Abstract This article explores the Mono Trail, a route through the Sierra Nevada of California, both pre-contact and in the contact era, in order to explore the role of mobility in settler colonialism. The lens of the trail allows the narrative to stick close to the physical features of the landscape and expand the cast of characters exercising agency over time. Using Indigenous sources, Euro-American accounts, historical photographs, and other sources, this article helps expand our understanding of the history and socio-geography of Western North America.
Public education played a central role in the political campaign for statehood in territorial Hawai'i (1900-1959). Educational administrators and statehood activists presented public schools as evidence of the islands' fitness for full incorporation and used public education to recruit educators and local students to actively lobby for statehood. Through curriculum, letter-writing campaigns, and direct appeals, they framed statehood as the natural result of American presence in the islands and enlisted students and teachers by emphasizing the campaign as both non-partisan and a fulfillment of democratic practice. In the process, this Pacific outpost illustrated the tensions of American empire, as educators and statehood advocates encouraged democratic activism to advance the settler goal of statehood.
