Imperial America Research Articles

Notes from the Editors, April 2024

buy this issueIn a December 2023 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Richard Haass, former special assistant to H. W. Bush, declared that the world has descended into a "new world disorder," lamenting the long-lost dream of unending U.S. hegemony. This month's "Notes from the Editors" reflects on not only Haass's recent statements, but his longstanding advocacy of an "Imperial America" designed to ensure U.S. domination on the world stage.

Playing with Phantoms: Decoding the Ludic Language of Metal Gear Solid V

Playing with Phantoms: Decoding the Ludic Language of <i>Metal Gear Solid V</i>

Janine Yorimoto Boldt

Janine Yorimoto Boldt

Come‐hither looks: the Hollywood vamp and the function of cinema

Come‐hither looks: the Hollywood vamp and the function of cinema

Tri lica Amerike i problem asimilacije u Hantingtonovoj paradigmi

In this paper, the author offers an interpretation of Huntington's account of three possible faces of America, the socio-political state of America in the immediate future. He derived these three perspectives from his paradigm of the clash of civilizations. These three faces of America are: 1. America as an open society to the rest of the world; 2. Imperial America, in which the world would be transformed into America; 3. America remains America, as opposed to spreading a new wave of ideas through the media about multiculturalism as the most humane way of existence of culturally diverse population in the human community. Between these three choices, Huntington opts for the third option, because only if America remains America can the national identity be preserved on the foundations of Anglo-Protestant culture. Immigrant assimilation is the key to solving the problem for the survival of the United States. In this text, the author discusses Huntington's three interpretations of the concept of assimilation and comes to the conclusion that through the concept of a foreigner, the other, who moves away from the domicile population like a quasar, as an embodiment of human alienation, all three possible imaginary histories of America are broken.

Charging Up San Juan Hill: Theodore Roosevelt and the Making of Imperial America. Witness to History. By John R. Van Atta

<i>Charging Up San Juan Hill: Theodore Roosevelt and the Making of Imperial America</i>. Witness to History. By John R. Van Atta

China’s South China Sea Claims as “Unprecedented”: Sceptical Remarks

AbstractA solely legalistic analysis of China’s South China Sea claims has given way to speculation regarding their exact nature. Scholars and the tribunal inPhilippines v Chinahave collectively described China’s position as “ambiguous” and “vague.” For others, China’s regulatory framework sets dangerous new precedents in the areas of effective occupation, historic rights, and exclusive economic zones. This article seeks to nuance these assessments. Contextualizing China’s framework within a broader geopolitical project reveals a China exploiting historic legal precedents in a manner reminiscent of imperial America. This should cast doubt on those too quick to see China as a rule-breaking new power eager to upset international norms. Rather, China’s “Caribbean” is a microcosm for a new great power coming into its own following an existing model.

Indigenous History and Imperial America: American Indian History Today and Tomorrow

Indigenous History and Imperial America: American Indian History Today and Tomorrow

Commentary on Gilded Ages, Now and Then

The skyrocketing separation of the richest Americans from the rest amidst a political and cultural discourse that celebrates the individual and the unquestioned wisdom of the free market has many commentators comparing our time to the Gilded Age of 100 years ago. It is an apt comparison. W.E.B. Du Bois’s (1935) assessment of this era, found in the chapter from his magisterial Black Reconstruction in America 1860– 1880 titled “The Counter-Revolution of Property” could also describe our era, with lives lived amidst the products of mass production, the domination of politics by corporations, economic booms and busts, labor markets divided by race and gender, and misery in this world of plenty. Painter (1987, p. xx) reports that in pre-federal income tax 1890 the top 1 % of families owned 51 % of the real and personal property, a figure that resonates with today’s 99 % Movement. Given the contradictions and crises we face in the early twenty-first century it is not surprising that historical archaeologists are interested in this earlier period. This earlier “Gilded Age,” like ours, was comprised of complex array of forces shaping life. Symptomatic of this complexity is that different scholars of the first Gilded Age, including authors in this collection, provide different date ranges to encompass these processes, depending upon which they foreground: a short politically defined Gilded Age (1876–1914), a longer Gilded Age from slavery America to imperial America (1865–1914), or an even longer phase of the social and ideological consolidation of capitalism (1789–1914) (Wallerstein 2011). Among the forces a century and more ago were:

