American Empire at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
A Brief History with DocumentsFirst Edition ©2017
This volume introduces students to primary documents on American empire from a pivotal era of U.S. expansion beyond the North American continent in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Along with covering a wide range of places–including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines—the docum...
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This volume introduces students to primary documents on American empire from a pivotal era of U.S. expansion beyond the North American continent in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Along with covering a wide range of places–including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines—the documents touch on a wide range of themes, among them race, citizenship, civilization, democracy, cross-cultural encounter, and self-determination. Kristin Hoganson’s introduction provides the context essential to understanding this period and the ways in which the echoes of 1898 still reverberate today, including in the reach of U.S. power and the composition of the American people. Through a collection of sources representing the voices of those living under imperial rule as well as those imposing and opposing it, students can consider the American imperial endeavors. Document headnotes, maps, a Chronology of American Empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific, Questions for Consideration, and a Selected Bibliography provide pedagogical support.
“At long last, there is an accessible and short study of the effects of the Spanish American War. The documents are excellent and capture the enormity of the American empire, particularly in matters of culture. The author is one of the key specialists in the era.”
-Thomas W. Zeiler, University of Colorado, Boulder“This is the best short introduction to U.S. foreign relations at the beginning of the twentieth century (‘the American century’).”
-Thomas Borstelmann, University of Nebraska“This book provides students with up-to-date scholarship and thought-provoking documents from a key period in U.S. History. It is especially successful in providing a range of viewpoints and will allow students to understand how American empire was received, debated, contested, and remembered. An excellent fit for undergraduate courses on U.S. history and U.S. foreign relations, its broad perspectives make it appropriate as well for courses in Atlantic or world history, Latin American history, and thematic courses in empire and migration.”
-Benjamin Allen Coates, Wake Forest University
Table of Contents
Foreword
Preface
Maps and Illustrations
PART ONE
Introduction: The United States in an Age of Empire
American Empire
The Imperial World System
1898 in the Larger Sweep of Time
Expanding Interests
The Golden Age of Missions
Crisis in Cuba
Why Did the United States Intervene in the Cuban-Spanish War?
U.S. Intervention in Cuba
Puerto Rico
Hawai’i
Intervention in the Philippines
Conduct of the War in the Philippines
Government in the Philippines
Beyond the Philippines
Empire at Home
The Imperial Origins of Our Own Global Age
PART TWO
The Documents
1. The United States in an Age of Empire
1. Frederick Douglass, What Do We Want of San Domingo?, 1871
2. Frederick Burr Opper, Uncle Sam’s Show, 1893
3. Victor Gillam, The White Man’s Burden, 1899
4. John Elfreth Watkins, Jr., We Have Much to Learn in Africa Today, 1899
5. Isabel Gonzalez, Let Them Learn a Lesson from Great Britain, 1905
6. W. E. Burghardt DuBois, Ownership of Materials and Men in the Darker World, 1915
7. Charles T. Magill, Not One Person of Color Had a Vote, 1920
2. Missionary endeavors
8. Mary and Margaret W. Leitch, The Women of Heathen Lands Need the Gospel, 1890
9. Queen Liliuokalani, The “Missionary Party” Took the Law into Its Own Hands, 1898
10. Zitkala-Sa [Gertrude Simmons], I Had Been Uprooted from My Mother, Nature, and God, 1900
11. Edwin H. Conger, The Missionaries Have Some Twenty Guns, 1900
3. Co-opting the Cuban Revolution
12. José Martí and Máximo Gómez, For the Good of America and the World, 1895
13. John M. Thurston, We Must Act!, 1898
14. The New England Woman Suffrage Association, Women Can and Do Fight, 1898
15. Máximo Gómez, A Tutelage Imposed by Force of Circumstances, 1899
16. Henry M. Teller, The People of the Island of Cuba Are, and of Right Ought to Be, Free and Independent, 1901
17. Elihu Root and Orville Platt, The United States May Exercise the Right to Intervene, 1901
4. Military conduct
18. Theodore Roosevelt, The Public Promptly Christened Us the “Rough Riders,” 1899
19. Presley Holliday, Colored Officers or No Colored Soldiers, 1900
20. John Clifford Brown, I Have Really Enjoyed the Hardships, the Excitement, the Change, 1901
21. G. E. Meyer, They Were Brandishing Bolos and Clubs and Yelling like Devils, 1931
22. Edward J. Davis, They Held Him under the Faucet, 1902
23. Carlos P. Romulo, I Hated Those Blue-Eyed Foreign Devils, 1961
5. The case for taking and holding the Philippines
24. William McKinley, Doing Our Duty by Them, 1899
25. Theodore Roosevelt, The Man Must Be Glad to Do a Man’s Work, 1899
26. Albert J. Beveridge, The Pacific Is Our Ocean, 1900
27. William Howard Taft, The Philippines for the Filipinos, 1915
6. Objections to U.S. policy in the Philippines
28. Felipe Agoncillo, The Right of the Filipinos to Their Self-Government, 1899
29. [Julius F. Taylor], They All Breathe an Utter Contempt “for the Niggers,” 1899
30. Carl Schurz, Colonies Are Not Necessary for the Expansion of Trade, 1899
31. Joseph Henry Crooker, Is This the Gospel of Jesus?, 1900
32. Varina Davis, What Are We Going to Do with These Additional Millions of Negroes? 1900
7. Colonial governance
33. Richard P. Leary, Licentious and Lawless Conduct in Guam, 1900
34. Henry Billings Brown, A territory Appurtenant and Belonging to the United States, 1901
35. Roberto H. Todd, et al., Porto Rico Enslaved, 1905
36. H. C. Theobald, Clean Bodies and Clean Clothes, 1907
37. Edith Moses, The Filipinos Are like Children, 1908
38. James Weldon Johnson, The Truth about the Conquest of Haiti, 1920
8. Race making in colonial contexts
39. U.S. Statistics Bureau, Wages in Hawaii, 1899
40. Sixto Lopez, The “Tribes” in the Philippines, 1900
41. David P. Barrows, If Possible Take the Following Six Measurements, 1901
42. Louis S. Meikle, With the Americans You Must Be White!, 1912
43. J. J. [Juan José] Osuna, An Indian in Spite of Myself, 1932
9. Commercial interests
44. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Opportunities in Africa, 1892
45. Theodore Roosevelt, Placing the Customhouses beyond the Temptation of Insurgent Chieftains, 1905
46. William English Carson, The United States Has About $750,000,000 Invested in Mexico, 1909
47. William T. Hornaday, All That Remained of Them Were Several Acres of Bones, 1913
48. Frederick Upham Adams, The United Fruit Company Is More Than a Corporation, 1914
APPENDIXES
A Chronology of U.S. Imperialism in the Caribbean and the Pacific (1844-1999)
Questions for Consideration
Selected Bibliography
Index
Authors
Kristin L. Hoganson
Kristin L. Hoganson (Ph.D. Yale University) is professor of history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  She is the author of Fighting for American Manhood:  How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars and Consumers’ Imperium:  The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1965-1920.  Her longstanding interest in empire carries over to her current research, on the making of the U.S. heartland.  She has held a Fulbright lectureship at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität and the Harmsworth Visiting Professorship of American History at Oxford University and has served the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in various capacities.
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