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The Purposes of Paradise shows how travel and tourism shaped U.S. imperialism in Cuba and Hawai'i between the 1850s, when expansionists imagined them as twin possessions, and revolution and statehood in 1959. It explores the relationships between imperial fantasies and political practices in Americans' favorite tropical isles.
With a series of rich case studies focused on mobile laborers, this book demonstrates how the regional migrations of the early modern era came to be connected, contributing to the creation of an increasingly integrated nineteenth-century world.
Camilla Fojas explores a broad range of popular culture media—film, television, journalism, advertisements, travel writing, and literature—with an eye toward how the United States as an empire imagined its own military and economic projects. Impressive in its scope, Islands of Empire looks to Cuba, Guam, Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, asking how popular narratives about these island outposts expressed the attitudes of the continent throughout the twentieth century. Through deep textual readings of Bataan, Victory at Sea, They Were Expendable, and Back to Bataan (Philippines); No Man Is an Island and Max Havoc: Curse of the Dragon (Guam); Cuba, Havana, and Dirty Dancing: Hav...
Her performing days numbered, Josephine Baker transformed her French chateau into a theme park whose main attraction was her 12 children from around the globe, adopted as the family of the future.
Investigating how intimacy is constructed across the restless world of empire
This book explores the decision of the British Empire to import Chinese labour to southern Africa despite the already tense racial situation in the region. It enables a clearer understanding of racial and political developments in southern Africa during the reconstruction period and places localised issues within a wider historiography.
Beginning in the era of Manifest Destiny, U.S. settlers, writers, politicians, and boosters worked to bind California and Hawai‘i together in the American imagination, emphasizing white settlement and capitalist enterprise. In California and Hawai‘i Bound Henry Knight Lozano explores how these settlers and boosters promoted and imagined California and Hawai‘i as connected places and sites for U.S. settler colonialism, and how this relationship reveals the fraught constructions of an Americanized Pacific West from the 1840s to the 1950s. The growing ties of promotion and development between the two places also fostered the promotion of “perils” over this transpacific relationship, f...
Beyond the Black and White TV argues that depictions of racial harmony on variety shows between their white hosts and ethnic guests aimed to shape a new perception of the United States as an exemplary nation of democracy, equality, and globalism during the Cold War.
"Education for Empire examines how American public schools created and placed children on multiple and uneven paths to "good citizenship." These paths offered varying kinds of subordination and degrees of exclusion closely tied to race, national origin, and US imperial ambitions. Public school administrators, teachers, and textbook authors grappled with how to promote and share in the potential benefits of commercial and territorial expansion, and in both territories and states, how to apply colonial forms of governance to the young populations they professed to prepare for varying future citizenships. The book brings together subjects in American history usually treated separately--in parti...
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was once synonymous with steel. But after the factories closed, the city bet its future on a new industry: casino gambling. On the site of the former Bethlehem Steel plant, thousands of flashing slot machines and digital bells replaced the fires in the blast furnaces and the shift change whistles of the industrial workplace. From Steel to Slots tells the story of a city struggling to make sense of the ways in which local jobs, landscapes, and identities are transformed by global capitalism. Postindustrial redevelopment often makes a clean break with a city’s rusted past. In Bethlehem, where the new casino is industrial-themed, the city’s heritage continues to dom...