Race Nation Empire In American History Easyread Edition

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

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...

At first glance, it may be difficult to accept that race and racism play a major role, whether conscious or subconscious, in policymaking. But leaders are products of their upbringing and era, and even some of America's best-educated presidents and secretaries of state have been slave owners, segregationists, or bigots. Some belong to America's distant past, but it was not so long ago that the civil rights movement began to correct America's troubled race relations. While race has rarely served as the primary motivating factor in America's foreign policies, Michael Krenn shows that it has functioned as both a powerful justification for U.S. actions abroad and a significant influence on their shape, direction, and intensity. Portraying nonwhite races as inferior allowed U.S. policymakers to rationalize territorial expansion at the expense of Native Americans and Mexico, to demonize the enemy in wars fought against Filipino insurgents and Japanese soldiers, and to justify intervention in developing nations. Racism made America's leaders soft on European colonialism, and U.S. racial segregation laws were an obstacle to winning hearts and minds in the developing world during the Cold War. Race plays a more subtle role in U.S. foreign relations today, but speeches about turning the war on terror into a crusade, the abuse of detainees in military prisons, and apathy toward genocide in Darfur can be explained, in part, by prejudice. The Color of Empire challenges readers to recognize that American perceptions and prejudices about race have influenced the conduct of U.S. foreign relations from the colonial era to the present. This concise survey is an excellent introduction to the topic for both students and general readers.

Education for Empire brings together topics in American history often treated separately: schools, race, immigration, and empire building. During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, American imperial ambitions abroad expanded as the country's public school system grew. How did this imperialism affect public education? School officials, teachers, and textbook authors used public education to place children, both native and foreign-born, on multiple uneven paths to citizenship. Using case studies from around the country, Clif Stratton deftly shows that public schooling and colonialism were intimately intertwined. This book reveals how students—from Asians in the U.S. West and Hawai‘i to blacks in the South, Mexicans in the Southwest, and Puerto Ricans in the Caribbean and New York City—grappled with the expectations of citizenship imposed by nationalist professionals at the helm of curriculum and policy. Students of American history, American studies, and the history of education will find Education for Empire an eminently valuable book.