This is a fuller, more detailed version of the above essay, on the history of the U. S. naval base at Guantánamo.
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The New Yorker (July 2013) This essay tells the story of the U. S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, emphasizing the ways that controversies over its uses and legal status have long and troubling histories. US access to the bay emerged from coercive diplomacy between the U. S. and…
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Andrew Zimmerman’s Alabama in Africa is a truly remarkable achievement, one of the most powerful and illuminating works to emerge so far in the effort to recast historical thinking beyond national scales. At its core, it is an inter‐imperial history of German colonialists attempt to transplant New South cotton varietals…
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In Douglas Northrup, ed., A Companion to World History (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) This article discusses the possibilities and limitations of region as a subject and frame for the writing of global histories. It explores competing definitions of the term “region” and, embarking from constructivist premises that cast regions…
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Slate (April 2012) This essay discusses present-day anti-immigration laws through California’s 19th-century struggle with the federal government over immigration. When, in August 1874, 22 Chinese women were barred from landing at San Francisco by a California official who identified them as “lewd and debauched”—undesirable immigrants under state law—they took the…
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An English-language version of “Historias Transimperiales.”
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In Bevan Sewell and Scott Lucas, eds, Challenging US Foreign Policy: America and the World in the Long Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011) This essay looks at American civil service reformers’ debates over the administration of U. S. colonies after 1898 and their understandings of colonialism’s impact on metropolitan…
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In Filipinas, Un País Entre Dos Imperios, María Dolores Elizalde y Josep M. Delgado, eds., (Barcelona: Bellaterra Edicions, 2011) This essay argues for the necessity of examining U. S. colonialism in the Philippines in the early 20th century as a self-conscious successor to Spanish colonial rule. While Americans consistently depicted…