Historic recurrence

Mark Twain: "a favorite theory of mine—to wit, that no occurrence is sole and solitary, but is merely a repetition of a thing which has happened before, and perhaps often."

Polybius

Historic recurrence is the repetition of similar events in history. The concept of historic recurrence has variously been applied to the overall history of the world (e.g., to the rises and falls of empires), to repetitive patterns in the history of a given polity, and to any two specific events which bear a striking similarity.

Hypothetically, in the extreme, the concept of historic recurrence assumes the form of the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, which has been written about in various forms since antiquity and was described in the 19th century by Heinrich Heine and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nevertheless, while it is often remarked that "History repeats itself," in cycles of less than cosmological duration this cannot be strictly true. That was appreciated by Mark Twain, who has been quoted as saying that "History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme."

In this interpretation of recurrence, as opposed perhaps to the Nietzschean interpretation, there is no metaphysics. Recurrences take place due to ascertainable circumstances and chains of causality. An example of the mechanism is the ubiquitous phenomenon of multiple independent discovery in science and technology, which has been described by Robert K. Merton and Harriet Zuckerman.

G.W. Trompf, in his book The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, traces historically recurring patterns of political thought and behavior in the west since antiquity. If history has lessons to impart, they are to be found par excellence in such recurring patterns.

Historic recurrences can sometimes induce a sense of "convergence," "resonance" or déjà vu. Three such examples appear under "Striking similarity."

Authors

Prior to Polybius' theory of historic recurrence, ancient western thinkers who had thought about recurrence had largely been concerned with cosmological rather than historic recurrence.

Western philosophers and historians who have discussed various concepts of historic recurrence include Polybius (ca. 200–118 BCE), Dionysius of Halicarnassus (ca. 60–7 BCE), Saint Luke, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975).

An eastern concept that bears a kinship to western concepts of historic recurrence is the Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven, by which an unjust ruler will lose the support of Heaven and be overthrown.

Lessons

Poseidonius

Cicero

Machiavelli

Giambattista Vico

Santayana

Niall Ferguson

G.W. Trompf notes that most western concepts of historic recurrence imply that "the past teaches lessons for... future action" — that "the same... sorts of events which have happened before... will recur..."

One such recurring theme was early offered by Poseidonius (ca. 135–51 BCE), who argued that dissipation of the old Roman virtues had followed the removal of the Carthaginian challenge to Rome's supremacy in the Mediterranean world. The theme that civilizations flourish or fail according to their responses to the human and environmental challenges that they face, would be picked up two thousand years later by Toynbee.

Dionysius, while praising Rome at the expense of her predecessors — Assyria, Media, Persia, and Macedonia — anticipated Rome's eventual decay. He thus implied the idea of recurring decay in the history of world empires — an idea that was to be developed by Diodorus Siculus (1st century BCE) and Pompeius Trogus (1st century BCE).

By the late 5th century, Zosimus could see the writing on the Roman wall, and asserted that empires fell due to internal disunity. He gave examples from the histories of Greece and Macedonia. In the case of each empire, growth had resulted from consolidation against an external enemy; Rome herself, in response to Hannibal's threat posed at Cannae, had risen to great-power status within a mere five decades. With Rome's world dominion, however, aristocracy had been supplanted by a monarchy, which in turn tended to decay into tyranny; after Augustus Caesar, good rulers had alternated with tyrannical ones. The Roman Empire, in its western and eastern sectors, had become a contending ground between contestants for power, while outside powers acquired an advantage. In Rome's decay, Zosimus saw history repeating itself in its general movements.

The ancients developed an enduring metaphor for a polity's evolution: they drew an analogy between an individual human's life cycle, and developments undergone by a body politic. This metaphor was offered, in varying iterations, by Cicero (106–43 BCE), Seneca (ca. 1 BCE – 65 CE), Florus (who lived in the times of Emperors Trajan and Hadrian), and Ammianus Marcellinus (between 325 and 330 – after 391 CE). This social-organism metaphor would recur centuries later in the works of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903).

