| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Completing the Union: Alaska, Hawai'i, and the Battle for Statehood. By John S. Whitehead. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004. xviii, 438 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-8263-3636-1. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0-8263-3637-X.)

This lengthy study is narrowly focused. It does not explore issues linked to U.S. acquisition and incorporation of Hawai'i or Alaska. John S. Whitehead's explorations are essentially restricted to the years 1941–1959. He does not analyze the completion of the Union in the context of issues linked to imperialism, colonialism, or decolonization—except in a very triumphant epilogue where the granting of statehood is seen as confirmation of the anticolonial promise of America. The narrative foundations of Whitehead's celebratory work are explicitly personal. The very first sentence and the very last sentence build on first-person references. He is at pains to emphasize that the book is based on interviews conducted over twenty years, beginning in 1981. This reliance on oral testimony has undoubtedly encouraged Whitehead to begin his study in the 1940s and to ignore issues beyond the reach of living memory. This convenient time frame limits the importance of the study—although the editor's foreword claims, surprisingly, that it places the work

in the grand tradition of H. H. Bancroft, who was able to interview many of the principal figures who were still alive when he wrote his massive history of the acquisition and evolution of the western states. (p. ix)

Oral sources do provide some new details on Alaska's fate in Congress but largely repeat a well-known history of Hawai'i.

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