Download or read book Benevolent Empire written by Stephen R. Porter and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stephen Porter examines political-refugee aid initiatives and related humanitarian endeavors led by American people and institutions from World War I through the Cold War. The supporters of these endeavors presented the United States as a new kind of world power, a Benevolent Empire.
Download or read book Benevolent Assimilation written by Stuart Creighton Miller and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1984-09-10 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "American acquisition of the Philippines in 1898 became a focal point for debate on American imperialism and the course the country was to take now that the Western frontier had been conquered. U.S. military leaders in Manila, unequipped to understand the aspirations of the native revolutionary movement, failed to respond to Filipino overtures of accommodation and provoked a war with the revolutionary army. Back home, an impressive opposition to the war developed on largely ideological grounds, but in the end it was the interminable and increasingly bloody guerrilla warfare that disillusioned America in its imperialistic venture. This book presents a searching exploration of the history of America's reactions to Asian people, politics, and wars of independence." -- Book Jacket
Download or read book Close Encounters of Empire written by Gilbert Michael Joseph and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays that suggest new ways of understanding the role that US actors and agencies have played in Latin America." - publisher.
Download or read book That Pride of Race and Character written by Caroline E. Light and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has ever been the boast of the Jewish people, that they support their own poor, declared Kentucky attorney Benjamin Franklin Jonas in 1856. Their reasons are partly founded in religious necessity, and partly in that pride of race and character which has supported them through so many ages of trial and vicissitude. In That Pride of Race and Character, Caroline E. Light examines the American Jewish tradition of benevolence and charity and explores its southern roots. Light provides a critical analysis of benevolence as it was inflected by regional ideals of race and gender, showing how a southern Jewish benevolent empire emerged in response to the combined pressures of post-Civil War devastation and the simultaneous influx of eastern European immigration. In an effort to combat the voices of anti-Semitism and nativism, established Jewish leaders developed a sophisticated and cutting-edge network of charities in the South to ensure that Jews took care of those considered their own while also proving themselves to be exemplary white citizens. Drawing from confidential case files and institutional records from various southern Jewish charities, the book relates how southern Jewish leaders and their immigrant clients negotiated the complexities of fitting in in a place and time of significant socio-political turbulence. Ultimately, the southern Jewish call to benevolence bore the particular imprint of the regionOCOs racial mores and left behind a rich legacy."
Download or read book The Forging of the American Empire written by Sidney Lens and published by Pluto Press. This book was released on 2003-06-20 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Mexico to Vietnam, from Nicaragua to Lebanon, and more recently to Kosovo, East Timor and now Iraq, the United States has intervened in the affairs of other nations. Yet American leaders continue to promote the myth that America is benevolent and peace-loving, and involves itself in conflicts only to defend the rights of others; excesses and cruelties, though sometimes admitted, usually are regarded as momentary aberrations.This classic book is the first truly comprehensive history of American imperialism. Now fully updated, and featuring a new introduction by Howard Zinn, it is a must-read for all students and scholars of American history. Renowned author Sidney Lens shows how the United States, from the time it gained its own independence, has used every available means - political, economic, and military - to dominate other nations.Lens presents a powerful argument, meticulously pieced together from a huge array of sources, to prove that imperialism is an inevitable consequence of the U.S. economic system. Surveying the pressures, external and internal, on the United States today, he concludes that like any other empire, the reign of the U.S. will end -- and he examines how this time of reckoning may come about.