Niccolò Machiavelli, about to analyze the vicissitudes of Florentine and Italian politics between 1434 and 1494, described recurrent oscillations between "order" and "disorder" within states:

when states have arrived at their greatest perfection, they soon begin to decline. In the same manner, having been reduced by disorder and sunk to their utmost state of depression, unable to descend lower, they, of necessity, reascend, and thus from good they gradually decline to evil and from evil mount up to good.

Machiavelli accounts for this oscillation by arguing that virtù (valor and political effectiveness) produces peace, peace brings idleness (ozio), idleness disorder, and disorder rovina (ruin). In turn, from rovina springs order, from order virtù, and from this, glory and good fortune.

Machiavelli, as had the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, saw human nature as remarkably stable—steady enough for the formulation of rules of political behavior. Machiavelli wrote in his Discorsi:

Whoever considers the past and the present will readily observe that all cities and all peoples... ever have been animated by the same desires and the same passions; so that it is easy, by diligent study of the past, to foresee what is likely to happen in the future in any republic, and to apply those remedies that were used by the ancients, or not finding any that were employed by them, to devise new ones from the similarity of events.

A recurring theme in world history is the rise and fall of great powers and empires; even many, if not all, now medium-size or small countries have experienced expansionist periods in their histories. British historian Paul Kennedy, in his study of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, concludes that

The triumph of any one Great Power in this period, or the collapse of another, has usually been the consequence of lengthy fighting by its armed forces; but it has also been the consequence of the more or less efficient utilization of the state's productive economic resources in wartime, and, further in the background, of the way in which that state's economy had been rising or falling, relative to the other leading nations, in the decades preceding the actual conflict.

The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana observed that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Which raises the question whether those who can remember are not doomed, anyway, to be swept along by the majority who cannot.

Karl Marx, having in mind the respective coups d'état of Napoleon I (1799) and his nephew Napoleon III (1851), wrote acerbically in 1852: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

British historian Niall Ferguson, in Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011), warns that the rise and fall of civilizations "isn't one smooth, parabolic curve after another. Its shape is more like an exponentially steepening slope that quite suddenly drops off like a cliff.... [A] striking feature [of the history of past civilizations] is the speed with which most of them collapsed, regardless of the cause." Ferguson cites examples of such historic tipping points: the collapse of the Roman Empire within a few decades in the early 5th century; the fall of the Inca Empire within less than a decade in the early 16th century; the Ming Dynasty's fall in China over little more than a decade in the mid-17th century; the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991; the implosion of North African and Middle Eastern dictatorships in 2011. Similar catastrophic "tipping" processes occur in financial markets. "In the realm of power, as in the domain of the bond vigilantes, you're fine until you're not fine — and when you're not fine, you're suddenly in a terrifying death spiral."

Ferguson notes that in 1500 the average Chinese was richer than the average North American, but by the late 1970s the American was over 20 times richer than the Chinese. "By the early 20th century, just a dozen Western empires — including the United States — controlled 58 percent of the world's land surface and population, and a staggering 74 percent of the global economy."

According to Ferguson, the West first surged ahead of the rest of the world after about 1500 thanks to a series of institutional innovations: competition among fragmented Europe's multiple monarchies and republics, which were in turn internally divided into competing corporate entities; the Scientific Revolution, whose major 17th-century breakthroughs occurred in Western Europe; the rule of law and representative government; modern medicine; the consumer society; and the work ethic, and higher savings rates, permitting sustained capital accumulation.

Ferguson details the decline in the functioning of these institutions in the United States in recent decades and warns of the possibility of "imminent collapse." "Is there anything we can do to prevent such disasters? Social scientist Charles Murray calls for a 'civic great awakening' — a return to the original values of the American republic."

Striking similarity

One of the paradigms of recurrence thinking identified by G.W. Trompf involves "the isolation of any two specific events which bear a very striking similarity".

Such events need not be separated remotely in time. Indeed, historians of science and technology such as Robert K. Merton and Harriet Zuckerman have concluded that multiple independent identical discoveries, carried out simultaneously or very nearly so by more than one researcher or group of researchers, are much more the rule than the exception.

