Childhood's Imperial Imagination: Edward Stratemeyer's Fiction Factory and the Valorization of American Empire

2008 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-512 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Rouleau
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
Series Fiction ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Successful Author ◽  
Adventure Novels

Numerous studies have appeared in recent years that deal with the reasons and rationalizations that accompanied America's overseas acquisitions in 1898. This article uses juvenile series fiction to examine how the nation's youth—boys in particular—became targets of imperial boosterism. In the pages of adventure novels set against the backdrop of American interventions in the Caribbean and the Philippines, Edward Stratemeyer, the most successful author and publisher of youth series fiction, and other less well-known juvenile fiction producers offered sensationalistic dramas that advocated a racialist, expansionistic foreign policy. Stratemeyer and others offered American boys an imaginative space as participants in and future stewards of national triumph. Young readers, the article argues further, became active participants in their own politicization. An examination of the voluminous fan mail sent to series fiction authors by their juvenile admirers reveals boys' willingness, even eagerness, to participate in the ascendancy of the United States.

Making War upon the Chart

2018 ◽  
pp. 166-201
Author(s):  
Jason W. Smith
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Central Place ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Western Pacific ◽  
American Empire ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Western Pacific ◽  
Hydrographic Surveying

This chapter examines the place of charts and hydrographic surveying in the consolidation of a formal American empire after 1898 and the central place of environmental knowledge in the broader strategic debates concerning American empire in the post war period, 1899-1903. It follows the work of surveying vessels off Cuba and the Philippines, the emerging role of the Hydrographic Office and its leaders, and the strategic debates among officer-students at the United States Naval War College and the Navy’s top leadership in the General Board of the Navy in recognizing and debating the importance of the marine environment generally and the specific strategic features of various harbors and coastlines from the Caribbean to the Western Pacific. The chapter argues that charts, hydrographic surveying, and a larger cartographic discourse were central to the geography of American empire, particularly in projecting American sea power into the Western Pacific and the Caribbean.

“I Am Already Annexed”: Ramon Reyes Lala and the Crafting of “Philippine” Advocacy for American Empire

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 426-446
Author(s):  
Theresa Ventura
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Public Speaking ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
American Empire ◽  
American Citizen ◽  
Political Patronage ◽  
Race Formation

AbstractThis article reconstructs the American career of the Manila-born author Ramon Reyes Lala. Lala became a naturalized United States citizen shortly before the War of 1898 garnered public interest in the history and geography of the Philippines. He capitalized on this interest by fashioning himself into an Oxford-educated nationalist exiled in the United States for his anti-Spanish activism, all the while hiding a South Asian background. Lala's spirited defense of American annexation and war earned him the political patronage of the Republican Party. Yet though Lala offered himself as a ‘model’ Philippine-American citizen, his patrons offered Lala as evidence of U.S. benevolence and Philippine civilization potential shorn of citizenship. His embodied contradictions, then, extended to his position as a producer of colonial knowledge, a racialized commodity, and a representative Filipino in the United States when many in the archipelago would not recognize him as such. Lala's advocacy for American Empire, I contend, reflected an understanding of nationality born of diasporic merchant communities, while his precarious success in the middle-class economy of print and public speaking depended on his deft maneuvering between modalities of power hardening in terms of race. His career speaks more broadly to the entwined and contradictory processes of commerce, race formation, and colonial knowledge production.

British Foreign Policy in the Caribbean Basin 1938–1945: Oil, Nationalism and Relations with the United States

1987 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Knape
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Policy Process ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
The United States ◽  
Caribbean Basin ◽  
British Foreign Policy ◽  
The Caribbean

The formulation of foreign policy is at best an inchoate process. The very term implies an orthodoxy of identification, pursuit and maintenance of perceived interests which is often patently lacking in reality. When a nation is beset by a declining capacity to exert influence in a particular region as a result both of competition from other powers and of incipient assertiveness on the part of local interests, the foreign-policy process may be reduced to one of administering ad hoc responses to particular developments which appear to lack any overall rationale.

