Path Of Empire Research Articles

Interventions of Memory and Visibility: Recovering and Reclaiming Filipino American History

Interventions of Memory and Visibility:Recovering and Reclaiming Filipino American History Linda Pierce Allen (bio) Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire. By Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 208 pages. $70.00 (cloth). $22.00 (paper). The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898–1946. By Rick Baldoz. New York: New York University Press, 2011. 336 pages. $79.00 (cloth). $25.00 (paper). Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina. By Denise Cruz. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 312 pages. $89.95 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). Over the past twenty years, the field of Filipino American studies has exploded, from just a handful of scholarly books on the subject to more than three dozen titles and countless essays. The field’s notable progress is not surprising given the growing population of Filipinos in the United States: estimated at 3.4 million by the 2010 US Census Bureau, the Filipino American population grew by nearly half within the last decade alone, to become the second largest Asian group in the United States. Yet despite this demographic support, the emergence of Fil-Am studies has been no easy task. In addition to the epistemological challenges involved in conceiving a field from such a heterogeneity of disciplines, combined with the practical challenges involved in institutionalizing a field that remains largely underrepresented in academe, Fil-Am studies scholars have also had to write themselves into existence—writing against decades of imperial amnesia that have maneuvered to erase the historical record that exposes the United States’ forfeitures of democracy in favor of empire building. The ways in which Filipinos have become forgotten and made invisible despite their long-standing presence in the United States have been well documented by early scholars in the field, such as Fred Cordova and Oscar Campomanes. [End Page 211] More recent scholarship has since worked to the counter the cultural aphasia surrounding Fil-Am studies, recovering historical memory and reclaiming visibility for Filipinos in the United States. Rick Baldoz’s Third Asiatic Invasion (2011), Denise Cruz’s Transpacific Femininities (2012), and Lucy Burns’s Puro Arte (2013) each add new dimensions to Fil-Am studies. Baldoz’s strength lies in the details: his meticulously researched work provides the most exhaustive account of early twentieth-century Filipino immigration, labor, and contested citizenship to date. Providing an abundance of documentation, he recovers a valuable historical record that complicates the US perspective on Philippine independence. Cruz’s narrative is essential for the ways in which it contests the early twentieth-century figure of the male migrant laborer as the sole representative of Filipinos during this period; her study of the “transpacific” Filipina brings new attention to the representations of women in the Philippine Question. Finally, Burns’s narrative analyzes deeply the historical representations of Filipino men and women, theorizing the Filipino/a performing body at sites such as the St. Louis World’s Fair exhibition and taxi dance halls (both also thoroughly documented by Baldoz), as often overlooked sites of resistance. Together, these three complementary texts recover and illuminate—even as they complicate Filipino American history, literature, and politics. Baldoz’s Third Asiatic Invasion provides a nuanced reading of US political history surrounding the Philippine Question. Minimizing the efficacy of anti-imperialist ideologues in the fight for Philippine independence, Baldoz redirects attention to struggles between increasingly violent nativist groups, American agribusiness and plantation interests, US diplomatic officials, and Filipino nationalist leaders over questions of citizenship and sovereignty. In his comprehensive study of the domestic ramifications of the US occupation of the Philippines, Baldoz exposes how US racial formation is both informed by and works to inform the path of empire. His detailed, lucid portrait of the mutually constitutive practices of empire, immigration, and race establishes clear links between Filipinos’ status as American colonial subjects and the organization of racial boundaries in American society. Moving beyond the now widely accepted sociological premise that race is a social construction, Baldoz asks, “who is doing the assigning, and to what end?” (8). He begins by situating the uniqueness of Filipino immigration amid the waves of Asian immigration to the United States since the...

“No Transient Spectacle”: Bayard Taylor, Wilderness Tourism, and the Re-creation of the United States