Similar patterns have also been found in the social sciences and humanities.

In the film world, there are many instances of two or more films with similar plots or themes having been released within a close period of time.

British novelist Martin Amis observes that recurring patterns of imperial ascendance-and-decline simultaneously are mirrored in, and inform, the novel:

Martin Amis

[In an empire] novels seem to follow the political power. In the 19th century, when England ruled the earth, the novels were huge and all-embracing and tried to express what the whole society was. [This British "hegemony" waned with World War II and ended in the postwar years.] The English novel at that point was about 225 pages long and about career setbacks or marriage setbacks. [The "great tradition" increasingly looked depleted.] Uncannily, that power passed to the United States after the war, and [Americans such as Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth and John Updike] started to write these huge novels.

[Amis draws a picture of Americans weighing the costs of "diminishing expectations" in the new millenium. The British had gradually accepted the decline and dissolution of their empire.] [T]he ideology [of] level-ism actually sweetened the pill of decline. It was saying, "You haven't got an empire anymore, but you shouldn't have had an empire in the first place. We don't like empires." It sort of soothed our brow. There's no great fury about decline in England. [Americans, Amis thinks, will react differently.] They're not going to be docile and stoic like we were. [The likely American reaction:] A fair amount of illusion.

Below are three examples of strikingly similar historic recurrence, drawn from general history.

Kings kill bishops, create saints

Conflict between church and state is an ancient theme, with examples found in civilizations as widely scattered in time and space as ancient Egypt (as with Akhenaten), medieval Europe and Japan.

Poland's King Bolesław the Generous kills Stanisław of Szczepanów

The story of England’s Thomas Becket, and of his martyrdom in 1170 at the behest of King Henry II, is familiar to the world. A pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral provided the ostensible occasion for Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Becket’s martyrdom was reprised in T.S. Eliot’s verse drama, Murder in the Cathedral. In 1964 Jean Anouilh’s play, Becket, was adapted as a film starring Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole.

Less familiar to the world is the story of Poland’s Saint Stanisław Szczepanowski and of his martyrdom nine decades earlier, in 1079, personally by King Bolesław the Generous.

In 1071, Stanisław of Szczepanów became one of the earliest native Polish bishops of the Roman Catholic Church, as Bishop of Kraków, and an advisor to Bolesław, Duke of Poland. Bishop Stanisław's achievements included re-establishing a metropolitan see at Gniezno. This was a precondition for Duke Bolesław's coronation as King of Poland, which took place in 1076 — the first Polish coronation held at Kraków, the country's capital from 1038.

Over the next three years, relations between Bishop Stanisław and King Bolesław II the Bold soured over a dispute concerning Church property and over the Bishop's criticism of the King's conduct in office. Eventually the Bishop excommunicated the King. The King retaliated by accusing the Bishop of treason and in 1079 — when the King's henchmen dared not touch the Bishop — personally slew him as the Bishop celebrated mass.

Henchmen of England's King Henry II kill Thomas Becket

Bishop Stanisław's murder stirred outrage throughout Poland and led to the dethronement of King Bolesław II the Bold, who was forced to seek refuge in Hungary. In 1253, 174 years after Bishop Stanisław's martyrdom, he was canonized, becoming Poland's first native saint — St. Stanisław Szczepanowski.

Nine decades after the martyrdom of Saint Stanisław, in 1170, something similar happened in England:

Thomas Becket had carried out important missions to Rome for Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, who subsequently recommended him to England's King Henry II for the post of Lord Chancellor. Upon his appointment, Becket became a boon companion to the King and enforced the Danegeld taxes, creating resentment among affected English churchmen.

After Becket's patron, Archbishop Theobald, died in 1161, King Henry raised his friend Becket to the primacy on the assumption that Becket would support him in curtailing church power. But no sooner had Becket been installed as England's primate than he switched loyalties and became as zealous in protecting the privileges of the Church as he had previously been in enforcing King Henry's prerogatives.

