The Pacific Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
8,412 issues from 1856 to 1910, published in Honolulu, Hawaii, digitised for Chronicling America.
The Pacific Commercial Advertiser (PCA) debuted in Honolulu on July 2, 1856, when Hawaiʻi was in the throes of westernization and the resulting decline of the Native Hawaiian culture and population. Owner and editor Henry Martyn Whitney called the PCA an “opposition paper,” because “The whalemen wanted an American newspaper and the white residents wanted one that was not run ‘by authority'” (referring to the Hawaiian government-sponsored Polynesian, according to Whitney’s obituary. He based the PCA upon the New-York Commercial Advertiser, where he had been employed. Whitneywas the first newspaperman in Honolulu to meet ships off port in a boat to pick up foreign newspapers, as was often done in New York. Initially the Pacific Commercial Advertiser was published every Thursday. In 1882 a daily (except Sunday) edition was also published. In May 1888 the weekly edition ceased.
The PCA provided local political and legislative news and news of the neighbor islands, in addition to international news. Although the target audience was English-speaking, in the newspaper’s first two and one-half months, a Hawaiian-language section titled “Ka Hoku Loa o Hawaii” (The Morning Star of Hawaii) filled the PCA’s last page.
As an English-language newspaper serving the minority Caucasian community in Hawaiʻi, the PCA supported the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, noting that it was “natural, logical and as common in the world’s history as it is natural and common to throw away a…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Honolulu, Hawaii, United States
- Language
- English
- Collection
- Chronicling America
- Licence or status
- None stated by the archive
- Rights
- The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety.
- Credit
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Who can read it
- Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)
- Archive
- Library of Congress