Baba's kitchen medicines: folk remedies of Ukrainian settlers in Western Canada

Introduction - America's First Nations Discovery, Exploration and Colonisation Revolution and Independence The Young Republic Jefferson and the Democratic Republic The Age of Jackson The West (Pre-Civil War) Sectional Conflict Civil War and Reconstruction The West (Post-Civil War) The Gilded Age and Imperial America Populism, Progressivism and the Great War Boom, Bust and the New Deal World War II and the Origins of the Cold War Post-war America: The Fifties and Sixties Retrenchment: The Seventies and Eighties Post-Cold War America: Cold War Ends, War on Terror Begins Index.

God's democracy: American religion after September 11

Introduction Chapter 1 America Violated Chapter 2 Where Was God? Chapter 3 At the White House Chapter 4 Moses of America Chapter 5 Going to War, with God Chapter 6 Sacred Imperial America Chapter 7 The Great Awakening Chapter 8 The Golden Calf Chapter 9 A Political Religion, American Style? Notes

A Usable American Literature

When I first read Terry Eagleton’s thundering assaults on Bush’s imperial America, not long after “Shock and Awe,” what struck me was how much parts of After Theory (2003) sounded like a literary “American studies” that flourished 150 years earlier. Is this Herman Melville diagnosing the cultural monomania that produced Ahab in Moby-Dick (1850): “What is immortal in the United States, what refuses to lie down and die, is precisely the will.. . . It is a terribly uncompromising drive, one which knows no faltering or bridling, irony or self-doubt. It is so greedy for the world that it is at risk of pounding it to pieces in its sublime fury, cramming it into its insatiable maw” (187)? Is this Nathaniel Hawthorne explicating his critique of industrial obsession in “The Birth-mark” (1843): “It is its demented refusal to limit and finitude, its crazed, blasphemous belief that you can do anything if you put your mind to it, which lies at the source of its chronic weakness. Nations or individuals which cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the realities of frailty and failure—that this is what we all start from, and where we all return—are feeble indeed” (226)? To fast-forward, is this F. Scott Fitzgerald lecturing on The Great Gatsby (1925): “The USA is a nation which tends to find failure shameful, mortifying or even downright sinful.. . . No group of people uses the word ‘dream’ so often” (185)? The Eagleton who helped teach me to read American literature as an historical and ideological symptom—an indispensable approach—unwittingly demonstrated the power of American literature as a critical and theoretical resource. This sent me back to the idea of a “usable past,” a term coined by Van Wyck Brooks in 1918, explored and expanded by Lewis Mumford in the 1920s and after, and implemented in the early development of American studies by the likes of F. O. Matthiessen. The “usable past” that such critics originally had in mind was

Margaret Fuller: transatlantic crossings in a revolutionary age

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), a pioneering gender theorist, transcendentalist, journalist, and literary critic, was one of most well-known and highly regarded feminist intellectuals of nineteenth-century America. With her contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, she was one of predominant writers of Transcendentalist movement, and she aligned herself in both her public and private life with European revolutionary fervor of 1840s. She traveled to Italy as a foreign correspondent for New York Tribune to cover nascent revolutions, pursuing transnational ideal awakened in her youth by a classical education in European languages and a Romantic curiosity about cultures, traditions, and identities. This volume is a collaboration of international scholars who, from varied fields and approaches, assess Fuller's genius and character. Treating last several years of Margaret Fuller's short life, these essays offer a truly international discussion of Fuller's unique cultural, political, and personal achievements. From origins and articulations of Fuller's cosmopolitanism to her examination of the woman question, and from her fascination with European other to her candid perception of imperial America from abroad, they ponder what such an extraordinary woman meant to America, and also to Italy and Europe, during her lifetime and continuing to present.

