islands are among the very youngest of Lands that have reached the surface of the Earth sometime around 85 million years ago a volcanic plume from deep within the Earth's molten mantle layer managed to extend from the Earth's mantle and through the crust and into the bottom of the Pacific Ocean over a geologic process lasting tens of millions of years that is still ongoing magma flowed up through the plume
toward the bottom of the Pacific Ocean which then cooled into rock and steadily built Up into a volcano but while the volcanic plume beneath the surface was largely stationary the Pacific tectonic plate above it on the surface was not and has been constantly moving to the Northwest at a rate of about eight centimeters a year this entire time the result is that for tens of millions of years the plume has constantly been building volcanoes that then get dragged to the Northwest by the Pacific plates movement and as they get dragged off of the plume they
Cease becoming volcanically active and they cease growing and as they continue drifting across the ocean over millions of years they steadily erode away and sink back into the ocean from whence they came the long long history of this primordial process can be clearly seen when looking at a topographic map of the Pacific Ocean's floor which shows a very visible trail of underwater mountains created by this process over the past 85 million years stretching all the way Nearly to Russia the further Northwest you go from the hot spots location around the modern Big Island the more
ancient the islands become the modern islands of Niihau Kauai and Oahu and the Hawaiian archipelago are therefore the oldest of the main Hawaiian Islands still standing above sea level and they each used to be a part of their own Big Island millions of years ago similarly the modern islands of Maui Molokai Lanai and kahulawei used to all be a part of The same Big Island as well about 1.2 million years ago before they all broke apart and separated into their modern Islands as the Pacific Plate drifted them away from the hot spot they used to
feed them while the current Big Island the island of Hawaii is of course the youngest of all the islands having only breached above the surface of the ocean around 600 thousand years ago extremely recently in a geologic sense as a result the big island is still by far the most Geologically active of all the modern islands in the chain as well as it continues to rest Atop The primordial Hawaiian Hot Spot there are still four active volcanoes on the island that continued to occasionally erupt every few years and the island is still continuing to grow
from all of the debris as a result as well in another ten thousand to a hundred thousand years from now the next island in the Hawaiian chain is likely to be born in a rise out Of the sea about 22 miles to the southeast of Hawaii island and a constant cycle of birth life and death for the Hawaiian Islands will continue on for millions of more years to come long after we as a species have come and went but as a result of the archipelago's unusual formation and extremely remote location in the middle of the
vast Pacific Ocean thousands of miles away from the nearest other land mass they remain completely undiscovered And undisturbed by Humanity for most of our entire history as a species there is no specific date that is known when the islands were finally first discovered by humans but archaeological evidence suggests that the seafaring Polynesian people most likely first stumbled upon them during their great Odyssey of Pacific exploration sometime around the year 900 A.D after an enormous amount of human history had already taken place the entire rise and fall of the Roman Empire the birth and rise of
Christianity the birth of Islam in the ensuing Arab conquests the coronation of Charlemagne and the proclamation of the Holy Roman Empire and the beginnings of the Viking age all likely took place before a single human eye had ever even managed a glimpse of Hawaii that meant that up until about the year 900 Hawaii had a total human population of literally zero while at about that same time the greater human population Worldwide was estimated to be around 50 million and at least four different cities had already at some point or another managed to reach a population
of 1 million meaning that Hawaii was simply starting out the game of human colonization very very late nonetheless after the initial Polynesian discovery of Hawaii the population of the island steadily grew over a period of centuries and likely reached a peak of somewhere around 300 000 people at some point There were almost certain sporadic contacts between the native Hawaiians and the outside world for centuries before the official first Contact was made but eventually lasting contact between the native Hawaiians and the outside world was finally only established in 1778. two years deep into the American Revolution
when the British Navigator Captain Cook happened to stumble upon them during an expedition and he was the one to finally relay the Knowledge of their existence with a greater outside world at the time of this contact there may have been anywhere between 150 000 and 300 000 native Hawaiians across all of the islands we don't really know exactly but what we do know is that the islands were not unified beneath a single Authority and nor had they ever been fully unified each of the islands in the archipelago were ruled by different Chiefs and factions and
essentially functioned as Completely separate many kingdoms but all of that would change very quickly after Cooks suddenly opened the islands up to the outside world in 1778. by 1780 just two years after Cook's arrival the chief known as kamehamehan the Big Island began acquiring Advanced Western weapons like cannons and muskets from the British armed with these new Advanced weapons and assisted directly with British military advisors Kamehameha managed to unify the entire Big Island beneath his authority and then launched a 15-year long military campaign of Conquest to subjugate all of the other islands in the archipelago
