American Empire

Provides a critical re-evaluation of US territorial expansionism and imperialism from 1783 to the present The United States has been described by many of its foreign and domestic critics as an “empire”. Providing a wide-ranging analysis of the United States as a territorial, imperial power from its foundation to the present day, this book explores the United States’ acquisition or long-term occupation of territories through a chronological perspective. It begins by exploring early continental expansion, such as the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803, and traces US imperialism through to the controversial ongoing presence of US forces at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The book provides fresh insights into the history of US territorial expansion and imperialism, bringing together more well-known instances (such as the purchase of Alaska) with those less-frequently discussed (such as the acquisition of the Guano Islands after 1856). The volume considers key historical debates, controversies and turning points, providing a historiographically-grounded re-evaluation of US expansion from 1783 to the present day. Key Features Provides case studies of different examples of US territorial expansion/imperialism, and adds much-needed context to ongoing debates over US imperialism for students of both History and Politics Analyses many of the better known instances of US imperialism (for example, Cuba and the Philippines), while also considering often-overlooked examples such as the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa and Guam Explores American imperialism from a “territorial acquisition/long-term occupation” viewpoint which differentiates it from many other books that instead focus on informal and economic imperialism Discusses the presence of the US in key places such as Guantanamo Bay, the Panama Canal Zone and the Arctic

I can speak five tongues--three Indian tongues, English and Spanish. I can read and write, and am a school teacher. Now I do not say this to boast, but simply to show you what can be done. --Sarah Winnemucca (qtd. in We have referred) Sarah Winnemucca, the nineteenth-century Northern Paiute translator, educator, author, and activist, lived within five languages. (1) To her, multilingualism was a source of power. (2) Nonetheless, throughout her life, the English language was brandished as a weapon by the US government and some reformers against American Indians. In response, she wielded English education and translation as twin tools of resistance, though her role as translator was perilous at times. Her Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) contains some of the most detailed representations of translation by an American Indian in the nineteenth century. Yet the book is only part of her legacy. Hundreds of newspaper articles by or about Winnemucca from her first public appearance in 1864 to her death in 1891 provide evidence regarding her use of the English language and representations of translation. They indicate how some non-Native members of the media responded to Winnemucca's English-language skills and represented her role as a translator, thereby allowing us to better assess Winnemucca's interaction with her audiences. This essay furthers critical appreciation of the complexity of Winnemucca's representational strategies in the context of those audiences, allowing us to identify her as participating in what Lawrence Venuti refers to as an alternative genealogy of resistant translators (Translator's 40). (3) Drawing on Venuti's terminology, Winnemucca's representations of translation can be understood as foreignizing and subversive, though her representations of subversive translation differ substantially from those described by Venuti, particularly regarding assertions of untranslatability. To resist colonialism, Winnemucca created foreignizing representations of translation while also insisting on communicability across languages. Analyzing Winnemucca's representational strategies regarding translation is important in its own right; (4) however, it also prompts a reconsideration of recent literary critical interest in globalization and transnationalism, because to understand better the complexity of Winnemucca's resistance and her unsettling effect on audiences, one needs to consider her representations within the late-nineteenth-century contexts of nationalisms, US colonialism, and US imperialism. Doing so partially redresses the lack of attention given to Native American literature by many scholars of transnationalism and US imperialism. Shari M. Huhndorf notes that even major innovators in the field focus on either transnationalism and imperialism outside of North America or US-Chicano frontier relations (Mapping 17). Similarly, Philip J. Deloria argues that critical attention to globalization often focuses on a particular version of 'the transnational' that overlooks US-Indian relations. He challenges us to consider the implications of dependent nations--literally internal trans-nations--within the boundaries of (and willing to transcend the boundaries of) the United States (From Nation 371). Considering representations of Winnemucca and translation within an imperial as well as colonial context is more than a corrective gesture; it allows us to better understand the connections among nationalisms (US and American Indian), colonialism (often understood as domestic or continental), and US imperialism (typically conceptualized as outside of North America). At first glance, there appears to be little relationship between Winnemucca and US imperial efforts beyond what would become the contiguous forty-eight United States. A Northern Paiute woman born circa 1844, Winnemucca experienced one of the fastest contact histories in North America (Knack and Stewart 45). …

