|
Any short list of my favorite diplomatic historians has to include Emily Rosenberg. Rosenberg is a pioneering scholar in multiple dimensions, including her Spreading the American Dream (Hill & Wang, 1982), one of the important early depictions of “Americanization” (more on that later); in her work on gender and diplomacy, helping to center gender even in-–especially in--the mighty halls of international power; and, most germane to one of our current conversations, her scholarship on the privatization of American power. 
0 Comments
My current book project on American empire lacks a title (suggestions welcome!) But it has a number of sources of inspiration which I’ll be featuring here in the coming months. One significant muse has been the work of William Appleman Williams, and in particular, Williams’s final, quirky book, Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America’s Present Predicament Along with a Few Thoughts About an Alternative.   As a historian of modern America, I am naturally certain that Americans do not know nearly enough about key developments that shaped the world in which they live, notably the civil rights movement, the New Deal, and the Cold War among them. As a historian generally, I wish more Americans knew even a little quality history about the Founding period, about race in America, and certainly women’s history. However, if I was forced to choose one period or topic exhibiting the greatest disparity between what we should know and what we actually do (or don't) know, I would have to choose Reconstruction, the period directly after the Civil War ended in 1865 and which lasted, by all accounts, only until 1877. Ignorance about Reconstruction has been poisonous to American civic life.
In 1893, at the famed World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a young historian from the University of Wisconsin offered what might still be the most influential history lecture ever given in America. Titled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner laid out a compelling political and cultural anthropology of the frontier in American life and a lament for its apparent passing. Basing his analysis in the 1890 census, Turner argued that the frontier was now, for all intents and purposes, filled up. Sparse population in some regions there may be, but the tide of settlement had nevertheless run the continent, and all was being brought under the control of barbed wire and the telegraph. No more wilderness was left to be claimed and tamed. For Turner, this fact carried enormous implications for American society. An era had passed, and the capacity of the frontier to generate what was unique about the Americans had passed with it. What became known as Turner’s “frontier thesis” enthralled a generation of leading American opinion makers, such as Theodore Roosevelt, who feared for the sake of the country’s future, and, in particular, for the fate of American manhood.  |
AuthorI am an editor and historian of US history, diplomacy, and international relations. Archives
June 2025
Categories
All
Why empire?This blog presents new scholarship on American empire, places the American experience in a broader and global imperial context, explores imperial habits throughout American society and culture, uncovers the imperial connections between the foreign and the domestic, and develops “empire” as a critical perspective.
At least two features in the American experience are clarified through the lens of American empire: First, we better understand persistent social inequities in a nation professing a fundamental commitment to equality. Second, even a cursory glance at American history makes plain the chronic violence at the center of US foreign policy, which frequently mounts or supports bloody military conflict abroad. Empire helps us recognize how and why the United States seems to be constantly at war--including often with itself--with all the foreign and domestic consequences thereof. |
RSS Feed