August 2020

How governments use “remote control” policies to prevent asylum seekers coming anywhere close to refuge.

How did the US immigration debate get to be so divisive? In this informative talk, historian and writer Paul A. Kramer shows how an “insider vs. outsider” framing has come to dominate the way people in the US talk about immigration — and suggests a set of new questions that could reshape the conversation around whose life, rights and thriving matters.

This historiographic essay explores recent innovations in the rescaling of U. S. historical writing and makes the case for the imperial as an analytic category necessary to this effort. Thinking with the imperial, it argues, foregrounds asymmetries of power and connections between societies, while facilitating non-exceptionalist comparisons. The essay’s themes include exceptionalism, methodological nationalism, structure and agency, and the oscillating presence of the imperial in U. S. historiography.

In 1899 the United States, having announced its arrival as a world power during the Spanish-Cuban-American War, inaugurated a brutal war of imperial conquest against the Philippine Republic. Over the next five decades, U.S. imperialists justified their colonial empire by crafting novel racial ideologies adapted to new realities of collaboration and anticolonial resistance. In this pathbreaking, transnational study, Paul A. Kramer reveals how racial politics served U.S. empire, and how empire-building in turn transformed ideas of race and nation in both the United States and the Philippines.