While public debates over America's current foreign policy often treat American empire as a new phenomenon, this lively collection of essays offers a pointed reminder that visions of national and imperial greatness were a cornerstone of the new country when it was founded. In fact, notions of empire have long framed debates over western expansio...

While public debates over America's current foreign policy often treat American empire as a new phenomenon, this lively collection of essays offers a pointed reminder that visions of national and imperial greatness were a cornerstone of the new country when it was founded. In fact, notions of empire have long framed debates over western expansion, Indian removal, African slavery, Asian immigration, and global economic dominance, and they persist today despite the proliferation of anti-imperialist rhetoric. In fifteen essays, distinguished historians examine the central role of empire in American race relations, nationalism, and foreign policy from the founding of the United States to the twenty-first century. The essays trace the global expansion of American merchant capital, the rise of an evangelical Christian mission movement, the dispossession and historical erasure of indigenous peoples, the birth of new identities, and the continuous struggles over the place of darker-skinned peoples in a settler society that still fundamentally imagines itself as white. Full of transnational connections and cross-pollinations, of people appearing in unexpected places, the essays are also stories of people being put, quite literally, in their place by the bitter struggles over the boundaries of race and nation. Collectively, these essays demonstrate that the seemingly contradictory processes of boundary crossing and boundary making are and always have been intertwined. Contributors: James T. Campbell, Brown University Ruth Feldstein, Rutgers University-Newark Kevin K. Gaines, University of Michigan Matt Garcia, Brown University Matthew Pratt Guterl, Indiana University George Hutchinson, Indiana University Matthew Frye Jacobson, Yale University Prema Kurien, Syracuse University Robert G. Lee, Brown University Eric Love, University of Colorado, Boulder Melani McAlister, George Washington University Joanne Pope Melish, University of Kentucky Louise M. Newman, University of Florida Vernon J. Williams Jr., Indiana University Natasha Zaretsky, Southern Illinois University Carbondale

"... a lively and interesting book... " -- American Historical Review These writers reveal the power relations of gender, class, race, and sexuality at the heart of the imperialisms, colonialisms, and nationalisms that have shaped our modern world. Topics include the (mis)representations of Native women by European colonizers, the violent displacement of women through imperialisms and nationalisms, and the relations between and among feminism, nationalism, imperialism, and colonialism.

The essays in this collection show how histories written in the past, in different political times, dealt with, considered, or avoided and disavowed Britain’s imperial role and issues of difference. Ranging from enlightenment historians to the present, these essays consider both individual historians, including such key figures as E. A. Freeman, G. M. Trevelyan and Keith Hancock, and also broader themes such as the relationship between liberalism, race and historiography and how we might re-think British history in the light of trans-national, trans-imperial and cross-cultural analysis. "Britishness" and what "British" history is have become major cultural and political issues in our time. But as these essays demonstrate, there is no single national story: race, empire and difference have pulsed through the writing of British history. The contributors include some of the most distinguished historians writing today: C. A. Bayly, Antoinette Burton, Saul Dubow, Geoff Eley, Theodore Koditschek, Marilyn Lake, John M. MacKenzie, Karen O’Brien, Sonya O. Rose, Bill Schwarz, Kathleen Wilson.

In the late nineteenth century, in an age of ascendant racism and imperial expansion, there emerged in Cuba a movement that unified black, mulatto, and white men in an attack on Europe's oldest empire, with the goal of creating a nation explicitly defined as antiracist. This book tells the story of the thirty-year unfolding and undoing of that movement. Ada Ferrer examines the participation of black and mulatto Cubans in nationalist insurgency from 1868, when a slaveholder began the revolution by freeing his slaves, until the intervention of racially segregated American forces in 1898. In so doing, she uncovers the struggles over the boundaries of citizenship and nationality that their participation brought to the fore, and she shows that even as black participation helped sustain the movement ideologically and militarily, it simultaneously prompted accusations of race war and fed the forces of counterinsurgency. Carefully examining the tensions between racism and antiracism contained within Cuban nationalism, Ferrer paints a dynamic portrait of a movement built upon the coexistence of an ideology of racial fraternity and the persistence of presumptions of hierarchy.

Race for Empire offers a profound and challenging reinterpretation of nationalism, racism, and wartime mobilization during the Asia-Pacific war. In parallel case studies—of Japanese Americans mobilized to serve in the United States Army and of Koreans recruited or drafted into the Japanese military—T. Fujitani examines the U.S. and Japanese empires as they struggled to manage racialized populations while waging total war. Fujitani probes governmental policies and analyzes representations of these soldiers—on film, in literature, and in archival documents—to reveal how characteristics of racism, nationalism, capitalism, gender politics, and the family changed on both sides. He demonstrates that the United States and Japan became increasingly alike over the course of the war, perhaps most tellingly in their common attempts to disavow racism even as they reproduced it in new ways and forms.