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.
Academic Articles
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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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An Enemy You Can Depend On: Trump, Pershing’s Bullets, and the Folklore of The War On Terror
by paul.kramerForeign 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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Slate, February 3, 2017 This essay puts contemporary anti-immigrant politics in historical perspective by narrating clashes between rival ideas of the United States and its relationship to immigration: an asylum ideal which held that the United States, as a republic, must offer refuge to the oppressed of all nations, and…
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Amerasia Journal 42:3 (2016) This short historiographic essay, part of a roundtable on the history of Pacific empires, describes three broadly-defined approaches to Pacific history: critical empire histories focusing on the Pacific as a space of European, US and Japanese military, colonial and commercial projection and inter-imperial war; indigenist histories…
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This essay summarizes the methodological approach and themes of The Blood of Government. Beginning with a critique of conventional, “export” models of transnational cultural history, it provides a definition of “transnational” history and employs this technique to illuminate Philippine-American colonial encounters of the early 20th century through changing racial discourses constructed…
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Imperial Openings: Civilization, Exemption, and the Geopolitics of Mobility in the History of Chinese Exclusion, 1868-1910
by paul.kramerThe Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2015) This essay argues for an imperial lens onto migration history by focusing on “civilized” exemptions to anti-Chinese barriers in the late 19th and early 20th century. U. S. exporters, missionaries and diplomats opposed totalized Chinese exclusion and lobbied successfully for…
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Colonial Crossings: Prostitution, Disease and the Boundaries of Empire during the Philippine-American War
by paul.kramerIn Emily Rosenberg and Shanon Fitzpatrick, eds., Body and Nation: The Global Realm of U. S. Body Politics in the 20th Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014) The essay explores the U. S. military’s regulation of prostitution during the Philippine-American War, and a resulting scandal, as a lens onto the…
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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…