Seeking Influence Abroad

2020 ◽  
pp. 209-253
Author(s):  
Atul Kohli
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Poor Quality ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Pacific Asia ◽  
The Caribbean

Born an anticolonial nation, the United States burst upon the global scene as an imperial power at the end of the nineteenth century. This chapter analyzes the American expansion into the Caribbean, Central America, and Pacific Asia. When the United States became a major industrial power in the late nineteenth century, it sought profit and power overseas, especially new economic opportunities. The United States experimented with colonialism but settled on creating stable but subservient regimes in peripheral countries as the main mechanism of control. Benefits to the United States included gains in trade, opportunities for foreign investments, and profitable loans. Countries under US influence, including the Philippines, Cuba, and Nicaragua, experienced some economic growth but became commodity exporters with sharp inequalities and poor-quality governments.

Shoring up a Sea of Signs: How the Caribbean Basin Initiative Framed the US Invasion of Grenada

1994 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 547-558 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia Weber
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Policy Discourse ◽  
Caribbean Basin ◽  
Critical Geopolitics ◽  
The Us ◽  
Caribbean Basin Initiative ◽  
Us Hegemony ◽  
The Caribbean

Diseourse in the United States concerning the Grenada invasion exemplifies what is at stake at the intersection between geography and critical geopolitics. In this paper I have taken seriously the geographic imagery of foreign policy discourse in order to examine how discursive diplomatic flows (and other fluids) are shaped by the containers in which they are placed. The Caribbean Basin Initiative—the Reagan administration's geopolitical container for its Caribbean policy—allowed the administration to chart a new course for US hegemony in the region. Contained and contextualized by the Initiative, regional struggles such as the invasion of Grenada are saturated with implications that may have been absent had Caribbean policy been framed differently.

Theodore Roosevelt: Confident Imperialist

1961 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 356-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
David H. Burton
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Theodore Roosevelt ◽  
American Imperialism ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Western Imperialism ◽  
The Caribbean

In the antithesis of Western imperialism and colonial nationalisms and the still uncertain synthesis the United States has had a significant and in some ways a determining role. By the extension of its frontiers into the Caribbean and the Pacific at the turn of the century, the United States found itself an imperialist power. American imperialism consciously endeavored to bring what was best of the Western way of life to its colonial peoples. Nevertheless, it depended on the conventional instruments of military force and colonial-civil government imposed by the conqueror. For the United States the Philippines became the fittest subject for this Westernizing process for which Theodore Roosevelt was the outstanding spokesman and apologist. Under President Roosevelt's direction the work of civilizing a backward people received a full American expression, and from a consideration of that enterprise the temper of American imperialism may be sounded. Drawing from the Philippine experiment and from experience with the Caribbean countries Roosevelt combined practical judgments with certain intellectual and emotional attitudes to elaborate a comprehensive doctrine of imperialism.

Main Patterns of Philippine Foreign Policy

1961 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 507-530 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. B. Jacobini
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
The Other ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
Insight Into

Philippineforeign policy is important to the United States for several reasons. The epigram describing the Filipinos as the most occidental of the Orientals and the most oriental of the Occidentals, emphasizes the Philippines as potentially one of the world's most important cultural bridges between these two worlds. It combines some of the best features of both areas and offers the possibility of giving each world an insight into the other. From the American standpoint the Philippines is often thought of as a show window in the Orient, and this country has a stake not only in the success of Philippine democracy, but also the Philippines provides some testimony to the fairness of American colonial policy.

America and the world: (still) a work in progress?

2004 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 443-450
Author(s):  
Linda B. Miller
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Explanatory Variables ◽  
The World

Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).Charles Kupchan, The End of the American Era (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2002).Ivo H. Daadler and James M. Lindsay, America Unbound (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2003).Did 11 September 2001 change everything about the United States including its foreign policy? Have the subsequent US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq altered the scholarly calculus of what should be studied and how? Must authors determined to assert the continuing importance of history, geopolitics or domestic factors as explanatory variables recast or abandon their existing conclusions to highlight the newer realities after the terrorist attacks and their aftermath? If so, how? These questions lead to others. Is there a usable American past that helps illuminate the dilemmas of the present? If so, where is it found? Is there a sustainable future role for the US in the world, beyond ideology or improvisation? If so, what are its contours? Is the Bush administration truly ‘radical’ or even ‘revolutionary’ in its imperial thrusts? After Afghanistan and Iraq, is American foreign policy still largely a success story? Or is the United States en route to becoming an ordinary country, albeit one with extraordinary resources in both hard and soft power?

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