A FUTURE WISH: Hawai‘i at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition

Only four months after helping to lead the U.S. military–backed overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, Lorrin A. Thurston was in Chicago at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Thurston, a third-generation settler descended from some of the first American missionaries to Hawai‘i, was at the world’s fair helping to manage his “Cyclorama of Kilauea”—a five-story-high and four-hundred-foot-wide landscape painting of Kīlauea crater designed to encircle the viewer and give the impression of standing in the actual volcano. Using the cyclorama as an “imperial advertisement” for annexation, Thurston placed large American flags at the top of it.¹ Thurston hoped that