American Historical Review (December 2002)
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This essay discusses the profound ways that Americans’ debates about U. S. colonialism after 1898 were shaped by their reflections on British colonialism. Colonialism’s critics contrasted the British Empire’s tyranny with what they saw as U. S. national-exceptionalist freedom; colonialism’s defenders adapted Anglo-Saxonist ideology to make a racial-exceptionalist case for the inevitability of U. S. colonial rule.
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With John Plotz, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History (Spring 2001) This article opens a special issue of the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History dedicated to selected papers given at the 2000 conference “Pairing Empires: Britain and the United States, 1857-1947.” It introduces the papers and discusses the conference’s goal of…
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This article, winner of SHAFR’s Bernath Article Prize, reexamines the racial politics of empire at the 1904 St. Louis Fair with an eye towards the tense intersection of metropolitan and colonial agendas. Where traditional accounts emphasize the coherence of world’s fair racial hierarchies, the Philippine Exhibition at the St. Louis Fair, to the contrary, saw clashes over the appropriate way to display the United States’ consolidating colonial regime and its subjects.
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This essay discusses the ways the Spanish-Cuban-American War and Philippine-American War were experienced at Princeton University. The wars prompted politics professor Woodrow Wilson to ponder the implications of colonialism for American institutions, served as a topic for inter-collegiate debate, and saw a former undergraduate from Cuba serve as a Spanish-language interpreter for the U. S. military in the Philippines.