Lecture at the Society of U. S. Intellectual Historians, Chicago, November 10, 2018. This 12-minute talk to historians explores distinct elements of Trump’s racist politics, focusing on its stress on national borders and boundaries, its imperial globalism, and its enthusiasm for militarization and violence.
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This essay discusses ongoing challenges in the historiography of U. S. colonialism, through a critique of Daniel Immerwahr’s 2016 article in Diplomatic History, “The Greater United States.” It discusses the ways Immerwahr’s article draws upon a number of widespread problems in this field: a terminological conflation of U. S. colonialism…
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This piece puts the US Supreme Court’s upholding of the travel ban in an historical context. Supporters argued that the ban was about national security rather than racism; opponents that it was about racism rather than national security. But both sides separated logics that haven’t been separable: ideas of national…
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C-SPAN June 22, 2018 A panel of historians discussed U.S. immigration policies and migration patterns to America dating back to the late 19th century. The topics covered in a session titled “The Geopolitics of Migration” include Chinese and Mexican immigration, travel restrictions in the civil rights era, and the criteria…
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This panel discussion featuring Profs. Paul Kramer, David Weintraub and William Snyder at Vanderbilt University explores how and why university-based scholars present their work to broader publics.
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This narrative essay recounts struggles over the Statue of Liberty’s symbolic relationship to immigration on the hundredth anniversary of its dedication, in 1986. The Reagan administration, which was actively excluding and deporting immigrants from Central America and the Caribbean, used the occasion to assert American exceptionalism and to celebrate the…
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This tribute to the late Marilyn B. Young, an historian of US militarization, war and empire, gathers together key themes and insights from her work and provides brief summaries and illustrative quotations from some of her essays over the past two decades.
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This essay, adapted from an op-ed published in the New York Times, uses the occasion of Donald Trump’s racist disparagement of immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African nations to explore racism’s deeper roots in US immigration policy, and role in shaping in the dominant terms of the immigration debate. How…
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Foreign Affairs, September 11, 2017 This essay, adapted from an article published in Foreign Affairs, explores the origins of the legend used by Donald Trump to justify torture and war crimes against terrorists: that Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing had Muslim prisoners in the Philippines shot with bullets dipped in pigs’…
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This 20-minute lecture at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center deals with ways historians might approach the question of public engagement: the relationship between a “public” presence and university teaching; ways to approach the question of which issues to address; and differences between a university and extra-university mode of address…