This article reviews the idea of ‘American Empire’. For most of the Cold War, this term formed part of particular kind of Marxian critique of American power. Neither American nor European statesmen, nor the mainstream press, regarded America as an ‘empire’. Interestingly, the idea of an ‘American Empire’, stripped of its Marxian connotations, entered the mainstream towards the end of Cold War. This article asks two questions: what does it mean? Is it a useful expression or a dangerous distortion? It will be argued that, as a general statement of American political economy, ‘American Empire’ is meaningless: it neither lends itself to positive comparison with European empires nor describes any concrete aspect of the international relations of the US. However, it is possible to refer to American empires limited in time and space, for instance to formal empire in the Philippines or informal empire in Iran. ‘American Empire’ is thus a distortion; but is it dangerous? The idea certainly captured the neoconservative imagination, but it does not seem to have had real policy implications.

ABSTRACT: The late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw the beginnings of US empire abroad and simultaneously the crystallization of the US assimilation era at home. While off-reservation Native American boarding schools like the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879–1918) developed national recognition, the US began to acquire overseas territories in Cuba, Hawai'i, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. Students at schools like Carlisle produced white-edited, school-controlled periodicals like the Indian Helper , the Red Man and Helper , the Arrow , and the Carlisle Arrow . Reading Carlisle's periodicals, this essay traces the experiences of thirty-eight Carlisle students who enlisted in the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars and wrote about their experiences across the US's new empire. Although such periodicals have long been read as colonial documents, these newspapers, newsletters, and magazines nevertheless offer insights into Native students' writing and Native soldiers' voices at war, including their impressions of—and, sometimes, identification with—Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, and Native Hawaiians. Carlisle's administrators often used student-soldiers' reprinted letters to demonstrate successful assimilation which promised to transform Native peoples into patriotic US soldiers. These new "war correspondents" could then provide first-hand accounts of some of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars most famous battles. Although largely meant to legitimate assimilative education systems, reprinted letters by Native student-soldiers often detail their everyday lives at war, including interactions with other Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities overseas. This essay ultimately argues for more generous readings of Native voices in these otherwise heavily censored letters. Despite their framing in the periodicals as willing agents of US empire, these reprinted letters by Native students underscore how the US military was likewise a site of trans-Indigenous exchange that provided the material circumstances for connection and solidarity.