Download or read book Jefferson s Empire written by Peter S. Onuf and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Jefferson believed that the American revolution was atransformative moment in the history of political civilization. He hoped that hisown efforts as a founding statesman and theorist would help construct a progressiveand enlightened order for the new American nation that would be a model andinspiration for the world. Peter S. Onuf's new book traces Jefferson's vision of theAmerican future to its roots in his idealized notions of nationhood and empire.Onuf's unsettling recognition that Jefferson's famed egalitarianism was elaboratedin an imperial context yields strikingly original interpretations of our nationalidentity and our ideas of race, of westward expansion and the Civil War, and ofAmerican global dominance in the twentiethcentury. Jefferson's vision of an American "empirefor liberty" was modeled on a British prototype. But as a consensual union ofself-governing republics without a metropolis, Jefferson's American empire would befree of exploitation by a corrupt imperial ruling class. It would avoid the cycle ofwar and destruction that had characterized the European balance ofpower. The Civil War cast in high relief thetragic limitations of Jefferson's political vision. After the Union victory, as thereconstructed nation-state developed into a world power, dreams of the United Statesas an ever-expanding empire of peacefully coexisting states quickly faded frommemory. Yet even as the antebellum federal union disintegrated, a Jeffersoniannationalism, proudly conscious of America's historic revolution against imperialdomination, grew up in its place. In Onuf's view, Jefferson's quest to define a new American identity also shaped his ambivalentconceptions of slavery and Native American rights. His revolutionary fervor led himto see Indians as "merciless savages" who ravaged the frontiers at the Britishking's direction, but when those frontiers were pacified, a more benevolentJefferson encouraged these same Indians to embrace republican values. AfricanAmerican slaves, by contrast, constituted an unassimilable captive nation, unjustlywrenched from its African homeland. His great panacea: colonization. Jefferson's ideas about race revealthe limitations of his conception of American nationhood. Yet, as Onuf strikinglydocuments, Jefferson's vision of a republican empire--a regime of peace, prosperity, and union without coercion--continues to define and expand the boundaries ofAmerican national identity.
Download or read book Rebecca Gratz written by Dianne Ashton and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first in-depth biography of Rebecca Gratz (1781-1869), the foremost American Jewish woman of the nineteenth century. Perhaps the best-known member of the prominent Gratz family of Philadelphia, she was a fervent patriot, a profoundly religious woman, and a widely known activist for poor women. She devoted her life to confronting and resolving the personal challenges she faced as a Jew and as a female member of a prosperous family. In using hundreds of Gratz's own letters in her research, Dianne Ashton reveals Gratz's own blend of Jewish and American values and explores the significance of her work. Informed by her American and Jewish ideas, values, and attitudes, Gratz created and managed a variety of municipal and Jewish institutions for charity and education, including America's first independent Jewish women's charitable society, the first Jewish Sunday school, and the first American Jewish foster home. Through her commitment to establishing charitable resources for women, promoting Judaism in a Christian society, and advancing women's roles in Jewish life, Gratz shaped a Jewish arm of what has been called America's largely Protestant "benevolent empire." Influenced by the religious and political transformations taking place nationally and locally, Gratz matured into a social visionary whose dreams for American Jewish life far surpassed the realities she saw around her. She believed that Judaism was advanced by the founding of the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society and the Hebrew Sunday School because they offered religious education to thousands of children and leadership opportunities to Jewish women. Gratz's organizations worked with an inclusive definition of Jewishness that encompassed all Philadelphia Jews at a time when differences in national origin, worship style, and religious philosophy divided them. Legend has it that Gratz was the prototype for the heroine Rebecca of York in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, the Jewish woman who refused to wed the Christian hero of the tale out of loyalty to her faith and father. That legend has draped Gratz's life in sentimentality and has blurred our vision of her. Rebecca Gratz is the first book to examine Gratz's life, her legend, and our memory.
Download or read book Bonds of Salvation written by Ben Wright and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2020-12-16 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ben Wright’s Bonds of Salvation demonstrates how religion structured the possibilities and limitations of American abolitionism during the early years of the republic. From the American Revolution through the eruption of schisms in the three largest Protestant denominations in the 1840s, this comprehensive work lays bare the social and religious divides that culminated in secession and civil war. Historians often emphasize status anxieties, market changes, biracial cooperation, and political maneuvering as primary forces in the evolution of slavery in the United States. Wright instead foregrounds the pivotal role religion played in shaping the ideological contours of the early abolitionist movement. Wright first examines the ideological distinctions between religious conversion and purification in the aftermath of the Revolution, when a small number of white Christians contended that the nation must purify itself from slavery before it could fulfill its religious destiny. Most white Christians disagreed, focusing on visions of spiritual salvation over the practical goal of emancipation. To expand salvation to all, they created new denominations equipped to carry the gospel across the American continent and eventually all over the globe. These denominations established numerous reform organizations, collectively known as the “benevolent empire,” to reckon with the problem of slavery. One affiliated group, the American Colonization Society (ACS), worked to end slavery and secure white supremacy by promising salvation for Africa and redemption for the United States. Yet the ACS and its efforts drew strong objections. Proslavery prophets transformed expectations of expanded salvation into a formidable antiabolitionist weapon, framing the ACS's proponents as enemies of national unity. Abolitionist assertions that enslavers could not serve as agents of salvation sapped the most potent force in American nationalism—Christianity—and led to schisms within the Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist churches. These divides exacerbated sectional hostilities and sent the nation farther down the path to secession and war. Wright’s provocative analysis reveals that visions of salvation both created and almost destroyed the American nation.