King Henry sought to abolish certain of the clergy's privileges that exempted them from the jurisdiction of the civil courts, and to introduce some royal control over the decisions of ecclesiastic courts. Archbishop Becket withheld his agreement to this. After several years, the tensions between them culminated on December 29, 1170, in the Archbishop's murder by four of the King's knights at Canterbury Cathedral as Becket attended Vespers.

Henry II, unlike Poland's King Bolesław II the Bold, did not lose his throne over the Archbishop's murder. Becket came to be venerated as a martyr, and within three years had been canonized a saint. In 1174, during the Revolt of 1173–1174, King Henry humbled himself with public penance at Becket's tomb. In 1189 the King was defeated in battle by his own son, Richard the Lionheart, and died two days later.

Islands repel invaders, hurricanes defeat fleets

Two island monarchies, Japan and England, have often been characterized as insular, xenophobic, reserved and formal. Both these countries have been the first to industrialize, off the coasts of their respective continents. Both have experienced invasions, have been threatened by formidable empires, and have gone on to establish their own empires.

Mongol fleet, sent to invade Japan, is destroyed by typhoon.

In 1266, seven years after becoming Emperor of China, Kublai Khan, grandson of the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan, demanded that Japan submit to Mongol rule. Having met with rebuffs, in 1274 he sent out a fleet of 300 large vessels and perhaps 500 smaller ones, carrying 15,000 Mongol and Chinese, and 8,000 Korean, warriors. On November 19, 1274, they landed at Hakata Bay on the Japanese island of Kyūshū, and next day fought the Battle of Bun'ei, also known as the "Battle of Hakata Bay." The Mongols, though outnumbered, held out all day but that night were persuaded by a storm to retreat.

In the spring of 1281, Kublai Khan made a second attempt to conquer Japan. After a poorly-coordinated false start, in the summer the combined Korean and Chinese fleet captured Iki-shima and proceeded on to Kyūshū. In several skirmishes known as the Battle of Kōan, or the Second Battle of Hakata Bay, the Mongol forces were driven back to their ships. A massive typhoon—the famous kamikaze ("divine wind")—now assaulted Kyūshū for two days, destroying much of the Mongol fleet.

Three centuries later, storms again intervened to seal the fate of an attempt to subjugate an island monarchy at the opposite end of the Eurasian landmass:

Spanish Armada off the English coast, sailing to its destruction by a hurricane

Spain's King Philip II was intent on stopping English depredations against his treasure fleets from Mexico and Peru, and English assistance to Dutch rebels against Spanish rule in the Netherlands. The Pope, in Rome, gave his blessing to an undertaking that promised to restore Anglican England to the Catholic fold.

On May 28, 1588, a Spanish Armada of 130 ships set sail from Spanish-controlled Lisbon for the English Channel. The Armada's charge was to protect a fleet of barges that were to carry a 16,000-strong invasion force to England. At midnight of July 28, 1588, as the Armada lay at anchor off Calais, not far from the Spanish army at Dunkirk, the English set eight pitch-and gunpowder-filled ships alight and sent them downwind among the tightly-packed Spanish fleet. Many Spanish ships cut their cables in order to escape. The 55 lighter, more maneuverable English ships, armed with new longer-range artillery, could now engage the scattered Spanish ships individually.

Next day the English attacked. In the wake of the ensuing indecisive Battle of Gravelines, the Spanish, unaware that the English were short of ammunition, sailed north, pursued by the bluffing English fleet. The English followed the Armada well up the Scottish coast before disengaging for lack of ammunition.

The Spanish fleet sailed on around Scotland and Ireland into the North Atlantic. There it ran into a hurricane, which scattered the fleet and drove two dozen ships onto the Irish coast. Ultimately 67 ships—a mere half of the original Spanish Armada—survived to limp back to Spain.

The Spanish army never crossed the English Channel to invade England. Much as Kublai Khan might have, King Philip lamented: "I sent the Armada against men, not [the] winds and waves."