In this riveting account, Jane Fletcher Geniesse tells story of Horatio Spafford and his Norwegian-born wife Anna, who arrived in Jerusalem in 1881 as leaders of a small group of Chicagoans known as Overcomers. The group's ostensible goal was to witness second coming of Christ, though Spaffords themselves had another purpose. Horatio had squandered $100,000 of his own and others' money; he was fleeing from debt and law. In time, Anna Spafford presided over creation of a Jerusalem commune that became known as Colony, even though many of those who joined were Swedes. Disciplines Islamic World and Near East History | Near Eastern Languages and Societies | Religion Comments Heather J. Sharkey's review of American Priestess: The Extraordinary Story of Anna Spafford and American Colony in Jerusalem by Jane Fletcher Geniesse. This review is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/nelc_papers/4 734 MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL counts are, in parts, rather elliptic. The book's analytical ? as opposed to documentary ? value would also have been enhanced by a substantial engagement with existing writings on monarchical rule, no tably Michael Herb's All in Family, main poUtical science work on family politics and succession issues in MENA monarchies. A book of this scope will always con tain some mistakes. Yet, given its ambition as compendium, a bit editing and fact checking could have helped to make it undisputed standard reference of field. The Saudi section alone contains a number of inaccuracies: King Fahd took title of Custodian of Two Holy Mosques not in 1995 (p. 80), but in 1986. Saudi Prince Waleed does not have a 14% share of Citi corp (p. 267), but a 4.4% share. The Saudi state's comptroller-general in 1950s and 1960s was not Musaid bin Abdulaziz (p. 270) (who was a religious recluse), but Mu said bin Abdulrahman, an uncle of Kings Saud and Faysal, and probably most important princely technocrat before 1975. The ruling family in 1992 contained hun dreds of grandsons of founder king Ab dulaziz rather than more than 60 (p. 240). Page 247 contains contradictory information about King Khalid's maternal background. This being said, Kechichian has done a considerable service to Middle East studies by assembling by far most comprehen sive source book on Middle East monarchies to date. Shot through with new insights and nuggets of previously unavailable informa tion, book will be a resource that scholars will gratefully mine for many years to come. Dr. Steffen Hertog, Sciences Po, Paris American Priestess: The Extraordi nary Story of Anna Spafford and American Colony in Jerusalem, by Jane Fletcher Geniesse. New York: Nan A. Talese, 2008. xvii + 313 pages. Acknowl. to p. 316. Notes to p. 348. Bibl. to p. 364. Index to p. 378. Reviewed by Heather J. Sharkey In this riveting account, Jane Fletcher Geniesse tells story of Horatio Spaf ford and his Norwegian-born wife Anna, who arrived in Jerusalem in 1881 as leaders of a small group of Chicagoans known as Overcomers. The group's ostensible goal was to witness second coming of Christ, though Spaffords themselves had another purpose. Horatio had squandered $100,000 of his own and others' money; he was fleeing from debt and law. In time, Anna Spafford presided over creation of a Jerusalem commune that became known as Colony, even though many of those who joined were Swedes. Under Anna Spafford's autocracy, and following a period of hand-to-mouth living, Overcomers went into hotel busi ness and tourist trinket trade, and saw their enterprise flourish. The American Colony eventually won respect of many local Muslims, Christians, and Jews because its members did not proselytize and because they unstintingly helped destitute and sick. The American Colony also won appre ciation from rich tourists who stayed in their lodgings without realizing that Colony children who carried their luggage, made their meals, and did their laundry had been yanked out of school just to serve them. Outsiders seldom saw strange and seamy side of group's practices. Its members yielded to dictates from Anna Spafford, who claimed to receive messages from God. These messages ordered Colony members to practice first celibacy and later sharing of beds (swapping husbands and wives and placing young girls with older men), as a way of testing their ability to resist temptation. (Many failed test.) Spafford separated parents from offspring, discouraged children from getting too much education, forbade reading for pleasure, saw that misbehaving youngsters were stripped naked and whipped, and provided followers with meager meals. However, she exempted her own daughters, Bertha and Grace, from this regimen, and insured that they received French and piano tutoring (and good food) in addition to academic training. When Bertha reached maturity, Anna Spafford received a message relaxing ban on marriages. When Bertha went into childbirth, Spafford relaxed ban on seeking professional med MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL 735 ical help (since she had for years insisted on exclusive healing power of prayers). Periodically, a member of die American Colony would escape, bringing news of Spaffords' abuses to attention of Ameri cans consuls. One consul in particular, Reverend Selah Merrill, was so appalled that he sent regular reports to US State Department, which filed them away. Protes tant missionaries in Jerusalem also were ap palled, and shunned group. Perhaps mis sionaries had heard, for example, of Anna Spafford's belief that death, however caused (by heart attack, tuberculosis, or otherwise), was God's punishment for an individual's sin and that she herself, being blameless, would never die. But Anna did die, in 1923, leaving her followers stunned and adrift. The American Colony soon collapsed as a religious cult, and an acrimonious fight over Colony assets ensued. Anna's daughter Ber tha obtained control of American Colo ny Hotel, which flourishes even today, and devoted her spare energies to social service. Years later, King Husayn of Jordan awarded Bertha Jordanian Star in recognition of her work on behalf of Jerusalem's children, making her the only Christian woman ever to have received that honor (p. 309). Geniesse's occasional insertion of imag ined dialogue and of stereotyped summaries of Middle Eastern history (e.g., her dismiss al of Sudanese Mahdist movement as a revolt by Muslim fanatics [p. 124], and re duction ofthe 1860 civil war in Mount Leba non to a terrifying massacre of [p. 184]) weakens book. Nevertheless, Geniesse succeeds in bringing this story of American Colony alive, and result is a memorable account. Particularly fascinat ing is way she connects Spaffords to contemporaries like Dwight L. Moody, most popular American evangelical of 19th century; Eliezer ben Yehuda, who engineered modern revival of Hebrew; Charles Gordon, British general who later died in Khartoum; Djemal Pasha, Young Turk who presided over Ottoman army in Palestine during World War I; and Selma Lagerlof, Swedish writer, whose novel Jerusalem drew inspiration from American Colony and helped her to win Nobel prize for literature. After reaching Jerusalem in 1881, Spaffords and their fellow Overcomers had initially sympathized with Jewish return to Palestine, which they regarded as a pre requisite for Christ's second coming. Per haps most surprising turn in their his tory is that they did not become Christian Zionists, as term is now understood, and that they watched Jewish Zionists' state like organization with mounting unease. By time World War I ended, Anna Spafford and members of American Colony had developed a vision of a Jerusalem that would be open to all people who called it their home, including Arab Muslims and Christians of Palestine. Heather J. Sharkey, author of American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encoun ters in an Age of Empire (Princeton Uni versity Press, 2008), is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at University

Are Electronic Health Records Good for Health Care?

The Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home: African American Literature and the Era of Overseas ExpansionMelville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century America

This chapter deals with the rise of anti-Americanism within Kurdish nationalism in the 1970s, the PKK’s discourse on the Turkish state as a puppet of US imperialism, and the PKK’s so-called war against US imperialism in the Middle East, respectively. By closely examining the PKK’s discourse on the USA and its policies in the Middle East, this chapter aims to show the role of anti-American discourse in delegitimizing the Turkish state in the eyes of its Kurdish citizens, normalizing the fight of the PKK against traditional Kurdish social forces, and making the PKK responsible for saving the Kurds from slavery under US imperialism supported by the Turkish state and traditional Kurdish social forces. While the description of the Turkish state as a puppet of US imperialism dismantles the identificatory process, which is vital in making the Turkish state the legitimate representative of Kurdish people, the discourse on the war of emancipation against US imperialism not only produces a new identificatory process for the Kurds in Turkey but also generates obligations/responsibilities that inscribe the PKK into the center of power.

As the United States escalates its military presence in the Asia–Pacific to ‘contain’ an ascendant China, Menace to empire reminds us that earlier US imperial aspirations in the region had deadly consequences. Moon-Ho Jung explores how the US actually encouraged the growth of anti-colonial movements that it tried to counteract, and eventually provoked the Pacific War with Japan. The book includes an insightful discussion about how nativist immigration policies during the early twentieth century resulted largely from American efforts to keep out the political activists who were radicalized through their experiences of US and British imperialism. Building on Alfred W. McCoy's pioneering study, Policing America's empire (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), Jung details how the draconian surveillance methods adopted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the Cold War had their origins in the US colonization of the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century. At the time, US military intelligence set up an unprecedented surveillance state that was part of what Moon calls a ‘budding transpacific security apparatus’—encompassing the Philippine Constabulary, the Military Information Division, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Bureau of Investigation and Bureau of Immigration. Its racist intent was epitomized in the use of the term ‘gook’ [a euphemism for subhuman] to characterize the Filipinos. Moreover, the celebration of killing illustrated the extent of racist thinking. Constabulary officer Jack Daly wrote in his diary in August 1902: ‘It was such fun to shoot them [Filipinos] and kill them where they lay’ (p. 26).

Reviewed by: Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared by Trinh T. Minh-ha Krista Geneviève Lynes Trinh T. Minh-ha, Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared New York: Fordham University Press, 2016, 298 pp. ISBN 978-0-8232-7110-8 Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared is written in the midst of a wartime violence whose endless terror has engendered and sanctified new forms of domestic and international surveillance, "security" measures, the militarization of daily life, discriminatory policing, and imperialist bluster. Haunted by the specters of other conflicts—Sudan, Tibet, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Rwanda, Congo, Burma, Bosnia, Kosovo, South Africa, Cambodia, and Vietnam—Trinh Minh-ha elaborates the intimate and worldly effects of war's Manichean violence on daily embodied life, on living "exiled, expatriated, segregated, deported, displaced, discarded, repudiated, estranged, disappeared, unsettled and unsettling" in times of crisis (2). The book tracks both the rising US military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan and China's occupation of Tibet, mapping the intersecting forms of imperialism whose discursive force makes certain forms of writing and making impossible. In the face of wartime image making and iconoclasm, Trinh devises a method and language to write from and through the contemporary moment's unsettling climate. Lovecidal is partially a factual account of the state of war under US and Chinese imperialism and partially a philosophical account of the epistemological and ontological conditions of [End Page 377] the post-9/11 world, these two accounts interspersed with lyrical passages of a woman's movement through a twilight landscape, as well as black-and-white photographic images of fragmented, bisected, and mirrored female bodies in natural landscapes. The book aims explicitly to challenge acts of militarism and surveillance, as well as the confiscation of language by militarized rhetoric, and to find a voice resonant with the forms of resistance she turns to in and through the text. Much of her account of imperial power (by both the United States and China) revolves around the intersections of state violence with image making and image repression. In response to the missing image of the corpse of Osama bin Laden, for instance, Trinh recounts the frenzied circulation of hoaxes on the internet, including a doctored photo of bin Laden's bloodied head that appeared on Pakistan's GeoTV (10). Image making, for Trinh, is a tactic of wartime propaganda, the reiteration of power through showing sensational, exceptional, extra-ordinary feats, what she calls a "mise-en-scène of victory" (43). She points to the 1991 Gulf War (the first twenty-four-hour cable news war) as a site for the orchestration of homogeneous coverage of an event, which programmed the world to feel "shock" and "awe" at "the deployment of power via images of raw sensational destruction" (43) and the "power of the camera indulging evil as aesthetics" (58). The Gulf War was not only a spectacle of "shock" and "awe," though, but also a concerted orchestration of the absence of the war itself. The "war" went unseen as the coverage focused on techniques of war processing, a "carefully filled Absence: since the press was not allowed to see what was happening" (87). The account Trinh builds of wartime is contemporary but transversal—sliding between the first and second Gulf Wars, between the "war on terror" and the war in Vietnam, between the imperial ventures of the United States and France, and between Western and Eastern imperial power. Drawing predominantly from news reports, popular magazines, blogs, and alternative press sites, Trinh builds an account of war in its very emergence, in the liveliness of its contemporary moment, through the media apparatuses that give it (and its repressive effects) shape. If the first half of the book concerns itself with US imperial power, the second half focuses its lens more properly on emergent Chinese imperialism, most particularly evidenced in its occupation of Tibet. China exercises its power not only through direct repression of dissent, but also through complex processes of displacement (the forced modernization and "Sinicization" of Tibet) and censorship of all objects of Buddhist veneration, most notably images of the Dalai Lama. Throughout her account, Trinh traces how the war of words empties language (and signifying...

