Between 1660 and 1720 the British American empire expanded to incorporate new settlements, new trade routes, and it occupied a growing place in the British export economy. This expansion created challenges in transoceanic navigation and understanding of local geography, particularly as ambitions to trade in new markets in Spanish America gained traction. Mariners, merchants, scientists and policymakers required useful knowledge to enable their voyages and imperial activities. To meet this growing demand, print artisans in London produced an increasing amount of printed geographical information in the form of maps, charts and geographical texts. Draftsmen, engravers and printers applied their skill and labour to produce 179 maps and charts of the British Americas, and these artisans in turn benefitted from the income supplied by consumers. The increasing valorisation of empiricism and eyewitness knowledge resulting from the 'scientific revolution' also informed the inclusion of useful and practical information on maps and charts, and publishers asserted their credentials in claims to accuracy and novelty. Crown-sponsored voyages, buccaneers and chartered companies supplied eyewitness information from the Spanish Pacific and Caribbean, although the quality of information varied depending on the voyage itineraries and priorities. The growth of this market for maps and charts of the Americas highlights how the economic and territorial exploitation inherent to British empire was partly enabled by artisans living thousands of miles from colonial spaces. It further demonstrates the pivotal role of empire in Britain's long-term economic growth, and highlights that useful knowledge was central not peripheral to early modern socio-economic development.

As the United States began to expand imperially beyond the continent, conflicts grew over control of what terms such as “America” and “American” represented—and how to depict them. The so-called “Golden Age of American Imperialism” spawned excited, jingoistic texts that asserted an American identity predicated on exceptionalism and beneficence. Meanwhile, protests arose from, and in, the margins of American literature. Though scholars have rigorously examined the fingerprints left by empire in U.S. culture and literature, we now need to dust for its protestors: the elements and aesthetics of the forces resisting it require further examination. “War in the Margins: Illustrating Anti-Imperialism in American Culture” demonstrates the interplay of grapheme, graphics, and propaganda integral to the anti-imperialist movement in American literature and culture. It argues that hybrid media was essential to anti-imperialist propaganda in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Beginning with Mark Twain's adventure novels and ending with W. E. B. Du Bois's work with the Crisis, “War in the Margins” analyzes intermedia dynamics to highlight how currents of empire play out between aesthetics and imperial politics across and through the page. Each chapter considers intergroup dynamics central to the annexation debates, relying particularly on visual theory, neoformalism, and humor studies, but also attending to book history, especially in the development of imaging technologies. I open by discussing the fluctuating space of home created by narratives in Mark Twain and Daniel Carter Beard's Tom Sawyer Abroad. The second chapter addresses the impact of humor and empathy on intergroup dynamics in Ernest Howard Crosby and Daniel Carter Beard's Captain Jinks, Hero. I move beyond the domestic in my third and fourth chapters. The third examines the use of photography and hybrid media in the battle between Mark Twain and King Leopold II, a conflict exemplified in King Leopold's Soliloquy and its response, An Answer to Mark Twain. The final chapter returns to the United States through the proto-modernist periodical work of Pauline Hopkins and W. E. B. Du Bois. I emphasize the ways textual aesthetics articulate national and international dynamics central to conceptions of what it means to be an American, concentrating on the ways aesthetic concerns amplify currents and voices that would ordinarily be marginalized. I contend that a close attention to multimodal aesthetics significantly contributes to discourses surrounding narratives of national and transnational communities and provides a deepened understanding of the struggles surrounding constructions of American citizenry.

