Mainland Americans have been making their mark on Hawaii — in ways both welcome and unwelcome — since the early 1800s, when Protestant missionaries first landed there and, per TIME, “devised a Hawaiian alphabet, soon printed a speller… promoted monogamy, [and] introduced the spare, hardy architecture of New England whaling ports.”
While the U.S. annexed Hawaii as a territory in 1898 under somewhat shady circumstances — and over the objections of many Hawaiians — by the 1950s most Hawaiians were in favor of being admitted as a state. When the state reached that milestone, on this day, Aug. 21, in 1959, just seven months after Alaska had joined the Union, Hawaii underwent immediate and radical change, largely in the form of unprecedented economic growth.
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