U.S. Empire: A History

Scholars of the U.S. empire over the past three decades have located the formal possession in 1898 of the Philippines, Guam, Hawai'i, Cuba, and Puerto Rico as an inflection point for the field. Their works analyze imperialism as a political and economic process through the transformation of social and cultural relations across the formal and informal colonial possessions of the United States. This course will extend the insights drawn by historians of the U.S. empire through an oceanic lens that links Black and Pacific Islander knowledges and experiences under colonialism, as well as their ongoing efforts towards liberation, to the diplomatic underpinnings that have helped define the field.