Editor's Note Mari Yoshihara The essays in this issue all address, in different ways, how borders, places, cities, and life are managed, controlled, and represented by the possessive logics of the state, empire, and capitalism as well as how they are radically imagined and lived otherwise by those who refuse those logics. Alana de Hinojosa's "El Río Grande as Pedagogy" examines the Chamizal Dispute that purportedly ended when the 1964 treaty returned el Chamizal to Mexico and displaced 5,600 Mexican American residents of South El Paso. Through the pedagogical lens of the unruly river, de Hinojosa illustrates the terrain's refusal of white possessive logics as well as the residents' complex response to the treaty. Jennifer Ponce de León takes a different approach to the border in "After the Border Is Closed," which analyzes Ricardo A. Bracho's dystopian science fiction play Puto set in a near future in which the US has closed its border with Mexico. Ponce de León shows the play's depiction of the racialized social hierarchies, state and parastate violence, militarism, and authoritarian modalities of social control that are systematically produced by US capitalism and imperialism. Introducing the neologism of "transmilitainment," Waleed Mahdi examines Morocco's role in the production of Hollywood's "war on terror" films. Through a rich empirical study, Mahdi discusses not only the monetary relationship between Hollywood producers and Moroccan partners but also the multifaceted infrastructure for such support, arguing that transmilitainment's commodification of Morocco for pleasurable global consumption of US state violence is itself an act of neocolonial violence. Turning our attention to the other end of the spectrum in the imagination of places, Chandra Russo's "Cities of Fruit" examines how art activism can promote popular education and mobilize radical collectivity in the face of eco-social alienation. Russo focuses on the Guerrilla Grafters, an activist artist collective whose members surreptitiously graft fruit onto sterile city trees in the San Francisco Bay Area, as an example of how creative arts can contest dominant social-spatial arrangements and forge alternative imaginaries of the city. Danielle Haque also discusses an alternative imagining of city space and life in "Collective Care and Human Rights Cinema." Through an analysis of Musa Syeed's 2016 film A Stray, Haque examines the film's portrayal of the improvised and communal spaces and sustaining networks created by Muslims in Minneapolis. Finally, in his essay that turned out to be an excellent tribute to the late Lauren Berlant, Chad Shomura presents a reading of Jennifer Egan's short story "Found Objects," to show that [End Page v] Berlant's notion of "impasse" points to the life otherwise by opening modes of being that are irredeemable to the good life founded on "animacy hierarchy." Aria S. Halliday reviews three books that examine how Latina and Black girls make sense of themselves in a society built on their objectification, consumption, and familial connection as well as the appropriation of their creativity for neoliberal consumerism. Hōkūlani Aikau discusses three important works that center Hawai'i as the site of settler colonialism and cultures of US imperialism and use indigeneity as a critical analytic. In a digital project review, Dylan Rodríguez engages Edmund T. Gordon's online exhibit Racial Geography Tour that guides the visitor through the University of Texas at Austin campus and the university's institutional foundations in racial, colonial history. [End Page vi] Copyright © 2021 The American Studies Association