Gods return, civilizations fall

The peoples that inhabited areas of the world outside the three conjoined continents of Africa, Asia and Europe had not taken part in the peaceful and warlike exchanges of people, goods, technologies and ideas that had been going on for thousands of years in the "Old World." Hence these peoples, isolated from the tri-continental system, were particularly vulnerable to conquest and devastation by guns, germs and steel. There was, however, yet another factor that may have added to their vulnerability: their religious beliefs.

Hernán Cortés, taken by some Mexicans to be the god Quetzalcoatl

On February 18, 1519, against the orders of Cuba's governor, the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés set sail with 11 ships and 600 men for Mexico in search of gold and empire. In Yucatán he found two interpreters — one, the Doña Marina who has come down in Mexican history as La Malinche, and who was to play a crucial role in Cortés' career.

On Good Friday, 1519, the expedition put in at a harbor where Cortés founded, as a base of operations, a town appropriately named La Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz ("The Rich City of the True Cross"—now Veracruz). Soon ambassadors arrived from Tenochtitlán, the capital of Aztec Emperor Moctezuma II, who hoped to keep Cortés at bay with gifts of gold. Cortés subsequently claimed to have learned at this time that he was suspected of being the feathered-serpent god Quetzalcoatl or an emissary of that legendary god-king, who was predicted to return one day to reclaim his city in a One-Reed year of the Mexica calendar—which was, in that particular 52-year period, the current year, 1519.

To ensure the loyalty of his expedition's members, Cortés scuttled all but one of his ships, then in August led his band inland toward Tenochtitlán, then one of the greatest cities on earth. Having learned that many of the peoples who had been subjugated by the Aztecs hated their overlords, Cortés hoped to recruit them to his cause.

Ultimately, aided by his polyglot political adviser La Malinche, by the Aztecs' vassal tribes which Cortés terrorized into lending him military support, by his European firearms and other steel weapons, by his horses and war dogs, by smallpox previously unknown to the Western Hemisphere, and by his own ruthless perfidy, Cortés conquered Mexico. For Moctezuma had hesitated until too late to act decisively against the pale-skinned, bearded supposed god Quetzalcoatl, had been taken hostage by Cortés, and had been killed by his own people as but one of the early victims of his country's conquest.

Two and a half centuries later, a similar story would begin to play itself out in Polynesia:

Captain Cook, taken by some Hawaiians to be the god Lono

In Hawaiian mythology, the fertility god Lono had descended to Earth on a rainbow to marry the fertility goddess Laka. Lono was also the god of peace, and it was in his honor that the annual four-month Makahiki festival was held, during which war was kapu (taboo). Lono eventually left Hawaii, promising to return on a floating island.

The first European to visit the Hawaiian Islands, Captain James Cook, during his third great voyage of exploration, landed in 1778 at Kauai. Departing the Hawaiian Islands, which he named the "Sandwich Islands," Cook proceeded to explore the coast of North America from California to the Bering Strait.

In 1779 Cook returned to the Hawaiian Islands. He arrived at the "Big Island" of Hawaii during the annual Makahiki peace festival. His ship, HMS Resolution — more particularly, its mast formation, sails and rigging — put some Hawaiians in mind of their god Lono returning on a floating island. Moreover, Cook's route around the island before making landfall paralleled that of the processions that took place around the island during the Lono festival. Consequently some Hawaiians took Captain Cook for the returning god Lono, and he and his men were fêted accordingly.

After a couple weeks' sojourn, Cook set sail to resume his exploration of the Northern Pacific. However, shortly after the departure from Hawaii Island, the Resolution's foremast broke and Cook's two ships, Resolution and Discovery, returned to Kealakekua Bay for repairs in what was now the "war" season.

Even before his first landfall in the Hawaiian archipelago, the heretofore humane Cook had begun to show irritability and at times even irrationality, perhaps due to an intestinal parasitic infestation or a dietary vitamin deficiency. The changes in Cook's behavior contributed to his undoing when quarrels broke out between the Europeans and Hawaiians. On February 14, some Hawaiians made off with one of his small boats. Cook responded in an irrationally vindictive manner against a crowd of Hawaiians gathered on the beach, and in the ensuing skirmish was clubbed and stabbed to death.