Download or read book The Equality of Believers written by Richard Elphick and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2012-10-03 with total page 862 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the beginning of the nineteenth century through to 1960, Protestant missionaries were the most important intermediaries between South Africa’s ruling white minority and its black majority. The Equality of Believers reconfigures the narrative of race in South Africa by exploring the pivotal role played by these missionaries and their teachings in shaping that nation’s history. The missionaries articulated a universalist and egalitarian ideology derived from New Testament teachings that rebuked the racial hierarchies endemic to South African society. Yet white settlers, the churches closely tied to them, and even many missionaries evaded or subverted these ideas. In the early years of settlement, the white minority justified its supremacy by equating Christianity with white racial identity. Later, they adopted segregated churches for blacks and whites, followed by segregationist laws blocking blacks’ access to prosperity and citizenship—and, eventually, by the ambitious plan of social engineering that was apartheid. Providing historical context reaching back to 1652, Elphick concentrates on the era of industrialization, segregation, and the beginnings of apartheid in the first half of the twentieth century. The most ambitious work yet from this renowned historian, Elphick’s book reveals the deep religious roots of racial ideas and initiatives that have so profoundly shaped the history of South Africa.
Download or read book The Scandal of Empire written by Nicholas B. Dirks and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many have told of the East India Company’s extraordinary excesses in eighteenth-century India, of the plunder that made its directors fabulously wealthy and able to buy British land and titles, but this is only a fraction of the story. When one of these men—Warren Hastings—was put on trial by Edmund Burke, it brought the Company’s exploits to the attention of the public. Through the trial and after, the British government transformed public understanding of the Company’s corrupt actions by creating an image of a vulnerable India that needed British assistance. Intrusive behavior was recast as a civilizing mission. In this fascinating, and devastating, account of the scandal that laid the foundation of the British Empire, Nicholas Dirks explains how this substitution of imperial authority for Company rule helped erase the dirty origins of empire and justify the British presence in India. The Scandal of Empire reveals that the conquests and exploitations of the East India Company were critical to England’s development in the eighteenth century and beyond. We see how mercantile trade was inextricably linked with imperial venture and scandalous excess and how these three things provided the ideological basis for far-flung British expansion. In this powerfully written and trenchant critique, Dirks shows how the empire projected its own scandalous behavior onto India itself. By returning to the moment when the scandal of empire became acceptable we gain a new understanding of the modern culture of the colonizer and the colonized and the manifold implications for Britain, India, and the world.
Download or read book Empire s Proxy written by Meg Wesling and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011-04-11 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series In the late nineteenth century, American teachers descended on the Philippines, which had been newly purchased by the U.S. at the end of the Spanish-American War. Motivated by President McKinley’s project of “benevolent assimilation,” they established a school system that centered on English language and American literature to advance the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, which was held up as justification for the U.S.’s civilizing mission and offered as a promise of moral uplift and political advancement. Meanwhile, on American soil, the field of American literature was just being developed and fundamentally, though invisibly, defined by this new, extraterritorial expansion. Drawing on a wealth of material, including historical records, governmental documents from the War Department and the Bureau of Insular Affairs, curriculum guides, memoirs of American teachers in the Philippines, and 19th century literature, Meg Wesling not only links empire with education, but also demonstrates that the rearticulation of American literary studies through the imperial occupation in the Philippines served to actually define and strengthen the field. Empire’s Proxy boldly argues that the practical and ideological work of colonial dominance figured into the emergence of the field of American literature, and that the consolidation of a canon of American literature was intertwined with the administrative and intellectual tasks of colonial management.
Download or read book Insurgent Empire written by Priyamvada Gopal and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How rebellious colonies changed British attitudes to empire Insurgent Empire shows how Britain’s enslaved and colonial subjects were active agents in their own liberation. What is more, they shaped British ideas of freedom and emancipation back in the United Kingdom. Priyamvada Gopal examines a century of dissent on the question of empire and shows how British critics of empire were influenced by rebellions and resistance in the colonies, from the West Indies and East Africa to Egypt and India. In addition, a pivotal role in fomenting resistance was played by anticolonial campaigners based in London, right at the heart of empire. Much has been written on how colonized peoples took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination. Insurgent Empire sets the record straight in demonstrating that these people were much more than victims of imperialism or, subsequently, the passive beneficiaries of an enlightened British conscience—they were insurgents whose legacies shaped and benefited the nation that once oppressed them.
