The gorgeously restored 104-year-old Moana Hotel on Waikiki is today the Sheraton Moana Surfrider ( www.moana-surfrider.com , 808-922-3111). Almost next door stands the monumental Royal Hawaiian ( www.royal-hawaiian.com , 808-923-7311), also now a Sheraton.
To see where the last king and queen of Hawaii lived and signed over their land to the Americans, visit the Iolani Palace ( www.iolnipalace.org , 808-522-0822), in downtown Honolulu. Glimpse the lives of Hawaii’s long-gone plantation workers through the meticulous recreation of colonial-era life at Plantation Village, in Waipahu ( www.hawaiiplantationvillage.org , 808-677-0110); a few miles and a world away, arrange a tour (Wednesdays through Saturdays, by reservation only) of the estate of the tobacco heiress Doris Duke and the museum of Islamic art it contains ( www.honoluluacademy.org/shangri , 866-385-5849).
You can get a sense of Schofield Barracks as James Jones and thousands of other GI’s knew it at the Tropic Lightning Military Museum ( www.25idl.army.mil/tropic%20lightning%20museum , 808-655-0438) and get an even more visceral sense of what put a sudden and permanent end to that world at the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor ( www.nps.gov/usar , 808-422-0561).