as well by 1795 He was largely Victorious after Conquering the islands of Maui kahulawei Lanai Molokai and Oahu adding them all to his own native island of Hawaii this led him in 1795 to First proclaim the brand new kingdom of Hawaii forcing the name of his own native Hawaii Island onto the greater Archipelago of islands that then became collectively known as the Hawaiian Islands 15 years later in 1810 the independent Chiefs of kawaii and Niihau saw the writing on the wall and swore their own fealties to kamehameha's wow joining their Islands to his new kingdom
for the first time in human history the entire Hawaiian archipelago is UNIF find beneath a single political Authority the independent Kingdom of Hawaii ruled by King Kamehameha the great but almost Immediately this newly created Kingdom faced three highly related to each other problems the first was that the native population of the islands almost immediately began rapidly crashing owing to a variety of compounding factors 15 years worth of near-constant warfare waged all across the islands during kamehameha's campaigns of unification killed a lot of people for starters but the biggest problem of all was the sudden introduction
of foreign diseases By the many westerners who are now visiting the islands that the natives had no immunities to diseases like smallpox influenza yellow fever measles and even the Bubonic plague ravaged through the native Hawaiian population in much the same way that they had done through the Native American population centuries previously after their initial contact other exacerbating factors included the introduction of alcohol which the natives of course had no prior Experience with high rates of infant mortality and long-standing cultural practices of infanticide and abortion which were not made illegal in the Kingdom until 1835 and
1850 respectively further compounding on the other downward pressures faced by the population combined with increasingly High rates of emigration among the native Hawaiians beyond the islands to the U.S Mainland which even further compounded the bottoming out of Hawaii's Population post-contact as a result the native population of the islands just completely crashed from between 150 000 to 300 000 at the time of Cook's arrival in 1778 to only about 71 000 less than a century later in 1853. a completely apocalyptic rate of population decline then two other problems for the kingdom stemmed from this core problem
a crashing native population meant an Ever diminishing labor pool which meant that Hawaii's Economy was struggling to get off the ground with a crippling lack of available workers that was even further exacerbated by Hawaii's sheer geographic isolation and distance away from any other outside markets that cost a fortune to export anything too which all combine mind made the new Hawaiian Kingdom an extremely sparsely populated and impoverished State occupying an immensely strategic valuable piece of real estate in a dangerous ocean with Way bigger sharks swimming all around it the huge and growing Maritime empires of Britain
and France and later the United States Germany and Japan as well all of them desired control over Hawaii because it is the only landmass of its kind to be found anywhere for thousands of miles in every direction which naturally made it an absolutely vital refueling and resupply station for ships traversing the vast Pacific between the Americas and East Asia to highlight the looming Danger a rogue British captain and his crew attempted to seize control over Hawaii in the name of the British crown in 1843. a situation that lasted for months until the British government in
London rebuked his attempts and reasserted the kingdom of Hawaii's right to Absolute sovereignty and Independence the early rulers of Hawaii of course knew that their geopolitical position was incredibly 10 us Within These Dangerous Waters but in order to try and Fix it they had no other choice but to invite the westerners to the islands as friends in order to help develop their economy and strengthen their overall position and so the westerners began coming to the islands in many different forms many were missionaries seen to convert the natives to Christianity While others were merchants and businessmen
who came to make money and many more were both many of these Western entrepreneurs realized that Hawaii's location in the tropics and its warm and relatively wet climate meant that it would be perfect for growing sugar and was as of yet completely untapped land for this purpose many came to Hawaii and set of large-scale sugar plantations across all of the islands and they became some of Hawaii's largest landowners in the process and some of them even bought up entire Islands in 1864 a woman named Elizabeth Sinclair bought the entire island of nihau from The Kingdom
of Hawaii for a sum of only ten thousand dollars Nihao has continually remained privately owned by her direct descendants for the century and a half of history that is followed ever since and it continues to this day to be privately owned by a pair of brothers the island is completely off limits to outside visitors without permission and is only accessible to a select few people belonging to the immediate family who owns it and U.S Government officials which has led to the Island's modern nickname and status as the forbidden island of Hawaii but other large sugar
