This volume examines the historical connections between the United States' Reconstruction and the country's emergence as a geopolitical power a few decades later. It shows how the processes at work during the postbellum decade variously foreshadowed, inhibited, and conditioned the development of the United States as an overseas empire and regional hegemon. In doing so, it links the diverse topics of abolition, diplomacy, Jim Crow, humanitarianism, and imperialism.
In 1935, the great African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois argued in his Black Reconstruction in America that these two historical moments were intimately related. In particular, Du Bois averred that the nation's betrayal of the South's fledgling interracial democracy in the 1870s put reactionaries in charge of a country on the verge of global power, with world-historical implications. Working with the same chronological and geographical parameters, the contributors here take up targeted case studies, tracing the biographical, ideological, and thematic linkages that stretch across the postbellum and imperial moments. With an Introduction, eleven chapters, and an Afterword, this volume offers multiple perspectives based on original primary source research. The resulting composite picture points to a host of countervailing continuities and changes. The contributors examine topics as diverse as diplomatic relations with Spain, the changing views of radical abolitionists, African American missionaries in the Caribbean, and the ambiguities of turn-of-the century political cartoons.
Collectively, the volume unsettles familiar assumptions about how we should understand the late nineteenth-century United States, conventionally framed as the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It also advances transnational approaches to understanding America's Reconstruction and the search for the ideological currents shaping American power abroad.
This volume examines the historical connections between the United States' Reconstruction and the country's emergence as a geopolitical power a few decades later. It shows how the processes at work during the postbellum decade variously foreshadowed, inhibited, and conditioned the development of the United States as an overseas empire and regional hegemon. In doing so, it links the diverse topics of abolition, diplomacy, Jim Crow, humanitarianism, and imperialism.
In 1935, the great African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois argued in his Black Reconstruction in America that these two historical moments were intimately related. In particular, Du Bois averred that the nation's betrayal of the South's fledgling interracial democracy in the 1870s put reactionaries in charge of a country on the verge of global power, with world-historical implications. Working with the same chronological and geographical parameters, the contributors here take up targeted case studies, tracing the biographical, ideological, and thematic linkages that stretch across the postbellum and imperial moments. With an Introduction, eleven chapters, and an Afterword, this volume offers multiple perspectives based on original primary source research. The resulting composite picture points to a host of countervailing continuities and changes. The contributors examine topics as diverse as diplomatic relations with Spain, the changing views of radical abolitionists, African American missionaries in the Caribbean, and the ambiguities of turn-of-the century political cartoons.
Collectively, the volume unsettles familiar assumptions about how we should understand the late nineteenth-century United States, conventionally framed as the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It also advances transnational approaches to understanding America's Reconstruction and the search for the ideological currents shaping American power abroad.
Introduction
David Prior | 1
1 The Last Filibuster: The Ten Years’ War in Cuba and the
Legacy of the American Civil War
Andre M. Fleche | 27
2 “What Hinders?”: African Methodist Expansion from the U.S.
South to Hispaniola, 1865–1885
Christina C. Davidson | 54
3 Domestic Stability and Imperial Continuities: U.S.–Spanish
Relations in the Reconstruction Era
Gregg French | 79
4 “Their very sectionalism makes them cultivate that wider
and broader patriotism”:
Southern Free Trade Imperialism Survives the Confederacy
Adrian Brettle | 105
5 James Redpath, Rebel Sympathizer
Lawrence B. Glickman | 136
6 “Our God-Given Mission”: Reconstruction and the
Humanitarian Internationalism of the 1890s
Mark Elliott | 161
7 Connected Lives: Albert Beveridge, Benjamin Tillman, and
the Grand Army of the Republic
David V. Holtby | 191
8 The Lynching of Frazier Baker: Violence from
Reconstruction to Empire
DJ Polite | 214
9 “The Same Patriotism . . . as Any Other Americans”:
Reconstruction, Imperialism, and the Evolution
of Mormon Patriotism
Reilly Ben Hatch | 239
10 Schooling “New-Caught, Sullen Peoples”: Illustrating Race
in U.S. Empire
Brian Shott | 264
11 An Empire of Reconstructions: Cuba and the Transformation
of American Military Occupation
Justin F. Jackson | 297
Afterword
Rebecca Edwards | 317
List of Contributors | 327
Index | 329
David Prior is an associate professor of history at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Between Freedom and Progress: Th e Lost World of Reconstruction Politics (Louisiana State University Press, 2019) and the editor of Reconstruction in a Globalizing World (Fordham University Press, 2018).
. . . Reconstruction and Empire is worthy of a read by those who
have a keen interest in Reconstruction and empire. The essays
within this volume raise many nuanced questions worthy of future
research.-- "H-Net Reviews"
Reconstruction and Empire is an invaluable contribution to a
growing transnational scholarship.-- "Journal of the Civil War
Era"
. . . [A] wonderful scholarly contribution. David Prior and Fordham
University Press should be commended. Reconstruction and Empire
will be of special interest to historians of the period from the
Civil War to the Progressive Era and to historians of imperialism
more broadly.-- "The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive
Era"
. . . Reconstruction and Empire is now an essential starting point
for historians seeking to understand how, within a half century,
"the United States government went from conducting one of the most
radical experiments in the history of democracy to constructing a
racist empire."-- "Journal of Southern History"
Although the 1860s and 1890s feature prominently in most histories
of U.S. foreign policy, it is perhaps time that we pay more
attention to how Americans in the 1870s and 1880s interacted with
the world around them. If anyone is interested in doing so,
Reconstruction and Empire is a good place to start.-- "The Journal
of Arizona History"
Although historians of Reconstruction have broadened their scope to
encompass the U.S. conquest of western North America, they have
hesitated to venture into the Caribbean and Pacific. This
collection bridges the scholarly gulf between Reconstruction and
overseas imperialism. It expands chronologies, reframes
geographies, and traces connections in eye-opening ways, revealing
how the age of emancipation bled into the age of empire.---Kristin
Hoganson, The Stanley S. Stroup Professor of United States History,
The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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