Making San Francisco American: cultural frontiers in the urban West, 1846-1906

The San Francisco that rose from the ashes of the 1906 earthquake and fire was a city of rigid social stratification - a city determined to contain its diverse and disorderly rough-and-tumble past some sixty years after its acquisition by the United States. Barbara Berglund vividly describes San Francisco's rapid evolution from Mexican outpost to crown jewel of America's western empire, taking readers back to an earlier and more chaotic time when class definitions and social conventions were much more fluid. Berglund argues that the city's rapid rise from a multicultural boomtown to a racially and socially stratified metropolis reflected the careful efforts of a nascent elite to order its inhabitants through political and cultural means. Berglund analyzes the cultural spaces that showcased the contests that would determine the social order and who defined it. The book's central chapters provide snapshots of the micro-workings of power on five key cultural frontiers: restaurants, hotels, and boardinghouses; places of amusement, ranging from the brothels of the Barbary Coast to the Pacific Museum of Anatomy and Science; Chinatown's tourist terrain; the Mechanics' Institute's annual fairs; and the 1894 California Midwinter International Exposition - the first such expo held west of Chicago and an image-building opportunity for the city's elites. By focusing on the role of cultural frontiers in the urban west, Berglund offers a new take on western history that explores the role of market-driven cultural institutions, demonstrating that the market was as important as the state in structuring power relationships in nineteenth-century imperial America. She shows that control over meanings ascribed to race, class, and gender - especially those generated in the city's cultural spaces - was critical to the incorporation of San Francisco into the fabric of the American nation.

Reflections of Primitivism: Development, Progress and Civilization in Imperial America, 1898–1914

At the turn of the twentieth century, America's first overseas imperial manoeuvres launched the nation into a new era of aggressive foreign policy. Simultaneously, on the domestic front, Progressive reformers fought to rescue its citizens from the dangers wrought by an increasingly urban, sedentary and ethnically diverse urban culture. Both at home and overseas, America was obsessed with civilization: its goal across scales was to transform ‘barbarian’ lands and people into self-governing places and individuals. Within this context, the newly anointed discipline of psychology offered a mechanistic logic to mediate this desire. Drawing from a cocktail of biology, physiology, and evolutionary science, psychologists linked individual development to the long term evolution of the human race. In this equation, childhood was cast as universally barbarian, a prehistoric state of being from which an adult state would emerge if the correct developmental context was provided. Like America's ‘underdeveloped’ colonies, children were theorised as having to traverse evolution from prehistory to modernity. Postcolonial literature has repeatedly pointed to the tendency of colonialism to lock foreign places in an antique state, and geographers have noted that foreign countries in a state of 'underdevelopment' are often equated with childhood. My claim in this paper, however, is that theories of child development interpenetrated with notions of foreign underdevelopment and not only informed imperial projects but also informed America's thinking about itself. By examining the export of American recreation to overseas protectorates during the first two decades of the twentieth century, I argue that America not only barbarized native populations abroad, but universally barbarized all children everywhere.

