The bubonic plague reached Hawaii for the first time in 1899, just as the archipelago was being annexed by the US. To deal with the epidemic, governmental authorities granted absolute emergency powers to the Honolulu Board of Health. Committed to the new science of bacteriology, the Board physicians eventually decided to burn buildings where victims had died, hoping thereby to destroy any remaining plague bacilli. On January 20, 1900, one of those controlled burns burgeoned into a larger inferno that obliterated the Chinatown section of the city. In a few hours, over 5,000 people lost everythi ... More

The bubonic plague reached Hawaii for the first time in 1899, just as the archipelago was being annexed by the US. To deal with the epidemic, governmental authorities granted absolute emergency powers to the Honolulu Board of Health. Committed to the new science of bacteriology, the Board physicians eventually decided to burn buildings where victims had died, hoping thereby to destroy any remaining plague bacilli. On January 20, 1900, one of those controlled burns burgeoned into a larger inferno that obliterated the Chinatown section of the city. In a few hours, over 5,000 people lost everything they had and were marched to detention camps where they were held under armed guard. Next to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, this remains the worst civic disaster in Hawaiian history, and probably the worst civic disaster ever to result from an American public health initiative. In the larger context of medical history, ethnic studies, and American imperialism, this book tells the story of how that catastrophe came about and how the principal racial and ethnic groups in Honolulu — Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiians, and whites — responded to the crisis.