A yearlong exhibit provocatively titled “1898, Imperial Visions and Revisions,” opened Friday at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., with Hawai‘i as a major subject. Given the National Gallery’s prominence, the exhibit may further illuminate for Americans how and why the United States took over the Hawaiian islands.

The invitation features William Cogswell’s portrait of Lili‘uokalani as queen of the nation-state of Hawai‘i. This monumental painting is on loan from ‘Iolani Palace in a transaction that, in the telling of a curator, “took a village” to effect.

The exhibit’s long and wide reach is laid out in 93 panels that hinge on the 1898 Spanish-American War and ranges from Cuba and Puerto Rico to Hawai‘i, Guam and the Philippines — widely disparate elements that cry out for integration.

Underlying the imperial scenario was a three-fold plan, elaborated most explicitly by Theodore Roosevelt, Naval Capt. Alfred Mahan, and U.S. Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, all portrait subjects: #1 — build a first-rate navy; #2 — secure the sea lanes to Latin America and Asia; and #3 — dig a canal across the isthmus of Central America to facilitate trade and provide a rapid passage from Atlantic to Pacific in the event of a two-ocean war.

Much of the exhibit’s front one-third reinforces the extant notion that the Spanish-American war was about Cuba when its more enduring legacy is Hawai‘i and the Pacific. Only on the 39th panel does the visitor come to an 11-panel section on Hawai‘i.

Lorrin Thurston, who promoted the overthrow of the monarchy, is here, along with his committee of 13 annexationists. Crucially, the mass opposition of Native Hawaiians to annexation is documented by a page blow-up from the Ku‘e (Protest) Petition. This is the mass petition displayed in its entirety with great impact throughout Hawai‘i in the 1998 centennial observance, overturning the colonizing myth that Hawaiians welcomed becoming part of the United States. The Queen Lili‘uokalani’s autobiography, “Hawai‘i’s Story,” is also on display, along with a Hawaiian flag quilt.

The rest of the Hawai‘i section is a lost educational opportunity. In a visually feeble cartoon, Uncle Sam looks down at Pearl Harbor and announces, “This Property Not For Sale.” It is a trivialization that fails to capture a central truth, namely that acquiring a sheltered, deep-draft harbor in the central Pacific drove U.S. policy for decades.

Maj. John Schofield (as in Schofield Barracks) scouted what the Hawaiians called Pu‘uloa in 1873. Pursuit of exclusive access was the real goal of U.S. participation in the Treaty of Reciprocity during the 1870s and 1880s. The network of American expansionists eagerly supported the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, which led to the 1898 annexation.

Today Cuba is a hazy memory, Puerto Rico is an unresolved territorial question mark, and the Philippines is long gone as a U.S. colony. One hundred and twenty-five years later, Pearl Harbor remains the headquarters for projecting American force throughout the Indo-Pacific command, what the White House calls “the world’s center of gravity,” with more than half of the world population and two-thirds of the world economy.

Despite my misgivings, I applaud the National Gallery and the curators — Kate Clarke Lemay and Taína Caragol by name — who have taken a certain risk to address the question of imperialism. In today’s polarized environment, when the history of Jim Crow and systemic racism are attacked as “woke,” a national exploration of imperialism may be a similar flashpoint. Accordingly, the Gallery deserves credit for taking on a difficult subject.

How this leap of history occurred, even the fact that it did occur, has been obscured by disbelief and misleading iconography. My hope is that “1898, Imperial Visions and Revisions” will help us to speak more honestly about Hawai‘i and these other places as well. The exhibit is to run through February 2024. An amplifying website is in the works for midsummer, as is a multiauthor catalog co-published by Princeton University Press. If this is the first you have heard of “1898,” it is possibly not the last.

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“1898: U.S. Imperial Visions and Revisions”

Now through Feb. 25, 2024

National Portrait Gallery: 8th and G streets, NW

Washington, D.C

Here is the Smithsonian Institution’s description of the exhibit:

On the 125th anniversary of the Spanish-American-Cuban-Philippine War, “1898: U.S. Imperial Visions and Revisions” is the first exhibition to examine this pivotal period through the lens of portraiture and visual culture. The year 1898 witnessed the United States become an empire with overseas territories, and by placing portraits of U.S. expansionists in dialogue with portraits of those who dissented.

This exhibition revisits this important period of history through multifaceted viewpoints. With more than 90 artworks from collections in Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Spain, and the United States, “1898: U.S. Imperial Visions and Revisions” illuminates the complications and consequences of the Spanish-American War (1898), the Congressional Joint Resolution to annex Hawai‘i (July 1898), and the Philippine-American War (1899–1913).

Tom Coffman is the author of “Nation Within, The American Occupation of Hawai‘i,”; his most recent works are “Inclusion” and “How Social Work Changed Hawai‘i.”