A World of Kings

May/June 2007 Historically Speaking tiousness both divides and unites them. It divides them because they have different views of the world. Britain, through closeness to America, tries to be more than it seems. France, through proclaiming its independence, tries to seem more than it is—as de Gaulle put it, behaving like a great power precisely because it no longer is one. Britain's position seems to the French to be subservient; France's, to the British, to be posturing. Both face the same problem of having ambitions that exceed their capacities or, more precisely, that exceed their willingness to pay the cost. Hence in recent months the French have had difficulties in backing up their diplomatic role in Lebanon with troops; and although Britain is managing to provide troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, they are perilously overstretched and underequipped. The irony, of course, is that cherished ambitions could be served if they acted together, but they could only act together by giving up cherished ambitions. Both countries will soon have new governments, and a new chapter in their political relationship may open. But we can be sure that the ambivalence will remain. Robert Tombs is afellow of St. John's College, Cambridge , and university reader in French history. He is co-author, with his wife, Isabelle, of'That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present (Knopf, 2007). A World of Kings Brendan McConville • ? November 5, 1764, diarist John Rowe recorded that "a sorrowful accident" had happened in Boston's North End. A giant "carriage" constructed by the neighborhood's residents , carrying effigies of the Pope and other figures , had "run over a Boy's head" during a raucous procession "& he died instantly." In response to the tragedy, the authorities dismantled the effigies and sought to destroy a similar cart in the South End, the "North & South end Popes" as they were known. However, when the magistrates "went to the So. End [they] could not Conquer upon which the South End people brought out their pope & went in Triumph to the Northward" to seek victory in the traditional battle between the neighborhoods that occurred on Boston Common every November 5th. "At the Mill Bridge," Rowe continued , "a Battle begun," the North End people "having repaired their pope." Neighborhood pride was on the line—the North End traditionally prevailed in these battles—but on this day a repaired pope would not do, and "the South End people got the Battle . . .. Brought away the North End pope & burnt Both of them at the Gallows . . . Several thousand people following them" to see the spectacle on Boston Neck. So ended the annual celebration of the foiling of Guy Fawkes's 1605 plot against KingJames I and the English nation.1 Certain images predominate in popular imagination when we think of colonial America. Somber Puritans, heads bowed in prayer when not hunting witches at Salem; broad-hatted Quakers preaching peace in the city of brotherly love; yeomen farmers chopping wood and tending crops; dignified Indian chiefs negotiating with the ever-increasing number of white settlers; Virginia tobacco planters living in Georgian mansions on the Northern Neck, served by African slaves; and deerskin-clad frontiersmen opening new lands and fighting against the various Indian nations. Scholars have refined these images and added new ones to their more specific conversations : visions of midwives and wenches, merchant entrepreneurs, aggressive artisans, confidence men, enlightened intellectuals reading Country-influenced pamphlets, and evangelical preachers seeking to save souls from eternal hellfire. But mobile papist archetypes crushing innocent children, followed by nightRqyalism , it has seemed to the generalpublic and most American scholars, had never really taken deep root in colonial society. time battles on Boston Common? This all seems to be somehow foreign, un-American, at best the manifestation of lower-class rowdiness in a busy colonial port, at worst an early display of irrational religious bigotry. Yet it was none of these things. Boston's North and South End gangs were remembering Pope's Day, one of a number of annual royal rites at the core of political life in an imperial America that existed before 1 776. In that lost world, public holidays did not celebrate...

Imperial America: Niall Ferguson's Perspective on the United States in the World

American Colossus . Blakeway Productions for Channel 4 Television , United Kingdom . 102 minutes; broadcast 5 June 2004 .

Extermination and Democracy: O'Sullivan, the Democratic Review, and Empire, 1837-1840

