Kūhiō, a celebrity during his lifetime, had spent decades working on behalf of the people of Hawaiʻi but today few people know how great a mark he made.

Kūhiō’s legacy includes lighthouses, breakwaters, roads and parks and helping get women the vote.

His dream of giving Hawaiians self-sufficiency through land ownership became law but implementation has stumbled for a century.

Sugar permanently transformed Hawaiʻi’s landscape, propelled immigration and laid the foundation for an early middle class.

Prince Kūhiō became a master at leading congressional delegations to Hawaiʻi, winning converts to the causes he championed for the islands

The insistence of a Hawaiian prince cemented the military in the islands decades before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

As kingdom and then a territory controlled by special interests, Hawaiʻi’s leaders had always had the power to control everything themselves, and to pick their own friends and allies as local administrators.

Prince Jonah Kūhiō Kalanianaʻole spent part of the early 1900s on African safari. Then he began tracking the most elusive quarry: Elected political office.

Raised in nobility and imprisoned after the overthrow of the monarchy, Jonah Kūhiō Kalanianaʻole had an outsized impact on modern Hawaiʻi.

President Roosevelt couldn’t even pronounce Jonah Kūhiō Kalanianaʻole’s name, but Kūhiō’s celebrity star power equipped him for the perilous halls of Congress.