Founded in 1907 as the College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, the University of Hawai'i at Manoa campus you are entering is the flagship of the University of Hawai'i system, and its history mirrors Hawaii's transformation from plantation economy to knowledge economy. The university was founded in 1907 as the College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, a land-grant institution designed to train the agricultural and technical workforce of a territory whose economy was built on sugar and pineapple. After the Second World War, the GI Bill brought a new wave of veterans — many of them Japanese Americans who had served in the celebrated 442nd Regimental Combat Team — to the university, expanding its character dramatically.
It was at UH Manoa that the Hawaiian language, which had declined so severely under the territorial period's English-only school policies that it faced extinction by the mid-twentieth century, began its remarkable revival. Language immersion programs developed here in the 1970s and 1980s inspired the establishment of Hawaiian language immersion schools — Pūnana Leo preschools and then Kula Kaiapuni public schools — that have brought the language back from the edge of oblivion. The East-West Center, established on the UH campus in 1960, brings together scholars from Asia, the Pacific, and the United States in an expression of Hawaii's role as a bridge between civilizations.