In January 1848 Henry David Thoreau began his lecture on "Resistance to Civil Government" by asserting that "I heartily accept the motto—'That government is best which governs least;' and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically."1 The motto (actually "The best government is that which governs least")—had been emblazoned on the title page of The United States Magazine and Democratic Review (hereafter Democratic Review), the influential political-literary monthly, from its founding in 1837 through 1845.2 Thoreau had published an informal essay, "The Landlord," and a book review, "Paradise (To Be Regained)," in its pages in 1843, but in now urging his listeners to resist the government because of its prosecution of the Mexican War, protection of slavery, and annexation of Texas, he implicitly takes issue with the prominent periodical, which that same month had published the first in a two-part series devoted to defending "The Mexican War: Its Origins, Its Justice, Its Consequences."3 Thoreau's reference to the motto of the Democratic Review cuts several ways: as a means of stressing individual responsibility for moral conduct in a democracy; as a criticism of a newly imperial America; and, it would seem, as an implicit rebuke to the nation's leading Democratic monthly, whose former editor, John L. O'Sullivan, he had called "at any rate one of the not-bad."4 In present-day America, Thoreau argued, the only place for a "just man" would be in prison, where he could make common cause with "the fugitive slave, the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race." Yet, policies advocated by the Democratic Review from its founding in 1837 were responsible for the continued victimization of these groups.5 [End Page 123] Established in Washington by O'Sullivan and his brother-in-law Samuel Langtree, the Democratic Review moved to New York at the end of 1840. O'Sullivan ran the magazine until June 1846.6 It then exchanged hands several times before becoming defunct in 1859. No magazine more successfully articulated the principles and policies that actually guided and shaped American conduct during the 1830s, '40s, and into the '50s than the Democratic Review, which was closely allied with the administrations of Van Buren, Polk, and Pierce. It was in the pages of the Democratic Review, in July 1845, that O'Sullivan articulated America's "manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions."7 Here was the powerful phrase that promoted continental expansion, resulting in a doubling of American territory in four years. The Democratic Review presents a unique site to explore the interconnections and contradictions of politics, rhetoric, literature, race, empire, and print culture during the antebellum years. How did an underfinanced monthly exert such influence? Especially on issues of race, the Democratic Review was reactionary, yet it attracted a galaxy of progressive writers, including Thoreau, Whittier, Bryant, and Lowell. Few, if any contemporary periodicals spoke more eloquently of democracy than did the Democratic Review. In the 1839 "The Course of Civilization," O'Sullivan asserted that the "peculiar duty of this country has been to exemplify and embody a civilization in which the rights, freedom, and mental and moral growth of the individual man should be made the highest end of all social restrictions and laws." In the next sentence, however, he claimed that the "discipline of Providence" had best prepared the "Anglo-American race" to realize that democratic promise.8 Also in 1839, O'Sullivan anointed America as "The Great Nation of Futurity": "The far-reaching, the boundless future will be the era of American greatness. In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of...

Things Fall Apart: Black Struggle in Imperial America and the Need for an Adequate Theory of Emancipation for the 21st Century

the larger society, or with the needs of those who control the society. But, essentially, it always reflects a racial double standard, which is why Malcolm opined that, in the case of America, democracy is hypocrisy. America has claimed, for example, to be a nation of laws. But just look at some of these laws! American law prohibited slaves from testifying against their masters. When the slaves became nominally free, America passed codes that forbade blacks to testify on their own behalf, so that we were judged by all-white juries, until the courts finally ruled that our exclusion was unconstitutional. Then prosecutors used peremptory challenges to continue to keep us off the jury. And when courts said that, too, is not just, America's law allow the use of changeof-venue tactics as with Rodney King's baton-swinging police assailants who were not tried in Los Angeles where the beating took place, but in their own bedroom community of Simi Valley, California. Ditto with Amadou Diallo, the unarmed Guinean man shot forty-one times by New York's finest. The trial of his slayers was moved from the Bronx, and a likely black judge to an upstate, Buffalo court presided over by an ex-cop who instructed the jury for hours and at great length, upon the multiple rationales for acquittal.

Imperial America and War

On November 11, 2000, Richard Haass—a member of the National Security Council and special assistant to the president under the elder Bush, soon to be appointed director of policy planning in the State Department of newly elected President George W. Bush—delivered a paper in Atlanta entitled "Imperial America." For the United States to succeed at its objective of global preeminence, he declared, it would be necessary for Americans to "re-conceive their role from a traditional nation-state to an imperial power." Haass eschewed the term "imperialist" in describing America's role, preferring "imperial," since the former connoted "exploitation, normally for commercial ends," and "territorial control."This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.