In this conversation, held in Prof. Moses Ochonu’s graduate seminar on history-writing at Vanderbilt University, Prof. Paul Kramer discusses his essay “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World”: what prompted it, the existing literatures that enabled and inspired it, how he went about writing it, what he was trying to accomplish, and what he thinks is at stake in the use (and non-use) of empire as an analytic category in histories of the U. S. in the world.