Cook's "discovery" of the Hawaiian Islands led before long to their colonization, first by men of the cloth who "came to do good," then by their brethren who came to do well. The guns and steel, and above all germs, that they brought displaced and devastated the natives, eventually bringing about the destruction of their sociopolitical system and the near-wiping-out of the Hawaiian people.

Quotations

• “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” — André Gide

See also

• Cliodynamics
• Eternal return
• Fractal
• Multiple discovery
• List of multiple discoveries
• Repetition, a related concept by Søren Kierkegaard

References

• G.W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, from Antiquity to the Reformation, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1979, ISBN 0-520-03479-1.
• Arnold J. Toynbee, "Does History Repeat Itself?" Civilization on Trial, New York, Oxford University Press, 1948.
• Pitirim Aleksandrovich Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics: a Study of Change in Major Systems of Art, Truth, Ethics, Law, and Social Relationships, Boston, Porter Sargent Publishing, 1957, reprinted 1985 by Transaction Publishers.
• Gordon Graham, "Recurrence," The Shape of the Past, Oxford University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-19-289255-X.
• Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, Random House, 1987, ISBN 0-394-54674-1.
• Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest, Penguin Press, 2011.
• Niall Ferguson, "America's 'Oh Sh*t!' Moment," Newsweek, November 7 & 14, 2011, pp. 36–39.
• Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, University of Chicago Press, 1973.
• Harriet Zuckerman, Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States, Free Press, 1979.
• David Lamb and S.M. Easton, Multiple Discovery: The Pattern of Scientific Progress, Amersham, Avebury Press, 1984.
• Sam Tanenhaus, "The Electroshock Novelist: The Alluring Bad Boy of Literary England Has Always Been Fascinated by Britain's Dustbin Empire. Now Martin Amis Takes On American Excess," Newsweek, July 2 & 9, 2012, pp. 50–53.
• David Christian (historian), Maps of Time: an Introduction to Big History, University of California Press, 2005.
• Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies, new ed., W.W. Norton, 2005.
• Marshall G.S. Hodgson, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• Fred Spier, The Structure of Big History: from the Big Bang until Today, Amsterdam University Press, 1996.
• Andrey Korotayev, Arteny Malkov, Daria Khaltourina, Introduction to Social Macrodynamics: Secular Cycles and Millennial Trends., Moscow, 2006, ISBN 5-484-00559-0. See especially chapter 2.
• "Stanisław zwany ze Szczepanowa" ("Stanisław 'of Szczepanów'"), Encyklopedia Polski (Encyclopedia of Poland), Kraków, Wydawnictwo Ryszard Kluszczyński, 1996, pp. 636–37.
• "Becket, Saint Thomas à," Encyclopedia Americana, Danbury, Connecticut, Grolier Incorporated, 1986, vol. 3, pp. 425–26.
• David Knowles, Archbishop Thomas Becket, 1949.
• George Bailey Sansom, A History of Japan to 1334, Stanford University Press, 1958.
• Francis Russell Hart, Admirals of the Caribbean, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1922.
• Neil Hanson, The Confident Hope of a Miracle: The True History of the Spanish Armada, New York, Knopf, 2003, ISBN 1-4000-4294-1.
• Garrett Mattingly, The Armada, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1959.
• C. Martin and G. Parker, The Spanish Armada, 1988.
• Bernard Grunberg, "La folle aventure d'Hernán Cortés" ("Hernán Cortés' Mad Adventure"), L'Histoire (History), no. 322 (July–August 2007).
• William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, 1843.
• Vanessa Collingridge, Captain Cook: The Life, Death and Legacy of History's Greatest Explorer, Ebury Press, 2003, ISBN 0-09-188898-0.
• Ross Cordy, Exalted Sits the Chief: The Ancient History of Hawai'i Island, Mutual Publishing, 2000.
• Michael Dougherty, To Steal a Kingdom: Probing Hawaiian History, Waimanalo, Hawaii, Island Style Press, revised 4th printing, 1996.