plantations and cattle ranches were set up across all of the other Islands as well by this new class of Western landowner who are being welcomed into the kingdom and with an increasingly diminished pool of native Hawaiian labor to work on all of these plantations and ranches the Western landowners began searching abroad to Import labor on Five-Year temporary contracts primarily from East Asia and specifically from Japan China and later Korea and the Philippines and over time the native Hawaiian population continued diminishing in size while the population of White westerners and imported Asian labor continued to rise
the overall population of Hawaii continued shrinking year after year following Cook's contact in 1778 until it hit an all-time historic low point in 1872 when that Year's census revealed only a meager total population of 56 897 people living across all of the Hawaiian Islands from there the overall population began steadily growing again but only because more westerners and more Asians brought in as laborers continued coming the native Hawaiian population would continue declining every single year for many more decades to come by 1893 the population across all of the islands had rebounded to Around 90 000
people but the demographics of the islands were completely unrecognizable from a century beforehand by then a whopping 52 of the Island's population were simply Japanese and Chinese male laborers who had come in on those temporary five-year contracts to work on all of the various sugar plantations and many of them ended up staying behind contributing to Hawaii's very large Asian-American population to this day but while the Western plantation owners on Hawaii had solved the labor shortage problem there still remained an unsolvable problem with distance Hawaii is thousands of miles away across the ocean in North America
which meant that exporting agricultural products produced in Hawaii and North America was pretty expensive and that was even further exacerbated by the fact that the US government had placed a series of import tariffs on Hawaiian sugar the Western Hawaiian Landowner class one of these tariffs removed in order to increase their competitiveness in the U.S market but the American government was playing Hardball they wanted Pearl Harbor and they offered the Kingdom of Hawaii that in return for eliminating the tariffs the Hawaiian government needed to lease Pearl Harbor to the U.S government you see Pearl Harbor is
on the island of Oahu and it is without a doubt one of the most strategically valuable natural Harbors that can be found anywhere in the world it's massive in size the waters within it are deep and can easily accommodate warships and submarines and its extremely well protected from the furies of the outside ocean through a single narrow entrance and best of all this incredible Harbor is located smack in the center of the North Pacific Ocean and there's simply no other possible alternative to it anywhere else around for thousands of miles whichever Nation Empire ended up
controlling Pearl Harbor would inevitably become the maritime Master of the entire North Pacific and thus become capable of dominating the sea Lanes of trade and travel between North America and East Asia and so the United States wanted it not only for its own purposes and Ambitions but also prevented from falling into the hands of a potentially hostile Maritime power who could then use it to dominate the Pacific and even threaten the U.S West Coast like the British the Germans or later on the Japanese policing any land within the Hawaiian Kingdom to a foreign government was
considered deeply unpopular among the native Hawaiians and so the Hawaiian government resisted leasing Pearl Harbor for the moment in 1875 the United States and Kingdom of Hawaii signed the reciprocity treaty that eliminated America's tariffs on Hawaiian sugar without the Hawaiian government leasing away any of its land And the sugar economy in the islands subsequently exploded Hawaiian sugar exports increased a full 13 times over between 1874 and 1890 while the value of the Kingdom's exports increased by a whopping 722 percent over the same time period exports that were utterly dominated by Sugar the scale and the
size of the sugar plantations in Hawaii rapidly increased along with the political Ambitions of the western landowners who Ran them and their increasing demands for labor coming from Asia by the late 1880s however the treaty was up for Renewal and now the US government was refusing to consider continuing its participation unless Hawaii finally leased them Pearl Harbor it was sensed in Washington that the Hawaiian government was growing closer to Japan in order to counterbalance the increasing influence and pressures of the United States which was true in 1881 The Hawaiian King had even held a secret
meeting with the emperor of Japan in which he proposed a royal marriage between his niece and a Japanese Prince an offer that the emperor at the time declined over fears of greatly worsening relations with the United States Washington did not want Pearl Harbor to fall into the hands of the Japanese or any other outside power and faced with crippling Economic Consequences to the sugar industry if the government refused The kingdom of Hawaii finally relented and agreed to lease Pearl Harbor to the United States beginning in 1887. it was the beginning of America's official presence on
the islands and it would accelerate even further very rapidly from there by this point in time native Hawaiians themselves had diminished to the point where they only represented about 25 of the overall population in their own kingdom while white westerners represented around 17 percent of the Population and a whopping 40 percent of the population were Japanese and another 16 percent were Chinese sensing their demographic and economic advantages in the aftermath of the Kingdom agreeing to lease Pearl Harbor to the United States government the landed Westerner class of the islands launched a coup against the monarchy
