Hawaii—a U.S. territory since 1898—became the 50th state in August, 1959, following a referendum in Hawaii in which more than 93% of the voters approved the proposition that the territory should be admitted as a state.

The voters wished to participate directly in electing their own governor and to have a full voice in national debates and elections that affected their lives. The voters also felt that statehood was warranted because they had demonstrated their loyalty—no matter what their ethnic background—to the U.S. to the fullest extent during World War II.

In retrospect, perhaps, the genuinely interesting question about Hawaii’s becoming a state is why it took so long—60 years from the time that it became a U.S. possession. There were many Hawaiian petitions for statehood during the first half of the 20th century. These were denied or ignored. Some in the U.S. had been convinced, even at the time of Hawaii’s annexation, that Hawaii had no natural connection to the rest of the states. It was not contiguous territory, most obviously, but 2,000 miles from the coast.

Hawaii’s annexation in 1898 had much to do with the power of American plantation owners on the islands and the protection of their financial interests—both in gaining exemption from import taxes for the sugar they shipped to the U.S. and in protecting their holdings from possible confiscation or nationalization under a revived Hawaiian monarchy. There was considerable sentiment in the U.S. that annexation would be an unjust, imperialistic, and therefore un-American, move (Hawaii had more than sugar; it was a potential harbor and coaling station for naval vessels and was historically pressured in the 18th and 19th centuries for concessions by countries including Great Britain, Japan, and Russia).

Nevertheless, at the time of annexation the monarchy itself had only been in existence for a century, and originally consolidated power brutally, with the help of European sailors and firepower. Even by the end of the 19th century, a significant portion of the Caucasian residents of Hawaii had been born and raised there and considered themselves natives. Complicating the question was a large population of immigrant Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese, all of whom had been originally encouraged to come in order to supply agricultural labor to the islands.

Part of the decades-long reluctance to change Hawaii’s status from territory to state derived, both in Hawaii and on the mainland, from uncertainty and fear about granting electoral power to one ethnic group or another. This was not just Caucasian vs. ethnically Polynesian. Some ethnically Polynesian Hawaiians opposed the change from territory to state because, while they had come to feel comfortably “American,” they feared that the Japanese population on Hawaii (perhaps as high as 30%) would, under a universal franchise authorized by statehood, organize and vote itself into power to the disadvantage of the Hawaiians of Polynesian descent.

At the time of the vote, 90% of the population of Hawaii consisted of U.S. citizens. Hawaii’s importance in World War II had secured its identity as fully American in the minds of both Hawaiians and mainlanders. In addition, persistent and effective lobbying of Congressional representatives during this initial period of the modern Civil Rights Movement convinced enough members of Congress that this was the right moment to accept Hawaiian statehood, no matter what its racial makeup was.

Hawaiians themselves had been awaiting this for years, so much so that the “49th State” Record Label had been selling popular Hawaiian music since shortly after the War. As it turned out, Alaska entered as a state at the very beginning of 1959, making it the 49th, and when Hawaii came in several months later, it became the 50th state of the Union.

"Bleeding Kansas" describes a period of civil unrest in Kansas Territory between 1854 and 1856.

After the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which prohibited slavery in the former Louisiana Territory north of the 36° 30’ parallel (except for the state of Missouri), Congress tried to maintain a balance between slave and free states in the Union. "Free" states did not permit slavery to exist within their borders, but this was rarely because they felt a commitment to equality between different racial groups. Instead, citizens in many free states feared that if slavery were permitted in their region, they would be unable to compete against agriculturalists who would use slave laborers to work in their fields. Most people in free states were happy to see slavery continue in the areas where it already existed—even those men and women who worked for wages in the North often feared if slaves were freed they would compete against them for their jobs. By the 1850s, supporting the idea of a "free" state more often than not meant supporting the idea that any expansion of the United States should benefit working white people over all others. Most citizens of slave states, on the other hand, believed that slavery should be permitted everywhere, and thought it unfair that they should be prevented from expanding their interests in the West like everyone else.

In 1853, these issues came to a head when the U.S. Senate took up the question of organizing the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. Nebraska was too far north to support the crops most commonly grown in slave-holding states, but Kansas was not. It did, however, exist north of the 36° 30´ line enshrined in the Missouri Compromise, which should have meant the territory was free. Southerners wanted slavery to be permitted in Kansas very badly, and some Northerners, feeling the country was in danger of tearing itself apart along sectional lines, wanted to find a means to compromise over the issue. Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois negotiated a compromise whereby the citizens of Kansas would be able to choose for themselves if their territory should permit slavery to exist within its borders—a strategy called "popular sovereignty." This was affirmed in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which passed Congress in May 1854; the Missouri Compromise was thereby repealed.

The situation in Kansas rapidly became fraught with tension. Beyond the political commitments of those settlers who already lived in Kansas, there were people who lived outside the territory who sought to influence what happened within it. Slave-holding Missourians flooded into Kansas to cast illegal votes for a pro-slavery territorial legislature and Congressional representative. Northerners responded by traveling to the state—sometimes from as far away as Massachusetts—to help elect an anti-slavery legislature. President Pierce recognized the first, but not the second, and the stand-off between the two spilled over into armed conflict. After Congressional investigators declared, in 1856, that the 1854 elections were fraudulent—information on which the President refused to act—this conflict escalated, aided and abetted by Northerners and Southerners who sent money and arms to their allies. More than 55 people died as a result, and the period became known as "Bleeding Kansas."

While Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Daily Tribune, is popularly credited with inventing the term "Bleeding Kansas," the archives of his newspaper suggest differently. The Tribune's first reference to "Kansas, bleeding," came on June 16, 1856, in a report on the North American National Convention. There a Colonel Perry of Kansas reported that "Kansas, bleeding at every pore, would cast more votes indirectly for [the presidential candidate the convention settled upon] . . . than any other State in the Union.” (1) The Tribune's first mention of "bleeding Kansas" was in a poem by Charles S. Weyman, published in the newspaper on September 13, 1856:

Far in the West rolls the thunder—
The tumult of battle is raging
Where bleeding Kansas is waging
War against Slavery! (2)

The matter of whether Kansas would enter the Union as a free or slave state was not resolved until after the Civil War began. Despite the repeated attempts of Kansans to draft a state constitution amenable to all citizens of the territory, it was not until Southern states seceded from the Union and surrendered their seats in Congress that an anti-slavery constitution finally gained approval from the U.S. Senate.