Explore Our Image Collections

In summer of 1966, Joan Griffis was recruited by the National Association of Broadcasters to work as an on-air teacher in American Samoa. For the next two years, she worked in Pago Pago, American Samoa, teaching English as a second language, with her lessons being broadcast to high schools on all of the American Samoan islands. She then spent an additional two years at the Feleti Teacher Training school—later the American Samoan Community College—where she and a small staff worked closely with Samoan high school students, helping them prepare for college on the mainland, while also conducting teacher training classes. In 1970, she returned to the continental United States. Over the…

The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (UHM) has over 3,000 items published in North Korea from the 1940s. The North Korea collection consists of books and journals published in North Korea and covers a variety of subjects such as literature, politics, history, science, economics, art, etc. We started the North Korean Special Collection Project in 2019 to increase awareness and to place selected materials in secure, accessible locations for research purposes. We gathered the North Korean books and placed them in the closed shelves of Hamilton Library. In order to build a digital collection, we scanned the title page and table of contents, and created metadata including the creator, date,…

These photographs were donated by Delagnel Haigh Roop who was a professor of Burmese and Thai in the Indo-Pacific Languages and Literatures Department at UH-Manoa. He received his BA from Harvard University and his MA and PhD from Yale University. His dissertation is entitled A Grammar of the Lisu Language (1970). Read further about Professor Roop’s amazing life. https://obits.staradvertiser.com/2022/11/06/delagnel-haigh-roop-06112022Requesting original items: The image number online corresponds with the original photograph number. Permission to use the images of the site: No permission is needed if images will be used for non-commercial educational purposes, such as class lectures,…

Fifteen photos from an exhibition in celebration of Filipino-American History Month in October 2013 were donated in print and digital formats to the University of Hawaii at Manoa library by David Chan Leprozo, Jr.  The photographic works depict current lifestyles of the Ilocos and Cordillera Regions of the Philippines; areas where most of the Filipino immigrants to Hawai'i originated.The Ilocos Region (aka Ilocandia) is located at the northwestern tip of Luzon in a narrow plain squeezed between the barren Cordillera mountain ranges and the South China Sea. Inspired by the promise of a much better life, the Ilocanos immigrated to the United States in 1906. The first wave of Ilocano migration…

Images of "tourist travel" to and in Hawaii from 1956 and the early 1970s taken by Leslie Sheraton, described as "an avid photographer". The slides were in the possession of Leslie Sheraton until his death in 1978. His son, Don Sheraton then inherited the records until his death in 2003, when they passed into the custody of his widow, Kathy Ingraham, who donated the slides to the Hawaiian Collection at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2012.

Douglas Oliver (Feb. 10, 1913 - October 30, 2009) completed a B.A. at Harvard in 1934 and and a DPhil in Ethnology at the University of Vienna in 1935. Between 1936 and 1941, he was a research associate on the staff of Harvard's Peabody Museum of Ethnology and Archaeology. Between 1938 and 1939, Oliver conducted research on Bougainville, among the Siwai (a.k.a. Siuai) people. The majority of these images derive from that period, and were donated to the Pacific Collection following Dr. Oliver's death in 2009.Image Courtesy Wikimedia CommonsRelated Information:Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania, Winter 1990 "Douglas L. Oliver, 1913-2009"

Donald Angus' collection of botanical prints are housed at the Bishop Museum, Foster Gardens, the National Tropical Botanical Garden, and the University of Hawai'i at Manoa Hamilton Library. These exquisite illustrations were published in monographs and journals mainly in the 18th and 19th centuries. They reflect the enthusiasm of scientists, and the popularity of the exotic flora being introduced and cultivated in European botanical gardens. Many prints in the Angus collection are from Monandrian Plants of the Order Scitamineae by William Roscoe (1753-1831). Roscoe, a wealthy banker and amateur botanist, founded the Liverpool Botanic Garden in 1802. Many of the illustrations in his 1828…

The album contains the passport applications for 165 people who wished to return to their native country. Every person was required to submit a photograph, and details on where they were born and when, what work they did in Russia, year and name of ship on which they came to Hawaii, what work they did here, how many children, and their religion.

Scanned photographs from two overland trips in China (1987 and 1988). The first trip began with a 2-day ferry from Kobe, Japan to Shanghai, and ended in Hong Kong. The second trip began in Hong Kong and ended with a train ride from Beijing to Moscow (through Mongolia) on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Travel on both trips was by train, long-distance bus, and once (Kunming to Jinghong, Xishuangbanna) by hitchhiking.

The Joseph Singer Collection is comprised of a sampling of the artist's black and white photographs and prints documenting many of Hawaiʻi's sacred places and a sampling of his experimental prints. Some of the works are alternate views of images for his book with Jan Becket.Joseph M. Singer (1918-2010) was born in Pittsburgh and earned chemistry and chemical engineering degrees at the University of Pittsburgh. He made a career with the U.S. Bureau of Mines and moved to Hawaiʻi in the early 1980s when he retired. In his undergraduate days, he also studied drawing and photography, with some of his work shown in exhibitions. He rekindled his interest in art at the University of Hawaiʻi when…