The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. CultureHarvard University Press, 2002 - 260 pages The United States has always imagined that its identity as a nation is insulated from violent interventions abroad, as if a line between domestic and foreign affairs could be neatly drawn. Yet this book argues that such a distinction, so obviously impracticable in our own global era, has been illusory at least since the war with Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century and the later wars against Spain, Cuba, and the Philippines. In this book, Amy Kaplan shows how U.S. imperialism--from "Manifest Destiny" to the "American Century"--has profoundly shaped key elements of American culture at home, and how the struggle for power over foreign peoples and places has disrupted the quest for domestic order. |
From inside the book
Results 1-3 of 45
... South and the racist ar- guments against the capacity of nonwhite people to govern them- selves . Thus while Twain may have retrospectively structured his voy- age to Hawaii in Roughing It as a flight west to freedom , what he found ...
... South produces emp- tiness , but ironically brings Hawaii closer to home . By turning the Hawaiian language he does not understand into a translation of an American song , Twain remains deaf to the history that preceded him . Yet his ...
... South were being restructured to reproduce the condi- tions of slavery in the aftermath of emancipation . In the colonial prison of Hawaii , Twain may have discovered a comforting reconstruc- tion of the American South , a model of a ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Manifest Domesticity | 23 |
The Imperial Routes of Mark Twain | 51 |
Copyright | |
6 other sections not shown