For Mark Twain, it was love at first landfall. Samuel Clemens first encountered the Bermuda Islands in 1867 on a return voyage from the Holy Land and found them much to his liking. One of the most isolated spots in the world, Bermuda offered the writer a refuge from his harried and sometimes sad existence on the mainland, and this island paradise called him back another seven times. Clemens found that Bermuda’s beauty, pace, weather, and company were just the medicine he needed, and its seafaring culture with few connections to the outside world appealed to his love of travel by water. This book is the first comprehensive study of Clemens’s love affair with Bermuda, a vivid depiction of a celebrated author on recurring vacations. Donald Hoffmann has culled and clarified passages from Mark Twain’s travel pieces, letters, and unpublished autobiographical dictation—with cross-references to his fiction and infrequently cited short pieces—to create a little-known view of the author at leisure on his fantasy island. Mark Twain in Paradise sheds light on both Clemens’s complex character and the topography and history of the islands. Hoffmann has plumbed the voluminous Mark Twain scholarship and Bermudian archives to faithfully re-create turn-of-the-century Bermuda, supplying historical and biographical background to give his narrative texture and depth. He offers insight into Bermuda’s natural environment, traditional stone houses, and romantic past, and he presents dozens of illustrations, both vintage and new, showing that much of what Mark Twain described can still be seen today. Hoffmann also provides insight into the social circles Clemens moved in—and sometimes collected around himself. When visiting the islands, he rubbed shoulders with the likes of socialist Upton Sinclair and multimillionaire Henry H. Rogers; with Woodrow Wilson and his lover, socialite Mary Peck; as well as with the young girls to whom he enjoyed playing grandfather. “You go to heaven if you want to,” Mark Twain wrote from Bermuda in 1910 during his long last visit. “I’d druther stay here.” And because much of what Clemens enjoyed in the islands is still available to experience today, visitors to Bermuda can now have America’s favorite author as their guide. Mark Twain in Paradise is an unexpected addition to the vast literature by and about Mark Twain and a work of travel literature unlike any other.

Since it first rolled off the presses in 1856, The Honolulu Advertiser has been an important force in reporting and shaping the news of Honolulu and, secondarily, the Hawaiian Islands. Established as The Pacific Commercial Advertiser, a four-page weekly, it was the first enduring non-government owned or subsidized newspaper published in the Hawaiian Kingdom. Under its first owner, the son of New England missionaries, the Advertiser became the most successful commercial English language newspaper in the Islands. The paper became a daily in 1882 and in 1921 changed its name to The Honolulu Advertiser. Now owned by Gannett Company, Inc., the Advertiser is one of the oldest newspapers still operating west of the Rockies. George Chaplin, editor-in-chief of the Advertiser from 1959 to 1986, has written a colorful and entertaining insider's account of nearly a century and a half of Advertiser history. He covers the legion of personalities that has worked for the Advertiser over the years: owners (from its first Island owner, Henry Whitney, to its last, the Thurston Twigg-Smith family), publishers, editors, reporters, political cartoonists, photographers, and pressroom people. He reports on issues and historical events that had a powerful impact on the Honolulu community and comments on the newspaper's position regarding each: the sensational Massie trial, the dilemma of Hawaii's Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II, the labor movement and communism in the Islands, and statehood, among others. He also recalls the many political figures who have waged their media battles within the pages of the Advertiser.Presstime in Paradise is an illuminating and informative look at the internal operations of a newspaper and its relationship with a community that has both influenced it and been influenced by it. It adds significantly to the growing body of literature on the role of the free press in Hawaii.

For half a century, the United States has treated Cuba and Hawai'i as polar opposites: despised nation and beloved state. But for more than a century before the Cuban revolution and Hawaiian statehood of 1959, Cuba and Hawai'i figured as twin objects of U.S. imperial desire and as possessions whose tropical island locales might support all manner of fantasy fulfillment—cultural, financial, and geopolitical. Using travel and tourism as sites where the pleasures of imperialism met the politics of empire, Christine Skwiot untangles the histories of Cuba and Hawai'i as integral parts of the Union and keys to U.S. global power, as occupied territories with violent pasts, and as fantasy islands ripe with seduction and reward. Grounded in a wide array of primary materials that range from government sources and tourist industry records to promotional items and travel narratives, The Purposes of Paradise explores the ways travel and tourism shaped U.S. imperialism in Cuba and Hawai'i. More broadly, Skwiot's comparative approach underscores continuity, as well as change, in U.S. imperial thought and practice across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Comparing the relationships of Cuba and Hawai'i with the United States, Skwiot argues, offers a way to revisit assumptions about formal versus informal empire, territorial versus commercial imperialism, and direct versus indirect rule.

Why do Americans find it appealing to create and live in artificial worlds--whether in space, at Disneyland, in computer networks, or in our own minds?

