Reconstruction and Empire
The Legacies of Abolition and Union Victory for an Imperial Age
Published by: Fordham University Press
Series: Reconstructing America
352 pages, 152.00 x 228.00 mm
Edited by David Prior
Contributions by Adrian Brettle, Christina C. Davidson, Rebecca Edwards, Mark Elliott, Andre Fleche, Gregg French, Lawrence B. Glickman, Reilly Ben Hatch, David V. Holtby, Justin F. Jackson, DJ Polite, David Prior and Brian Shott
Published by: Fordham University Press
Series: Reconstructing America
352 pages, 152.00 x 228.00 mm
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).
Adrian Brettle is a lecturer and the associate director of the Political History and Leadership Program in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona
State University. He is the author of Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post–
Civil War World (University of Virginia Press, 2020) and essays in Civil War History and
the Journal of Policy History.
Christina C. Davidson is a postdoctoral research associate at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis and an assistant professor of history at the University of Southern California. She is the author of essays in Church History and the Journal of Africana Religions, and she is revising her book manuscript, Converting Hispaniola: Religious Race-Making in the Dominican Americas.
Rebecca Edwards holds the Eloise Ellery Chair as a professor of history at Vassar College. She is the author of Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (Oxford University Press, 1997) and New Spirits: Americans in the “Gilded Age,” 1865–1905 (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 2010).
Mark Elliott is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He is the author of Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson (2006). The book won the Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians. He also coedited Undaunted Radical: The Selected Writings and Speeches of Albion Tourgée (2010) with John David Smith. His current research focuses on ideas of human rights and American nationalism in the nineteenth century.
Andre M. Fleche is a professor of history at Castleton University and the author of The
Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict (University
of North Carolina Press, 2012). His writings have appeared in Civil War History, the Journal
of the Civil War Era, and A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations: Colonial Era to the
Present.
Gregg French is an assistant professor at the University Windsor. His current book project, which is under advanced contract with the University of Nebraska Press, will explore U.S.-Spanish relations during the long nineteenth century and how these interactions influenced the creation of the U.S. colonial empire.
Lawrence B. Glickman is Associate Professor of History at the University of South Carolina and the author of A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society, also from Cornell.
Reilly Ben Hatch is a PhD candidate in history and Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Fellow
at the University of New Mexico, where his dissertation uses the Posey Wars of 1915
and 1923 to examine the relationships between Mormons and Indigenous communities
in the context of federal assimilation eff orts. He teaches history at Davis High School
in Kaysville, Utah. He has published essays in the Journal of the Southwest and the New
Mexico Historical Review.
David V. Holtby is the associate director and editor-in-chief, retired, of University of New Mexico Press. He is the author, most recently, of Forty-Seventh Star: New Mexico’s Struggle for Statehood (University of Oklahoma Press, 2012) and Lest We Forget: World War I and New Mexico (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018).
Justin F. Jackson is an assistant professor of history at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, where he is revising his book manuscript, The Work of Empire: War, Occupation, and the Making of American Colonialisms in Cuba and the Philippines. His writings have appeared in Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, the International Labor and Working-Class History Review, and On Coerced Labor: Work and Compulsion after Slavery (Brill, 2016).
DJ Polite is a visiting assistant professor of African American studies at the College of Charleston. He earned his PhD in history from the University of South Carolina, where he completed his dissertation, “Democracy, Citizenship, and Puerto Rican Autonomy under the U.S. Jim Crow Empire.” His writings have appeared in the Washington Post, Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association, Black Perspectives, and Activist History Review, among others.
Brian Shott is a historian of the nineteenth century United States and the author of Mediating America: Black and Irish Press and the Struggle for Citizenship, 1870–1914 (Temple University Press, 2019) and “Forty Acres and a Carabao: T. Thomas Fortune, Newspapers, and the Pacific’s Unstable Color Lines, 1902–03,” in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
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