American Realities with Bill Youngs
  • Home Page
  • About Me
    • Brief Résumé
    • Illustrative Films
  • Summary
  • Workshop
    • Jobs for Historians
    • Maps
    • Slideshows
  • Images
    • A Walk Through Turnbull
  • Fireside Talks
    • American History >
      • Indigenous Alaska: The Baidarka
    • National Parks
  • Spoken Word
  • Books
    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
      • Grief
      • Public Service
      • First Lady
      • The Democratic Crusade
      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
      • A Note on Wikipedia as a Source
      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

BINGHAM II, HIRAM 

Picture
(16 August 1831, Honolulu, HI-25 October 1908, Baltimore, MD). Education: B.A., Yale College, 1853; studied at Andover Seminary, 1855-56. Career: Principal, Northampton High School, 1853-54; private tutor, Europe, 1854-55; missionary and translator, Gilbert Islands and Hawaii, 1856-1908, with intermittent visits to the United States. 

The son of a great linguist and missionary, Hiram Bingham carried on the Polynesian work of his father in the Gilbert Islands. Bingham was born at a mission station in Hawaii in 1831 and received his early education at a mission school in Honolulu. After attending college and seminary in New England, he embarked on the brig Morning Star in 1856 to begin his missionary career. His father, Hiram Bingham* , had been married just twelve days after his ordination. The younger Bingham married only nine days after ordination, and like his father, set sail less than two weeks later. The church, the family, and the mission could easily have been seen as a seamless web by these later-day pilgrims. 

Bingham spent seven years in the Gilbert Islands, struggling against disease, hunger, and hostile merchants. During that time he made few converts, about fifty in all, but learned the language and began translating the Bible into Gilbertese. Due to ill health, he was forced to return to Honolulu in 1864. Except for occasional visits to the United States and another short stay in the Gilberts (1873-75), Bingham spent the remainder of his life in Hawaii. There he devoted himself to an epic task, the translation of the entire Bible into Gilbertese. With the help of a Gilbert Islander, Moses Kaure, who had followed him to Hawaii, he completed the Bible in 1890. Bingham also wrote a Gilbertese hymn book, commentaries on the gospels, and a Gilbertese-English dictionary. His wife published a book of Bible stories in Gilbertese. 

As missionaries and linguists the Binghams, father and son, and their wives, carried on a tradition that can be traced deep into the Congregational past, when John Eliot walked a few miles from his home parish of Roxbury, Massachusetts, to preach to the Indians. 

Bibliography 
A: Te boki n anene [Gilbertese hymnal] (Honolulu, 1863); Te boki n reirei [Gilbertese language primer] (Honolulu, 1865); Gilbert Islands Bible Dictionary (Honolulu, 1895); Gilbertese-English Dictionary (Boston, 1908). 
B: DAB 2, 276-77.