in 1887 which forced the king to adopt a brand new Constitution that stripped him of most of his own powers completely disenfranchised all of the Asians of the islands from voting and introduced a property requirement for voting that immediately disenfranchised two-thirds of the remaining native Hawaiian population getting the landed White westerners the majority of the new voting power in the Kingdom in 1891 that King died in his sister liliu Kalani ascended to the throne as Queen in his place and she was destined to be the Kingdom's final reigning monarch Lily okolani made it clear that
she intended To overturn the events of 1887 that had been forced upon her brother by the Island's Western Elites she would restore the power of the monarchy restore the voting privileges of the native Hawaiians and destroy the voting power of the western business class in order to prevent any of that from happening the Western business class on Hawaii organized another coup in 1893 with the direct assistance of armed Western militia groups on the islands And further assistance from representatives of the United States government who collectively conspired to overthrow the Hawaiian Queen and topple her government
citing the desire to protect U.S interests on the island of Oahu like their lease on Pearl Harbor hundreds of U.S Marines were ordered onto the island during the coup who intimidated the queen in her royal bodyguards into not resisting too heavily the coup plotters had the queen And hundreds of other native of Hawaiians arrested six of whom were later sentenced to death for alleged treason abolished the monarchy and declared the creation of a new Hawaiian Republic there wasn't really a republic at all because it would be a one-party State dominated by the Island's white Western
oligarchy they intended to become immediately annexed by the United States and requested As Much from the U.S government but the American President at the time was Grover Cleveland a democrat in a vowed Anti-Imperialist Cleveland and his administration were outraged by the events that took place on Hawaii as Cleveland himself infamously wrote to the US Congress later that year which concluded quote by an act of War committed with a participation of a diplomatic representative of the United States and without authority of Congress the government of a feeble but friendly And confiding people has been overthrown a
substantial wrong has thus been done which I do regard for our national character as well as the rights of the injured people requires we should Endeavor to repair the provisional government of Hawaii has not assumed a Republican or other constitutional form but has remained a mere executive counselor oligarchy set up without the ascent of the people it has not sought to find a permanent basis of popular Support and is given no evidence of an intention to do so the Cleveland Administration thus refused to Annex Hawaii and the coup plotters were forced to sit in a
sort of limbo state for a few more years everything changed however after William McKinley a republican in favor of U.S expansion and imperialism was elected to the American presidency in 1897. the following year in April of 1898 the Spanish-American war broke out and would change America's Calculus relating to Hawaii forever during that war the United States decisively defeated the alien Spanish Empire and acquired a vast new Colonial Empire across the Caribbean and the Pacific in the process it is how the United States ended up acquiring Puerto Rico Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and Guam which all
remained territories of the United States today in addition to the Philippines which are granted Independence in 1946 but at the time in 1898 America had acquired a major Empire in the Western Pacific out of the Philippines in Guam and in order to ensure America's continued hold over them the United States felt that it needed to guarantee that it would retain control over Pearl Harbor and definitely as well the only militarily suitable Harbor anywhere in the North Pacific between the U.S Mainland and the Philippines moreover there were already grave concerns within Washington over The growing Potential
Threat of Japan the Japanese empire had just decisively crushed the Qing Empire in their own brief war of 1894-95 shortly beforehand and acquired its own Pacific Empire in the process adding Korea and Taiwan to its overseas possessions very near to the Philippines and Guam in 1893 during the coup on Hawaii the Japanese had even sent warships to Hawaii to protect Japanese citizens and interests on the islands well perhaps even more to the Point approximately 40 percent of Hawaii's entire population at this point were ethnically Japanese and the United States government was terrified about their potential
affinities to being annexed by the rising Japanese empire were Pearl Harbor and Hawaii to become Japanese it would ensure Japan's Maritime dominance over the Pacific rather than Americas and restrict America's ability to adequately reach and Supply its newly acquired colonies Is in Guam in the Philippines so to prevent all of that from happening in the closing days of the war against Spain the McKinley Administration chose to finally step in and formally Annex the oligarchic Republic of Hawaii into the United States as a territory in August of 1898. obviously without the consent of the deposed Hawaiian
queen or any of the Hawaiian natives a century after the coup events of 1893 that led to the United States annexing Hawaii in 1898. the Clinton Administration in the United States in 1993 issued an official American apology to the Hawaiian people for the events that transpired and admitted that both the 1893 coup and the 1898 annexation were each illegal since they never had the consent of the queen nor the native Hawaiian people to have done so right up until 1959. the United Nations included Hawaii on its list of non-self-governing territories eligible for decolonization But the
