This isn’t new news, but it was new to me and, I’m sure, many of you.

The University of Hawaii Press has released at least 90 of its “classic” books as online “open access” titles, meaning that they are available online to download or read for free.

One that immediately caught my eye is “Broken Trust,” the must-read account of the 1990s scandal involving the trustees of the Bishop Estate, now known as Kamehameha Schools, which ended with the removal of all five trustees. The book’s availability in open access format was announced back in October 2017. It’s the kind of book that offers a way to learn not only about that political scandal, but about Hawaii’s political culture more generally.

From the University of Hawaii Press announcement:

As part of our ongoing open-access initiatives, University of Hawai‘i Press has released one of our best-selling titles in this free, online format. With the encouragement of the book’s coauthor, recently retired UH M?noa law professor Randall Roth, and with the support of Kamehameha Schools, the open access (OA) edition of Broken Trust: Greed, Mismanagement & Political Manipulation at America’s Largest Charitable Trust is now freely available to download or read on multiple platforms, including ScholarSpace, University of Hawai‘i’s open-access, digital institutional repository; Amazon Kindle; Apple iBooks; and Google Books.  The files can be downloaded and/or viewed at these links:

ScholarSpace:
https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/48548

Amazon Kindle:
http://a.co/0tFjGaH

Apple iBooks:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/broken-trust/id1289450562?mt=11

Google Books:
https://books.google.com/books?id=z6Y2DwAAQBAJ

The  OA edition has an added introduction with remarks by Professor Roth and the current Kamehameha Schools trustees, and includes Roth’s eulogy for coauthor Samuel P. King, the late federal judge who passed away in December 2010. In their statement, the Kamehameha Schools trustees share their support for the project as a way “to recognize and honor the dedication and courage of the people involved in our l?hui during that period of time and to acknowledge this significant period in our history.” They also emphasize the importance of making this resource “openly available to students, today and in the future, so that the lessons learned might continue to make us healthier as an organization and as a community.”

You can browse the list of UH Press open access books here.

Another book among the open access titles is my mother’s updated and expanded edition of Bernice Judd’s classic, “Voyages to Hawai?i Before 1860: A Record, Based on Historical Narratives in the Libraries of the Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society and The Hawaiian Historical Society, Extended to March 1860.”

Here are a few others I noted in a quick scan of the titles that might be of interest to those interested in Hawaii history and politics.

“The Fantastic Life of Walter Murray Gibson: Hawaii’s Minister of Everything”

Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii

Out of this Struggle: The Filipinos in Hawaii

Last Among Equals: Hawaiian Statehood and American Politics

Da Kine Talk: From Pidgin to Standard English in Hawaii