NEW MOON: 00:36 HST

January 8th,1834:  (Note: we’re guessing here a bit. It was in early January,  though no one seems to know exactly when.) Ka Lama, the first newspaper in Hawaii, is produced right here on Maui. Hawaii History reports that in the 1820s, Protestant missionaries brought with them the technology for the American-style newspaper when they transported a printing press 18,000 miles around Cape Horn. Ka Lama was produced in what was the first newspaper building west of the Rocky Mountains, at Lahainaluna School on Maui.

Ka Lama, “The Light” or “the Hawaiian Luminary,” was printed in Hawaiian on a manually operated flatbed press that could turn out 100 sheets per hour. Content included articles on constitutional government and Christian teachings, along with illustrations of exotic animals like the lion, elephant and zebra. We are told that when a free  issue appeared, students immediately, eagerly read it through.  

Ka Lama was part of the Calvinists’  almost immediate rise to power and influence. Mission editors joined the Hawaiian government. A modernized newspaper technology was a revolutionary force in bringing the outside world to Hawai‘i and cementing American expansion and dominance. Ka Lama initiated the popular press and was the forerunner of some 1,000 separately titled newspapers in a dozen different languages that have appeared to the present in Hawaii.

It introduced what became the principal way to transmit information in the islands until the advent of television. Thurston Twigg-Smith, chariman of the Honolulu Advertiser newspaper and primary defender of American overthrow of the Hawaiian momarchy, is a descendent of Lorrin Andrews, the original editor of Ka Lama.

HISTORICAL EVENTS ON THIS DAY – January 8th