American apology a century later in 1993 was for the most part merely words and didn't really involve any action actions on the part of the Americans further incorporating Hawaii into the country however would continue on almost immediately after the annexation Sanford B Dole was made Hawaii's first governor as he had previously ruled as the white oligar he's president of Hawaii during the five years between the coup and the Annexation the following year after the annexation in 1899 his cousin James Dole moved to Hawaii and founded what would become the Hawaii fruit company which would eventually
evolve into the well-known Dole Corporation one of the largest fruit and vegetable companies in the entire world today in 1822 James Dole purchased 98 of the island of Lanai the sixth largest island in the archipelago and he subsequently transformed the island into the largest Pineapple plantation in the world the pineapple was indigenous to South America but it was imported by the Western business Elite Hawaii because of the Island's favorable growing conditions for it by the end of the 1920s Dole's company was growing more than 75 percent of all the pineapples in the world and he
had essentially created a global Monopoly on the fruit and this Monopoly extended well across the 20th century in into the 1960s as Hawaii was Still at that time producing about 80 percent of all the pineapples in the world and the Dole company dominated that production out of their vast transformation of the island of Lanai into a single giant privately owned Plantation in effect Lanai became the second of the eight major Hawaiian Islands to fall under virtually complete private ownership restricting the Island's ability to be settled much by anyone the 98 private ownership of Lanai Has
passed on through various different owners over the century of history since it was initially bought by James Dole and was most recently purchased by Larry Ellison the co-founder of the Oracle Corporation in 2012 for a sum of 300 million dollars Larry Ellison is now as of September 2023 the fourth wealthiest person in the entire world with an estimated net worth of 144 billion dollars and his 98 ownership of Lanai is far from the only land in Hawaii Currently owned by the world's modern billionaire class Mark Zuckerberg owns more than 1600 years of land across the
island of Kauai that he purchased for 175 million dollars while Oprah owns more than 2 000 acres of land across Maui and is that Island's largest individual landowner while other billionaires like Jeff Bezos Peter Thiel and Mark benioff all own large Estates across Hawaii as well but these individual people are far from the only Ones who began acquiring land in Hawaii from the natives after it became a part of the United States by 2015 The Scholar Winona Leduc estimated that roughly 95 percent of all the land in Hawaii was owned by merely 82 land holders
including more than 50 percent owned by both the United States federal government and the Hawaii state government and much of the rest owned by the long-established sugar pineapple and ranching companies and large individual Landowners who own Islands outright Like Larry Ellison and the brothers who own Niihau by 1920 only a little more than 20 years after the American annexation the native Hawaiian population of the islands had crashed to its all-time historic low of nearly 24 000 individuals remaining most of whom lived in remote and difficult to access Villages scattered across the islands after the U.S
took over further immigration from Japan and China and Elsewhere and Asia were also banned and more and more Americans from the mainland began moving to the new Hawaiian territory as the island of Oahu specifically became increasingly more important to the American Military as the U.S Navy continually kept building up its infrastructure around Pearl Harbor to make it functionable as a major Naval Base it also didn't hurt the nearby Honolulu had a very good natural Harbor as well only about five miles Away from Pearl Harbor making Honolulu ideally suitable to become the Hawaiian Islands primary civilian
commercial center benefiting from the massive amounts of money that the military was investing into developing Pearl Harbor and as the Japanese Empire continued its aggressive expansion across Asia with invasions of Manchuria and the Chinese Mainland throughout the 1930s the United States became increasingly concerned about a coming war with Japan erupting In the Pacific despite America's commitment to neutrality at the Time by 1940 the United States was fearful of Japanese attacks on the Philippines and Guam and to put the Navy in a better position to respond the U.S Pacific fleet's headquarters were relocated from San Diego
on the west coast to Pearl Harbor on Oahu in order to place the fleet closer to potential flashpoints so they could respond quicker and as a result of many factors that are well Beyond the scope of this video the Japanese of course decided to launch a surprise attack against the U.S Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941 in an attempt to neutralize America's Naval power in the Pacific before launching their invasions across southeast Asia that they were sure would lead to American Military intervention against them the Pearl Harbor attack killed more than 2
400 Americans it Remains the deadliest attack to have Ever happened in Hawaii's history and led directly to the United States entry into World War II afterwards Hawaii became the major military base for the American fight against Japan in the ensuing Pacific War Pearl Harbor served as the major staging ground for just about all U.S forces entering into the Civic Theater for the year's Long Island Hopping campaign against Japanese forces while martial law was declared across all of the Hawaiian islands for the Entire duration of the war thousands of Japanese residents of the islands were forcibly