Focusing on a period roughly from 1865 to 1900, this dissertation utilizes close readings of paintings, illustrations, photographs, and other material culture to provide a lens on the rapid political and cultural transformation of the final decades of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i. Visual culture played a key role as a coercive tool as postbellum planters and industrialists who eyed Hawai‘i as the first Pacific outpost in an overseas American empire developed a colonial rhetoric that obscured Native authority and visibility and touted the “inevitable” extinction of the Hawaiian race. However, many images from this period which appear to illustrate Hawai‘i’s docility in the face of American supremacy do not fall as neatly into this simple interpretative framework as we might initially assume. For instance, this project observes how figures such as Queen Emma and King David Kalākaua refused to accept the threat to their sovereignty as they themselves leveraged visual culture in resistance to American imperialism. Chapter One analyzes photographs of Queen Emma as reflections on both Victorian mourning culture and Emma’s political ascendency from 1865-1885. Chapter Two explores paintings of early Maui sugar plantations by Enoch Wood Perry, Gideon Jacques Denny, and Joseph Dwight Strong as lenses on questions of slavery, Asian contract labor, and annexation. Chapter Three provides a close reading of the anti-annexation critique in Mabel Clare Craft’s illustrated book Hawaii Nei alongside the visual and literary production of other women who depicted Hawai‘i in the years surrounding annexation. Chapter Four jumps to the mid-20th century as it examines the painted portraits of late nineteenth-century Hawaiian royalty created by Fredda Burwell Holt alongside key works of literature by her husband, John Dominis Holt, a leading voice of the “Hawaiian Renaissance” that emerged in the 1960s following the resolution of Hawaiian statehood. Overall, this dissertation embraces its case studies as necessarily multivalent and open-ended as it resists the tendency to craft a narrative in which primitive indigeneity meekly yielded to the unstoppable barrage of American imperial pressure. Together, these chapters navigate a material landscape of nineteenth-century Hawai‘i that was layered with imperial control as well as opposition.

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This dissertation makes the argument that the Franklin Roosevelt administration (1933-1945) embarked upon a global hegemonic project to transform the United States into a world empire and bring about the "New World Order." In addition, the expansion of U.S. commercial and military air routes was seen as instrumental to the realization of this project.

This dissertation makes the argument that the Franklin Roosevelt administration (1933-1945) embarked upon a global hegemonic project to transform the United States into a world empire and bring about the "New World Order." In addition, the expansion of U.S. commercial and military air routes was seen as instrumental to the realization of this project.

This dissertation makes the argument that the Franklin Roosevelt administration (1933-1945) embarked upon a global hegemonic project to transform the United States into a world empire and bring about the "New World Order." In addition, the expansion of U.S. commercial and military air routes was seen as instrumental to the realization of this project.

No description available.

During the ten years following the Spanish American War (1898 to 1908), Major General Leonard Wood served as the primary agent of American imperialism. Wood was not only a proconsul of the new American Empire; he was a symbol of the empire and the age in which he served. He had the distinction of directing civil and military government in Cuba and the Philippines where he implemented the imperial policies given to him by the administrations of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. In Cuba, he labored to rebuild a state and a civil society crippled by decades of revolutionary ferment and guided the administration's policy through the dangerous channels of Cuban politics in a way that satisfied – at least to the point of avoiding another revolution – both the Cubans and the United States. In the Philippines, Wood took control of the Moro Province and attempted to smash the tribal-religious leadership of Moro society in order to bring it under direct American rule. His personal ideology, the imperial policies he shepherded, and the guidance he provided to fellow military officers and the administrations he served in matters of colonial administration and defense shaped the American Empire and endowed it with his personal stamp.

This dissertation produces the first attempt to bring the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and the political theory literature on citizenship into dialogue with the scholarship on American empire in the field of International Relations (IR). It explores how the United States’ quest for global pre-eminence, mirrored by the war in Iraq, reveals and exacerbates the social wounds at the seams of American society. To do this, it introduces three new concepts to the field of International Relations. It builds on historian Christophe Charle’s sociological framework of “imperial society” and “national habitus” (2001, 2004 and 2005) and introduces an original concept, the field of citizenship, to examine social conflict over the distribution of military sacrifice amongst citizens in the United States. Finally, it explores these tensions by looking at multiple documentary sources, including over 200 newspaper articles, 60 testimonies about the war from soldiers and their relatives, congressional documents, and military manpower policies.