Discusses the makings of the "American Pacific" locality/location/identity as space and ground of cultural production, and the way this region can be linked to "Asia" and "Pacific" as well as to "American mainland"

The dramatic history of America's tropical paradise The history of Hawaii may be said to be the story of arrivals—from the eruption of volcanoes on the ocean floor 18,000 feet below, the first hardy seeds that over millennia found their way to the islands, and the confused birds blown from their migratory routes, to the early Polynesian adventurers who sailed across the Pacific in double canoes, the Spanish galleons en route to the Philippines, and the British navigators in search of a Northwest Passage, soon followed by pious Protestant missionaries, shipwrecked sailors, and rowdy Irish poachers escaped from Botany Bay—all wanderers washed ashore, sometimes by accident. This is true of many cultures, but in Hawaii, no one seems to have left. And in Hawaii, a set of myths accompanied each of these migrants—legends that shape our understanding of this mysterious place. In Paradise of the Pacific, Susanna Moore, the award-winning author of In the Cut and The Life of Objects, pieces together the elusive, dramatic story of late-eighteenth-century Hawaii—its kings and queens, gods and goddesses, missionaries, migrants, and explorers—a not-so-distant time of abrupt transition, in which an isolated pagan world of human sacrifice and strict taboo, without a currency or a written language, was confronted with the equally ritualized world of capitalism, Western education, and Christian values.

No book exists specifically on the famous, popular ‘name’ trains that used to run on the New Zealand rail network. The Auckland-Opua Express once carried passengers to the Bay of Islands, the Onehunga Boat Train used to be part of the main route between Auckland and Wellington, and the Rotorua Limited enabled tourists and the well-to-do to take the waters in Rotorua. Later trains like the Silver Star and Northerner - even the Kaimai, Geyserland and Bay Expresses, withdrawn in 2001 - had a distinctive character too.Last Train to Paradise describes the halcyon days of New Zealand rail, some of which the author was fortunate enough to experience personally. The ‘name’ trains and journeys cover a considerable period of New Zealand’s history, from the late 1800s, through the ‘golden’ era of train travel (the first four decades of the 20th century), and conclude with the introduction of new services in the last half of the century. The railway lines described in the book cover every part of the country – and some that have almost been erased from popular memory. Almost everyone in the first half of the 20th century travelled by train – including royalty. In 1869 the first royal train journey from Lyttelton to Christchurch carried the Duke of Edinburgh; the first fully-fledged royal train carrying the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall (the future King George V and Queen Mary) plied the route of the Rotorua Limited and the South Island Express; in 1920 the Prince of Wales traversed the country by train with Lord Louis Mountbatten. In 1927 the Duke and Duchess of York (the future King George VI and Queen Elizabeth) travelled more than 1700 miles by royal train. Other distinguished visitors whose stories will be told in the book include the English comedian J.L.Toole and his company (1890), Australian poet Will Lawson, singers Dame Nellie Melba, Dame Clara Butt, Irish tenor John McCormack and Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin, Polish pianist Ignace Paderewski, ‘March King’ John Philip Sousa and his band, ballerina Anna Pavlova, the 17-year-old violinist Yehudi Menuhin, writers Rudyard Kipling, Zane Grey and George Bernard Shaw, and actors Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. The book will include a wide variety of fascinating and unfamiliar photographs, not just of the trains themselves but also of the people who travelled in them.

Draft, autograph manuscript, corrected of Phelps's novel Burglars in Paradise, published by Houghlin, Mifflin and Company circa 1886. Accompanied by an autograph manuscript letter, signed, from Phelps to "Mr. Ward," likely the minister and editor William Hayes Ward, and an autograph manuscript note, signed, "To the Printer."

Sojourners in Paradise: American and European Writers in Polynesia 1850-1950 By: George Rathmell Imagine a place where no one has to work, where food and other necessities were plentiful and easily accessible, where people spent their days fishing, swimming, bathing, and celebrating the beauty of their environment and ideal weather. This was mid-nineteenth century Polynesia, the place Herman Melville discovered when he jumped ship in 1842 in the Marquesas Islands. Well before Melville even began to conceive the idea of Moby Dick, he wrote Typee and Omoo, unveiling to the world the secrets of the Eden in Polynesia. He was followed by other famous authors over the next one hundred years, each one chronicling the evolution of attitudes toward the Polynesians and their customs as they underwent changes due to the influence of Western society. Sojourners in Paradise presents eleven American and European authors who describe their experiences in Polynesia’s development from a primitive culture toward civilization, bringing forth improvement and disaster to its people. In this book, acquaint or reacquaint yourself with these authors and review the major events in Polynesian history.

The fast-paced and gripping true account of the extraordinary construction and spectacular demise of the Key West Railroad—one of the greatest engineering feats ever undertaken, destroyed in one fell swoop by the strongest storm ever to hit U.S. shores. In 1904, the brilliant and driven entrepreneur Henry Flagler, partner to John D. Rockefeller, dreamed of a railway connecting the island of Key West to the Florida mainland, crossing a staggering 153 miles of open ocean—an engineering challenge beyond even that of the Panama Canal. Many considered the project impossible, but build it they did. The railroad stood as a magnificent achievement for more than twenty-two years, heralded as “the Eighth Wonder of the World,” until its total destruction in 1935's deadly storm of the century. In Last Train to Paradise, Standiford celebrates this crowning achievement of Gilded Age ambition, bringing to life a sweeping tale of the powerful forces of human ingenuity colliding with the even greater forces of nature’s wrath.