author
Sheldon Dibble
1809–1845
A New York-born missionary and teacher in Hawaiʻi, he helped preserve Hawaiian traditions by encouraging students to record oral histories. His work became one of the earliest published histories of the islands in English.
1 Audiobook
Thoughts on Missions
by Sheldon Dibble
About the author
Born in New York in 1809, Sheldon Dibble studied at Hamilton College and Auburn Theological Seminary before joining the Protestant mission to Hawaiʻi. He arrived in the islands in the early 1830s and went on to teach at Lahainaluna Seminary on Maui, where he became known as an educator as well as a writer.
Dibble is remembered for urging his Hawaiian students to gather and write down traditional accounts that had long been passed on orally. That effort fed into some of the earliest written histories of Hawaiʻi, including his History of the Sandwich Islands, and helped preserve important cultural knowledge during a period of rapid change.
He died in 1845, still only in his mid-thirties, but his influence lasted well beyond his short life. Today he is often noted not just as a missionary author, but as an early figure in recording and sharing Hawaiian history.