Not long ago I had mentioned that my posts were getting redundant. So, in breaking monotony and fulfilling a long time desire, here's to introducing a new category... "history."
Backing up a little, I had started teaching high school in 1996. I took two years, finished my MA in Pacific Island History at UH Mānoa, then returned to the DOE. At that time I was a little burned out and had no idea what I wanted to do for my PhD dissertation. By 2004, I had taken up ulana lauhala and thought I would return for my PhD to study some sort of history about lauhala hats and weaving in Hawaiʻi. Life had different plans for me. The desire to learn about the evolution of pāpale lauhala in Hawaiʻi never went away. I am now amazed at how many historical documents and images are digitized and available online. There's just some things that one has to view IRL though. True to my secondary social studies training, I wish to share the information I find along the way.
On to deduction... During my brief stint as an AP US History teacher, I taught students to analyze and deduce information from primary sources (ship logs, census sheets, photographs, and other types of original documents). While at the Hawaiian Historical Society library earlier this month, I came across the photographs (below) from Hawaiʻi circa 1890s, in Na Pai Kiʻi: The photographers of the Hawaiian Islands 1845-1900, Bishop Museum Press (1980).
In the above left, the pāpale in the foreground caught my eye. My deductive guess is: from the 1880s Japanese were contracted plantation workers, they are a young married couple splurging on a professional portrait. That pāpale was probably not lauhala and looks like braided straw. At first I thought it would have been a prop as imported hats were expensive back then, but it probably really was his as they were dressed in and displaying their very best attire. Perhaps they were planning on sending a picture back home to the families they left behind. In the above right, all the men are wearing pāpale. In the handful of historical books with their dozens of images I saw at the Hawaiian Historical Society, Panama hats, braided straw boaters, and pāpale lauhala were ubiquitous men's wear.
The pictures' descriptions from the book also illustrate a dynamic going on in Hawaiʻi at the time. No tangent into social-econ history though as I'm all about the pāpale. lol.
A big mahalo to Cynthia at the Hawaiian Historical Society for helping me find as many books as I could view in the short time I was at their library. More info and pics to come.