placed in new internment camps by the American authorities while the entire island of kahulaway was completely transformed into a U.S military training center the island had never been heavily populated in its entire history because it sits in the rain shadow of Maui's towering Haleakala Volcano and it doesn't have any high mountains of its own that can capture Moisture independently meaning that rainfall across the island is scarce and fresh water is hard to come by which always limited the Island's ability to develop and sustain a population nonetheless the US military removed the few Islanders who lived
there during World War II and effectively transformed the entire Island into a big live fire practice range it was repeatedly used as target practice by American bombers and ships going into war against Japan while Mock amphibious assaults on its beaches were conducted by U.S Marines training for the real battles to come else swear in the Pacific as a result Kahu all away became effectively uninhabitable due to the huge amount of unexploded ordinance that the U.S military left behind on it in addition to the crippling lack of fresh water there after World War II martial law
in Hawaii was ended but the U.S military maintained its ownership of kahulaway for decades longer well into The 1990s after all Hawaii remained extremely geopolitically valuable to the United States all throughout the subsequent Cold War as well and specifically Pearl Harbor and kahulaway the Pacific Fleet based in Pearl Harbor steadily grew into the largest Maritime command in the entire world with a combined Force as of 2023 of a quarter million Sailors and Marines under its command along with 200 ships and 2 000 aircraft Pearl Harbor continued to be a Major staging ground for the fleet
and conflicts all around the Pacific that the United States subsequently found itself involved in from Korea and Vietnam to the major Taiwan Straits crises between the People's Republic of China on the mainland and the Republic of China on Taiwan and kahulaway continued to be used as a training ground for bombing missions throughout the Korea and Vietnam conflicts as well and the United States continued Conducting live fire exercises on the island all the way until 1990 and the military finally gave it back to the Hawaii state government only in 1994. after which decontamination operations were conducted
to try and remove all of the unexploded bombs and artillery shells that the military had left there over decades worth of bombing the island but it's believed that many continue to remain and the island is not considered safe to travel to as a result moreover After receiving it back from the military in 1994 the Hawaii state government chose to set the entire Island aside as a nature preserve dedicated to the native Hawaiian people where all economic activity is forbidden basically rendering the island indefinitely uninhabitable which is why its population is zero today and this is
basically how you started getting Hawaii's current strange seeming population pattern three out of the Eight main islands were basically completely eliminated a settlement altogether by various different factors the island of nihau coming under 100 private ownership in 1864 that continues to this day the island of Lanai coming under 98 private ownership first by James Dole and later by Larry Ellison and the island of kahawalaway coming under the complete ownership of the United States military and used for live fire exercises for decades until the 1990s rendering it effectively uninhabitable then the island of Molokai isn't very
great from a development standpoint either when you look at a rainfall map of the islands the trade winds generally Blow from the East and they hit the high mountains found in the east of all the islands of Hawaii Maui Oahu and Kauai so all four of those islands have at least some areas where there are abundant amounts of rainfall the western parts of the islands are Generally in the rain Shadows of these mountains and are thus more arid and dry including kahoe all away and Lanai which are very dry Islands in addition to all of
their other problems Molokai the fifth largest island in the archipelago doesn't have as high mountains as the larger four ones do and so it doesn't Force clouds up as much and so it doesn't get as much rainfall meaning that fresh water is much scarcer to come by on Molokai and it further doesn't Have any significant Harbors like a wahoo has with Honolulu and Pearl Harbor and thus Molokai has remained very rural and sparsely populated for its entire history which is why only about 7 000 people live there today in 2023 so that essentially left only
Kawaii Oahu Maui and Hawaii the four biggest islands and the most mountainous islands that receive the most rainfall and have the most available freshwater resources but Oahu retained another major advantage Over all of the other Islands besides just for Pearl Harbor and Honolulu Harbor as well while Oahu is fairly mountainous it is significantly less mountainous than all of the other major islands and has substantially larger amounts of flatter lands that are simply easier to develop into an urban environment it's no surprise that oahu's modern population density is concentrated on the flat lands around Pearl Harbor
and the Island's Eastern Shore while the population density on Maui is concentrated in the flat narrow neck between the mountains of the East in the west one of the population density of the big island is concentrated along the narrow flatter and easier to develop coastal plains in the west and the East so as the U.S military continued pouring resources into developing Pearl Harbor Honolulu right nearby kept benefiting from all of the government's investment into Infrastructure and with its own pretty decent natural Harbor it developed into the Island's primary civilian business and finance Center and so