The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America. Edited by Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda. (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Pp. 401, Hardcover, $45.00.)Reviewed by J. Kime LawsonThe First Prejudice is a collection of twelve essays by leading historians that reexamine role of religious and persecution in shaping legal and cultural practices of early American colonies. Religion is called the first prejudice in early America because before legal imposition of racially based forms of intolerance, municipal authorities mandated practice of religious customs and often punished nonconformists with violence. Studying history of and in America has typically been domain of legal or church historians focused on court records or sermons, but this volume demonstrates that closer scholarly attention to sources illustrating lived religion, local legal norms, or everyday practices can complicate longstanding assumptions about early American religious history. While most religious histories of early America have stressed big events like English Toleration Act or American Revolution to describe continuity, change, or progress during period, each selection in this volume challenges usefulness of those categories to explain more complex and ambiguous cultural exchanges hiding underneath grander narratives of American religious history.Christopher S. Grenda's and John Corrigan's essays on tolerance and intolerance begin volume proper. Grenda points out that over seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, faith and reason often had a complex and multidimensional relationship in public discourse of American colonial intellectuals, who relied on forms of reasoning rooted in their understanding of Bible rather than Enlightenment secularity to argue their desires for a more tolerant society. Corrigan shows more gruesome side of reasoning, explaining how a variety of early American Christians deployed Hebrew Biblical story recounting Israel's extermination at divine behest of ancient Amalekites as a justification for and violence toward Native Americans. Both essays demonstrate that religious ideology was central to people's choices and behaviors in regard to justifying both and intolerance, even if that ideology was diverse, adaptable, and situational. They disagree about continuity and change in regard to religious influence from Europe, however, insofar as Grenda suggests a formal continuity of religious ideology coming from Continent, while Corrigan notes break between British and more violent American usage of Amalekite rhetoric.Part two has four selections. Ned Landsman addresses lingering question of why Anglican Church never became a powerful religious force in American colonies. Rather than following more traditional explanation that Anglican Church resisted appointing a bishop in American colonies out of fear of igniting anti-imperial sentiments, Landsman shows that factors such as internal Anglican Church restructuring as a result of union with Church of Scotland, anxieties about preserving apostolic succession and other sacred practices without direct oversight, and stubbornness to compete within American denominational style all contributed to Anglican Church's lack of institution-building in American colonies. Landsman also claims that lack of Anglican institutional strength in American colonies led to an informal separation of church and state in practice. Joyce D. Goodfriend compares legal treatment of religious outsiders in New Netherlands with their treatment in Holland, as Dutch are usually cited for pioneering European religious toleration. Peter Stuyvesant's handling of religious outsiders such as Lutherans, Jews, and Quakers was just short of brutal, and religious toleration in Dutch colonies was at best tepid with an uncooperative colonial state authority. …

Americans are debating what it would take to redeem the Constitution’s promise of a “more Perfect Union” in a time of deep and stark disagreements about the nation’s future. Despite the partisan rancor, most Americans share a faith in the Constitution’s redemptive potential. Constitutional faith is the civic religion that shapes our constitutional law, theory, and politics and binds Americans as one nation, indivisible. This Essay is about something our faith forgets: The promise of a “more Perfect Union” of “We the People” is not redemptive for colonized peoples who did not consent to the Constitution but are subject to American power. It makes three contributions to constitutional law and theory by focusing upon the United States’ colonial relationships with American Indians and Alaska Natives. First, this Essay makes the case that American colonialism poses a fundamental challenge to our constitutional faith. It traces the convergence of American constitutionalism and American colonialism in the concept of government power as a public trust, which is the foundation of federal plenary power over American Indians and Alaska Natives. Second, this Essay argues that the trust conception of constitutional law cannot solve the problem of redeeming American colonialism. Instead, the constitutional trust has reinforced the very power relations and ideology that Indian Nations challenge when they claim a right to national self-determination. Third, this Essay offers a viable alternative for redressing the wrongs of American colonialism by revisiting the problem of redemption from a relational perspective, one that does not focus upon Indian Nations’ dependence upon the United States. In comparing trust with contract to develop this relational perspective, this Essay contributes to the emerging literature that reimagines constitutional law by reference to existing rules and norms from the common law.