Download or read book Empire Calling written by Ralph J. Crane and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays gathered together in this book explore the roles of the men and women who served the British Empire in Australasia and India, and those who were subject to their administration. As these essays demonstrate, administrative arrangements involve complex cross-cultural relationships in colonial spaces, often through radically unequal and racially based power relations. Colonial administration involves diverse domains of practice -- the Civil Service, schools and universities, missions, domestic realms, justice systems -- and many forms of activities, including managing and organising; financing and accounting; monitoring and measuring; ordering and supplying; writing and implementing policies. In the two parts of this book, the authors -- from India, Australia, New Zealand, and Britain -- examine the ways colonial administrations accumulated and managed information and knowledge about the places and peoples under their jurisdiction. The administration of colonial spaces was neither a simple nor a unilinear project, and the essays in this book will contribute to key debates about imperial history. This book will appeal to readers from a variety of disciplines interested in the cultural history of the British Empire, including those working in the areas of literary, historical, postcolonial, and gender studies.
Download or read book The Blood of Government written by Paul A. Kramer and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2006-12-13 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1899 the United States, having announced its arrival as a world power during the Spanish-Cuban-American War, inaugurated a brutal war of imperial conquest against the Philippine Republic. Over the next five decades, U.S. imperialists justified their colonial empire by crafting novel racial ideologies adapted to new realities of collaboration and anticolonial resistance. In this pathbreaking, transnational study, Paul A. Kramer reveals how racial politics served U.S. empire, and how empire-building in turn transformed ideas of race and nation in both the United States and the Philippines. Kramer argues that Philippine-American colonial history was characterized by struggles over sovereignty and recognition. In the wake of a racial-exterminist war, U.S. colonialists, in dialogue with Filipino elites, divided the Philippine population into "civilized" Christians and "savage" animists and Muslims. The former were subjected to a calibrated colonialism that gradually extended them self-government as they demonstrated their "capacities." The latter were governed first by Americans, then by Christian Filipinos who had proven themselves worthy of shouldering the "white man's burden." Ultimately, however, this racial vision of imperial nation-building collided with U.S. nativist efforts to insulate the United States from its colonies, even at the cost of Philippine independence. Kramer provides an innovative account of the global transformations of race and the centrality of empire to twentieth-century U.S. and Philippine histories.
Download or read book The Rule of Empires written by Timothy Parsons and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-10 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Rule of Empires, Timothy Parsons gives a sweeping account of the evolution of empire from its origins in ancient Rome to its most recent twentieth-century embodiment. He explains what constitutes an empire and offers suggestions about what empires of the past can tell us about our own historical moment. Parsons uses imperial examples that stretch from ancient Rome, to Britain's "new" imperialism in Kenya, to the Third Reich to parse the features common to all empires, their evolutions and self-justifying myths, and the reasons for their inevitable decline. Parsons argues that far from confirming some sort of Darwinian hierarchy of advanced and primitive societies, conquests were simply the products of a temporary advantage in military technology, wealth, and political will. Beneath the self-justifying rhetoric of benevolent paternalism and cultural superiority lay economic exploitation and the desire for power. Yet imperial ambitions still appear viable in the twenty-first century, Parsons shows, because their defenders and detractors alike employ abstract and romanticized perspectives that fail to grasp the historical reality of subjugation. Writing from the perspective of the common subject rather than that of the imperial conquerors, Parsons offers a historically grounded cautionary tale rich with accounts of subjugated peoples throwing off the yoke of empire time and time again. In providing an accurate picture of what it is like to live as a subject, The Rule of Empires lays bare the rationalizations of imperial conquerors and their apologists and exposes the true limits of hard power.
Download or read book How to Hide an Empire written by Daniel Immerwahr and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of the ten best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune A Publishers Weekly best book of 2019 | A 2019 NPR Staff Pick A pathbreaking history of the United States’ overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an “empire,” exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories—the islands, atolls, and archipelagos—this country has governed and inhabited? In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century’s most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress. In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of colonies. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history.
Download or read book Over There written by Maria Hohn and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-30 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays explore the social impact of Americas global network of military bases by examining interactions between U.S. soldiers and members of host communities in South Korea, Japan/Okinawa, and West Germany.
