ʻIolani Palace

ʻIolani Palace is the only royal palace in the United States — built by King Kalākaua in 1882, wired for electricity before the White House was, and eleven years later the seat of a monarchy that was overthrown by a coup backed by the U.S. military. It is the most contested building in the Pacific: a palace that became a capitol, a throne room that became a courtroom, and a bedroom that became a prison.

Kalākaua died in 1891 and his sister Liliʻuokalani took the throne determined to restore the power the Bayonet Constitution of 1887 had stripped from the monarchy and from Native Hawaiians. The response was the Committee of Safety — American and European businessmen backed by U.S. Marines — who overthrew the Kingdom in January 1893. In 1895, after a failed royalist counter-revolution, the Queen was arrested, tried by a military tribunal in her own throne room, fined five thousand dollars, and sentenced to five years at hard labor. The sentence was commuted to eight months of imprisonment in an upstairs bedroom of her own palace — the only monarch in American history to be held prisoner in her own throne room's building.

The palace spent the next eighty years as the capitol of the governments that replaced her — the Republic, the Territory, the State of Hawaiʻi — before being restored to its 1880s appearance in the 1970s, its original furnishings hunted down and bought back piece by piece from the auction where the victors had sold them.