it was only natural then that it also evolved into the gateway to the rest of the Hawaiian Islands through a newly emerging sector of the economy that eventually became completely dominant in the islands after World War II tourism as Hawaii is geographically very far away from any other land masses flying to the islands From anywhere else was simply out of the question for most of its history as planes lacked the range or the power to actually make it there but inspired by Charles Lindbergh's first successful non-stop flight across the Atlantic in 1927. James Dole decided
to host a similar contest to try and get the first direct flight from North America to Hawaii happen this culminated with a great DOL air race of 1927. in in which Dole offered a prize of twenty five Thousand dollars for the first crew to successfully make the non-stop flight from Oakland to Honolulu and it turned into an absolute [ __ ] show of the highest order of the eight aircraft that participated in the race only two managed to successfully make it across the Pacific to Honolulu of the six unsuccessful aircraft two of them crashed immediately
upon takeoff two more of them were forced to return back to Oakland for repairs while another two Simply vanished and the vast emptiness of the Pacific never to be seen again one of the planes that was repaired subsequently went out searching for the missing planes and also vanished never to be seen again in all before during and after the race to be the first crew to successfully fly directly to Hawaii in 1927. 10 people were killed and six airplanes were lost or damaged Beyond repair in the attempt but the first successful flight from North America
to Hawaii had been made regardless and it marked the very beginning of the era of air travel to the islands rather than taking a very long journey by sea the very first commercial passenger air service to the islands began on pan M's once weekly scheduled service between San Francisco and Honolulu on the 21st of October 1936 but the true era of mass tourism to the islands only began after the second world war with United San Francisco Honolulu and Los Angeles Honolulu routes launching in 1947 and 1950 respectively in Northwest Seattle Honolulu and Portland Honolulu routes
both launching in 1949. the early tourism industry to the islands was completely centered upon Honolulu and it's remained that way ever since after Hawaii was admitted as the 50th and most recent American state after a referendum in 1959 a referendum in which Independence was not given as an option mind you tourism to the islands from the U.S Mainland continued accelerating even further to the point where it eventually became the state's most vital economic pillar in 2018 nearly 10 million tourists visited the Hawaiian islands that year alone and they spent more than 17 and a half
billion dollars doing so contributing massively to the state's economy and supporting more than 200 000 jobs on the island that are dedicated to the tourism industry tree if it were still an independent country Hawaii Would be one of the most visited in the world with more annual tourists than either the United Arab Emirates or Greece today tourism represents about 21 percent of the entire Hawaiian state economy while the defense industry represents about a further nine percent of the economy and both of them are centered around Honolulu and Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu no
other airport on the islands has anywhere near the capacity as Honolulu International Has today with 44 direct destinations to all across the mainland United States and Canada in addition to Australia New Zealand the Philippines Taiwan South Korea and Japan there are airports on the other islands of course but their routes are far more limited than Honolulu increasing the difficulties and expenses involved in visiting them and of course Pearl Harbor continues to remain of the utmost importance to the United States Department of Defense in The 21st century as well it continues to be the headquarters of
the U.S Pacific Fleet and as a deep water Port it is one of America's largest and most important submarine bases today it is the Home Port for 11 of America's Los Angeles class nuclear-powered submarines and six newer virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines as well both classes of these submarines are attack submarines who aren't armed with nuclear weapons but are rather designed to instead engage And Destroy enemy surface ships and submarines or covertly insert Special Forces somewhere of the U.S Navy's 50 total nuclear-powered attack submarines as of 2023. 17 of them are about a third are all stationed
at Pearl Harbor while another five of them are stationed further west in the Pacific at Guam and the reasons why are fairly obvious America's greatest emerging geopolitical rival of the 21st century is the People's Republic of China and there are Increasing risks of War erupting between them across the Pacific the People's Republic has made it abundantly clear that they consider Taiwan to be a rightful part of their country and they have never renounced the right to use military force to press the issue if and when the day comes that the Chinese finally decide to launch
a full-scale Invasion across the Taiwan Strait the United States has a very high chance of getting itself militarily involved to Defend Taiwan for reasons that fall outside the scope of this video America's military strategy to defeat a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and keep the island de facto independent hinges on many different Maritime objectives blocking the Strait of Malacca and the various narrow waterways zigzagging all throughout the Indonesian archipelago to deny China's ability to continue importing oil and gas from the Persian Gulf in order to starve China's War Machine and economy try while simultaneously blocking off
