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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. 
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Historians of empire tend to stress political, social, and economic motivations, both at the metropole and in the periphery, as the mainsprings of empire. These are important considerations that will all receive treatment in due course. Rather newer to the historians' toolbox is the subject of ideology. Ideology seems to be a part of every empire, though its importance has undoubtedly intensified in the modern period as democratic mass society has emerged as an important authorizing context for imperial policy. Imperial ideology, of greater or lesser intensity, is characteristic of all empires and, while it may not constitute one of the purposes of empire as outlined by Professor Colás (expansion, hierarchy, order), it is nevertheless essential.
The Big Sleep is an outlier in the world of film noir. Like most good noir, there are Dark and Sinister goings-on, to include embezzlement, infidelity, gambling, and murder. It’s got it all, and then some: drugs and pornography also feature, somewhat rarer debaucheries than we’re accustomed to in the period. But there is also a lightness to the film, conveyed in part by Bogie’s irrepressible nonchalance. It is also, as has been frequently commented, a hash of a plot best consumed with giddy delight rather than forensic solemnity. We know the film is in effect two Raymond Chandler short stories cobbled together, filtered through a number of rewrites, including one at William Faulkner’s boozy hand. So The Big Sleep offers a pastiche-y, perpetual “What’s going on?” affect. It’s a beloved film, but a hard movie to take seriously, and in that sense a bit of a noir orphan. But I think there is something else going on as well, a critical gender confusion on which few have commented. Outlier in its genre it may have been, but it was rather more central to the broader culture of which it was a part.  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.  There is a strong economic argument to be made in favor of public investments. The utility public goods offer is almost invariably cheaper than private goods, they often provide employment, and they may well provide benefit for years to come--last I checked, the Brooklyn Bridge was still connecting the outer boroughs to Manhattan. But it is the rights dimension to public goods that I find most compelling. As I indicated in a previous post, what seems to be missing from current political debate is how public goods extend the compass of rights in democratic society. The individual’s right to the public good is what gives it its defining essence, as compared to a private good. It is also likely why the opponents of public goods do in fact oppose them, despite their economic efficiency. Every establishment of a public good is by definition, an extension of rights. If we want to extend, and not limit, the kinds of rights we have, and expand as well the enjoyment of those rights, public goods must be factored.  Recent reports that the incoming Trump administration is considering privatizing the US Postal Service (USPS)--a recurring aim for conservatives, it must be noted--prompts a reflection on what we call "public goods" in America. In my view public goods are essential to our national prosperity, to our quality of living, and to our basic rights, as I shall attempt to explain. Public goods also connect in important ways to the history of US empire. Yet our capacity to think about, consider, even discuss public goods has been severely attenuated in recent decades.  The Roberto Clemente bridge in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  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.
One of the aims of this blog is to trace how the ideas that shape American empire are reflected and amplified by American culture, even--and perhaps especially--in American popular culture. Expect to see frequent excursions into American pop culture: Coming are more than a few posts about Star Trek, for example, a venerable proponent of American empire. Today, let’s consider another revered piece of pop culture, one that has been around quite a while, but which has also gotten renewed attention in the early 21st century: Captain America’s shield.  My current book project, American Power in the Netherlands: Modernization and the Politics of Clientelism, 1945-1959, is under contract with Bloomsbury Academic and will be published in 2025. This book tells for the first time the story of American economic, political, and cultural influence within the post-WWII Netherlands. The book advances two intertwined stories: 1) The recovery of Dutch politics, international relations, and socio-economy after World War II, and 2) The role of American power in facilitating and advancing that Dutch modernization.
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
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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. |
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