An American Empire

The fourteen essays in this collection equally emphasize history and culture and thereby offer a global approach to the highly delicate question of American imperialism, and anti-imperialism for that matter : empire between 1881 and 1917 reveals itself to be a state of mind as much as a geopolitical reality. Perhaps the authors' most useful contribution to the ongoing historiographical debate on the nature of US expansionism and interventionism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is their exploration of the American mind through a number of case studies that strikingly underline the same ethnocentric and moralistic postures among statesmen, intellectuals, writers and artists. The end result is a multilevel probing of the sources of US conduct, an analysis of the myths, misconceptions and stereotypes that nourished expansionist/imperialist policy making in America a century ago, and possibly still do…