all further Maritime choke points in between the Philippines Taiwan and Japan that could otherwise Grant Chinese warships and submarines access into the greater Pacific seeking to expand the scope of the war beyond the immediate theater in the Western Pacific to America's Naval bases and interests in Guam Hawaii or even the West Coast America's closest military basis to Taiwan are in Okinawa And South Korea but America's closest Naval basis to Taiwan and China are Guam and Pearl Harbor and just as in the Great Pacific War of the 20th century against Japan Hawaii in Pearl Harbor is
the most strategic asset the United States possesses in this potential upcoming conflict because it grants the 17 nuclear attack submarines and nine destroyers based here the ability to rapidly soar tea out westwards to accomplish all of America's strategic Maritime objectives during a Chinese invasion of Taiwan scenario denying the Chinese the ability to expand the scope of the war from Beyond Taiwan that is why there are still over forty thousand U.S troops in Department of Defense Personnel stationed on Oahu still today and why the U.S military will never want to get rid of its access to
Pearl Harbor Oahu is simply where all of the Island's most important industries got established following America's Annexation of Hawaii and it's simply where the highest demand for jobs in the state all emerged and following the jobs came all of the people and that is why Oahu is by far the most heavily populated island in the Hawaiian archipelago today and why it will probably always remain so despite only making up nine percent of Hawaii's total land mass but with such a high concentration of people in a geographically small and remote place Like Oahu have also come
sky high prices for all of the people living there Hawaii in the 21st century is literally the least affordable state in the country with the highest home prices in America by far as of 2023 the median price for a single family home Statewide is a whopping 970 thousand dollars while on Oahu specifically the median home price is more than 1.1 million dollars by comparison California experiences the Second highest median single-family home value in the country right now at only 762 thousand dollars still expensive but much less expensive than in Hawaii homes in Nevada average only
431 thousand dollars less than half the price they are in Hawaii while in Texas they're only 305 thousand dollars less than a third the price for a home in Hawaii and average rents in Hawaii aren't much better either with the average 2023 rent in the state for an 850 square foot Apartment being twenty four hundred dollars a month the fourth highest in the country only behind Massachusetts New York and California and nearly a thousand dollars a month more than in either Nevada or Texas Hawaii residents are currently spending an average of 42 percent of their
entire income simply on rent which is by far the highest percentage of any state California once again ranks in second place where residents only spend an average of 28.5 Percent of their incomes on rent by comparison it's not just housing that's more expensive in Hawaii either but just about everything else as well because shipping everything to Hawaii from the US Mainland is more expensive than any other state groceries in Hawaii are the most expensive in the country as of 2023 the average monthly grocery bill in the state is about 557 200 more than the national
average of only 355 dollars a month gas prices are Also the third highest in the nation only behind California and Washington and well above the national average and because of all of this a state analysis that was published as recently as 2022 concluded that a single person were talking 40 hours a week had to earn at least 18 dollars an hour just to pay for their housing and other basic life Necessities in Hawaii with nothing left over afterwards despite the current state minimum wage only being 12 dollars An hour the end result is that many
long-time Hawaii residents have become increasingly priced out of their homes and the effects are being disproportionately felt among Hawaii's native residents the most recent 2020 census revealed that there are about 309 800 native Hawaiians living within the state the very first census ever recorded that shows the native population having fully recovered from its previous collapse following the Arrival of cook and the British in 1778. but the number is a little misleading because there's a further estimated 370 000 native Hawaiians who live beyond the islands today primarily in the U.S Mainland having large leap and priced
out of their ancestral Homeland this means that there are more native Hawaiians living outside of Hawaii Today Than and within Hawaii while the native Hawaiians themselves only represent about 11 percent of modern Hawaii's Overall population and that in my opinion is a historic tragedy Hawaii is one of the most beautiful and unique places in the world and so it's a very desirable place to visit and to live because of its long history of relative isolation Polynesian Discovery and subsequent colonization by Western powers and proximity to Asia 21st century Hawaii is one of the most diverse
and unique cultures to be found anywhere in the world it is by far the Most ethnically diverse state in the United States and the only state where Asian Americans represent the largest ethnic group it is a very unique amalgamation of native Hawaiian East Asian and euro-american culture and consequently the food scene in Hawaii has become legendary and well known all across the world a lot of which I've ordered previously from today's sponsor hellofresh who maintains an archive of all their delicious Hawaiian recipes on Their website ranging for Teriyaki Park Blue albums to lion chicken poke
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and as always thank you so much for watching