“No Transient Spectacle”:Bayard Taylor, Wilderness Tourism, and the Re-creation of the United States James Weaver (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Rocky Mountain National Bank, Central City, Colorado Territory. Signed January 14, 1875, for $500. All images accompanying this essay courtesy of Shawn Larson at the Denver Stock Exchange, Englewood, Colorado, denverstockexchange.com. The checks and certificates used during the Colorado Gold Rush often present scenes of wilderness couched in documents of economic transaction. For instance, highlighting the “wildness” and nostalgia of the western frontier, this check depicts a Native man who struggles to fend off two grizzly bears with one leg pinned beneath his horse. Such an image also provides a subtle advertisement for (as well as a clear caution against) “wilderness tourism,” reminding the check holder of the dangers and adventures still to be had in the West. However, when coupled with the images of the Independence Mine and the emerging settlement community of Denver (Colorado National Bank) which appear later in the essay, this scene also sparks a sense of urgency, as the “Old West” of rugged individuals and foreboding landscapes is being replaced by the “New West” of transcontinental railroads, corporate mining operations, and cities, prompting many to seek solace in nature—albeit as tourists rather than settlers of the wilderness. [End Page 254] “Could the pencil faithfully represent this magnificent transfiguration of Nature, it would appear utterly unreal and impossible to eyes which never beheld the reality,” Bayard Taylor writes of a sunset in Eldorado, his 1850 travel narrative about the Gold Rush boom of California. “It was no transient spectacle, fading away ere one could feel its surpassing glory,” he continues (235). “I have seen the dazzling sunsets of the Mediterranean flush the beauty of its shores, and the mellow skies which Claude used to contemplate from the Pincian Hill; but, lovely as they are in my memory, they seem cold and pale when I think of the splendor of such a scene on the Bay of San Francisco” (236). As he attempts to capture the unreal beauty he witnessed in California, Taylor suggests that this natural scene implies the “surpassing glory” of a national dream now being realized. Having recently acquired California from Mexico, the United States had confirmed that it would be “no transient spectacle.” Rather, as Taylor’s chapter title asserts, California could become “the Italy of the West,” a claim that seeks to enshrine American grandeur alongside long-established scenes of European natural wonder. His favorable contrast between the splendor of San Francisco and the “cold and pale” memories of Europe invokes a national pride, one anchored first in the land itself and second in what enterprising Americans can make of that land. Taylor’s confident pronouncements of a promising national future, however, are set against a backdrop of increasing sectional tensions within the United States—tensions that would escalate over the coming decade and result in the union’s dissolution. The fate of the nation clearly was a central concern for Bayard Taylor, and his two narratives of western travel, Eldorado: Adventures in the Path of Empire (1850) and Colorado: A Summer Trip (1867), illuminate connections among commercial development of natural spaces, sociocultural refinement of the American populace, and a concurrent extension of US imperial political power. In these works, Taylor employs his skills as a travel writer to assure his audience that they are witnessing a lasting spectacle themselves. Documenting the Gold Rush boom of California following the Mexican War and then detailing the transformations of [End Page 255] Colorado territory in the wake of the Civil War, Taylor links the surpassing glory of the nation to its magnificent transfiguration of its natural resources, insisting on the land’s capacity to restore and redirect the nation’s imperial project after the sociopolitical fractures of war. Ultimately, attending to the nuanced ways in which Taylor’s imperialist attitudes intertwine with his environmentalist sensibilities offers us a clearer understanding not just of the thematic connections between Eldorado and Colorado but also of the significant contributions Taylor made to nineteenth-century discourse about the West. During his fifty-three-year life, Taylor came to be known—to...

Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush

Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush

Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush , and: Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion (review)

Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush. By Aims McGuinness. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Pp. 249. Cloth, $35.00; Paper, $19.95.)Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion. By Walter Nugent. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. Pp. 387. Maps. Cloth, $30.00.)Reviewed by Amy S. GreenbergWhither the course of empire. Thomas Cole transfixed the American art world in the mid 1830s with a series of allegorical paintings that suggested that the course of empire was inexorable, a cyclical decline from the idyllic pastoral state into ruin. The historiography of empire has not followed this neat linear trajectory. Only slowly has empire crept back into the history of the early American republic from the more immediate past. For decades, diplomatic historians treated America's imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an unfortunate digression from an otherwise noble history of idealistic settlement-driven expansionism. The idea that antebellum Americans pursued empire was openly rejected by scholars: Didn't the United States incorporate the Spanish, French, British, and Mexican settlers in newly acquired territories into the polity? Weren't politicians and citizens of the period openly disdainful of England's empire? If the United States was imperialist, why didn't it annex all of Mexico when it had the opportunity? Why did it wait until 1898 to annex Hawai'i? Why didn't it grab Cuba in the 1850s?All these questions have answers, and none of them includes altruism on the part of American politicians. Were it not for sectional tensions in the 1850s, the United States would certainly have pursued further territorial acquisitions, and extending full citizenship rights to the peoples of those territories was hardly the only option politicians debated. Indeed the Mexicans of America's new Southwest never enjoyed the full citizenship rights promised them in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.The fact that antebellum America was imperialistic is not only acknowledged but also central to the theses of two recent publications. Path of Empire is an innovative transnational history of Panama during the U.S. Gold Rush, and Habits of Empire is a traditional narrative history of American foreign relations published by a trade press. Vastly different, both adopt a perspective that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago.Aims McGuinness's Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush is a remarkable first book, a revised University of Michigan dissertation that quite literally approaches an old topic from a new direction. Utilizing a wide array of sources, many unearthed at great pains from archives in Colombia and Panama, McGuinness asks a provocative question: What did the Gold Rush look like from the perspective of Panama? Panama was a key transit route for Gold Rush travelers from the eastern United States, and the site of the first transcontinental railroad, built decades before the Panama Canal. Like other Latin American countries, it was also targeted by filibusters in the 1850s. Thus a very small country took on outsized international significance in the 1850s.Not surprisingly this transformation had profound internal ramifications for Panama. The railroad, which was originally embraced by the ruling elite as a panacea, instead destroyed the local economy by quickly transporting travelers from one coast to another, completely undermining the indigenous transit system. Growing tensions between Panamanians and Americans ultimately exploded in an 1856 incident over a slice of watermelon that left seventeen people dead outside the Panama City railroad station. In Panama the Tajada de Sandia, as it is known, is embraced as a heroic act of resistance against an occupying force. McGuinness uses the incident as a framing device for a complex history in which the meanings of events of international significance were actively contested on both sides of Panama's borders. …