The Community Became an Almost Civilized and Christian One: John Stewart’s Mission to the Wyandots and Religious Colonialism as African American Racial Uplift Sakina M. Hughes (bio) ON SATURDAY MORNING JULY 5, 1911, the Reverend Dr. Edward L. Gilliam, an African American Methodist Episcopal pastor from Columbus, Ohio, led a group of black men, women, and children on a pilgrimage north to Upper Sandusky, Ohio.1 They went to pay homage to the Reverend John Stewart, who, according to church legend, founded the Methodist Episcopal Home Missionary Movement there a century before. As the pilgrims remembered the story, Reverend Stewart earned his saintly reputation for accomplishing what others had failed to do before him—he was the first to convert a previously “unconvertible” Wyandot community and laid the groundwork for the very first permanent mission of the American Methodist Episcopal Home Missionary Society. For the African American pilgrims for whom antiblack prejudice was a normal part of life in 1911, that Stewart was also African American was even more cause for celebration. To them, Reverend Stewart was a model black citizen and a shining example of the potential benefits of racial uplift ideology—a philosophy and set of tactics to lift African Americans economically, socially, and culturally into fuller U.S. citizenship. African Americans who espoused the tenets of racial uplift ideology advocated for Stewart’s enshrinement in the ever-growing pantheon of successful black professors, ministers, journalists, orators, and writers whose lives, they believed, were the evidence of racial progress and the best arguments for African Americans to be included in full American citizenship.2 Stewart was not only a model cleric and citizen according to black uplift leaders, but he also moved outside the world of black and white. Stewart went beyond uplifting the African Americans by extending his work to a Native American community. This showed black peoples’ worth not only within their own communities but also within the greater United States. To the pilgrims, Stewart was also a black agent, an apostle of American civilization. This article argues that in addition to striving toward middle-class respectability and economic independence, turn-of-the-twentieth-century black progressives put forth African American religious colonialism among Native Americans as evidence that black [End Page 24] Americans were true Americans and worthy of full U.S. citizenship. In other words, African Americans who converted Native Americans to Christianity—and in Stewart’s case, a Christianity bereft of any Indigenous syncretism or symbolism—were not just model citizens; rather, they were true African American apostles of American civilization. This story complicates nineteenth-century understandings of African American–Native American relations, and highlights the understudied way black leaders attempted to negotiate their own citizenship in the face of American racism by comparing their own black citizenship to what they called Native American savagery. Over and over again, black leaders who aimed for social and political acceptance espoused middle-class Christian values and denigrated Native Americans for their savagery, anti-Christian practices, and unwillingness to buy into the American dream. These black leaders also belittled Native Americans by claiming to be able to tame them and for not bowing easily to westward expansion. An irony in this narrative is that Stewart’s aggressive push to end Native American religious practices in favor of Protestant Christianity aided white American institutions that oppressed both Native American and African American peoples.3 Despite the larger narrative of white settler-colonialism and antiblack racism, John Stewart gained from his role in the mission: the Methodist Episcopal Church rewarded him with heightened stature in the religious community and with land that was formerly owned by Wyandot people. This article shows how black writers at the turn of the twentieth century fit John Stewart’s story into traditional concepts of racial uplift that prescribed notions of respectability, a striving toward a Christian middle-class ideal, and helping other African Americans enhance their respectability.4 This article also illustrates how retellings of Stewart’s story—a story largely off the academic radar—reveal twentieth-century black thought on American colonialism and Indian policy on the North American continent. Counter to contemporary rebukes of U.S. imperialism from leaders...

Though Japanese migration to Brazil started only at the turn of the twentieth century, Brazil is now the country with the largest ethnic Japanese population outside Japan. Collaborative Settler Colonialism examines this history as a central chapter of both Brazil’s and Japan’s processes of nation and empire building and, crucially, as a convergence of their settler colonial projects. Inspired by American colonialism and the final conquest of the U.S. Western frontier, Brazilian and Japanese empire builders collaborated to bring Japanese migrants to Brazil, which had the outcome of simultaneously dispossessing Indigenous Brazilians of their land and furthering the expansion of Japanese land and resource possession abroad. Bringing discourses of Latin American and Japanese settler colonialism into rare dialogue with each other, this book offers new insight into the Japanese empire, the history of immigration to Brazil and Latin America, and the past and present of settler colonialism.