Review: Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush., by Aims McGuinness

Book Review| August 01 2009 Review: Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush., by Aims McGuinness Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush. By Aims McGuinness. (Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 2007. xiii + 249 pp. $35 cloth, $19.95 paper) Richard Stillson Richard Stillson George Mason University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (2009) 78 (3): 439–440. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2009.78.3.439 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Richard Stillson; Review: Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush., by Aims McGuinness. Pacific Historical Review 1 August 2009; 78 (3): 439–440. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2009.78.3.439 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2009 by the Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush

Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush

Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush

Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush

Aims McGuinness.Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush.:Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush.(The United States in the World.)

Aims McGuinness.<i>Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush</i>.:Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush.<i>(The United States in the World.)</i>

Reflections on a Toothless Revisionism

Shattered Peace by Daniel Yergin Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1977 526 pp. $15.00 In the sphere of scholarship, as in other areas, we are in a period of retrenchment. The social shocks of the sixties were accompanied by the emergence of a formidable critical social science literature. This revisionist literature scrutinized fundamental aspects of American society and harshly attacked basic social arrangements. Despite the relative tranquillity of the present, it has not proved possible for serious social thinkers to dismiss categorically the insights of their revisionist predecessors. Instead, many have sought to incorporate the perceptions of the sixties into frameworks or analysis less devastating in their implications. This pattern is markedly in evidence in the field of cold war scholarship. Conventional historiography, tied as it was to the official orthodoxy, had stressed Soviet expansionism and American restraint as the hallmarks of the postwar period. Given the circumstances of the Vietnam War, revisionists were most effective during the sixties in suggesting an opposite perspective, one that emphasized American interventionism and Soviet moderation as the distinguishing features of the cold war. The latter characterization was typically linked in revisionist writing to a Marxist or neo-Marxist analysis of American globalism. In varying formulations, revisionists (Kolko, Magdoff, Williams et al.) argued that there were internal contradictions in the capitalist order that had set the United States on the path of informal empire. They suggested that American expansionism stemmed from a perceived need for raw materials, markets, and outlets for investment. These requirements were, in their view, the specific consequence of the inherent incapacity of advanced capitalism to remain self-sustaining within the boundaries of the nation-state. From this vantage point, United States imperialism and militarism were less a response to aggression than an attempt to solve domestic social problems in a manner congenial to the interests of the capitalist class.

Benjamin Harrison and Hawaiian Annexation: A Reinterpretation

Research Article| August 01 1964 Benjamin Harrison and Hawaiian Annexation: A Reinterpretation George W. Baker,, Jr. George W. Baker,, Jr. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (1964) 33 (3): 295–309. https://doi.org/10.2307/3636837 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation George W. Baker,; Benjamin Harrison and Hawaiian Annexation: A Reinterpretation. Pacific Historical Review 1 August 1964; 33 (3): 295–309. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3636837 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1964 The Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Review: ELDORADO OR ADVENTURE IN THE PATH OF EMPIRE, by Bayard Taylor and Robert Glass Cleland

Book Review| December 01 1949 Review: ELDORADO OR ADVENTURE IN THE PATH OF EMPIRE, by Bayard Taylor and Robert Glass Cleland ELDORADO OR ADVENTURE IN THE PATH OF EMPIREBayard TaylorRobert Glass Cleland J. Gregg Layne J. Gregg Layne Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Quarterly: Historical Society of Southern California (1949) 31 (4): 324. https://doi.org/10.2307/41168221 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation J. Gregg Layne; Review: ELDORADO OR ADVENTURE IN THE PATH OF EMPIRE, by Bayard Taylor and Robert Glass Cleland. The Quarterly: Historical Society of Southern California 1 December 1949; 31 (4): 324. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41168221 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentSouthern California Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Path of Empire

The Path of Empire