Reconstruction and Empire

More about the book

This volume explores the historical connections between the United States’ Reconstruction and its rise as a geopolitical power in the following decades. It reveals how postbellum processes foreshadowed, inhibited, and shaped the U.S. as an overseas empire and regional hegemon, linking topics such as abolition, diplomacy, Jim Crow, humanitarianism, and imperialism. W. E. B. Du Bois, in his 1935 work, argued that the nation’s betrayal of the South’s early interracial democracy in the 1870s allowed reactionaries to seize control, impacting the country's global ambitions. Contributors to this volume engage in targeted case studies, examining biographical, ideological, and thematic connections across the postbellum and imperial periods. With an Introduction, eleven chapters, and an Afterword, the work presents diverse perspectives grounded in original primary source research, revealing a complex interplay of continuities and changes. Topics include U.S. diplomatic relations with Spain, evolving views of radical abolitionists, African American missionaries in the Caribbean, and the nuances of early political cartoons. Collectively, the volume challenges conventional views of the late nineteenth-century U.S., typically seen through the lenses of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and promotes transnational approaches to understanding Reconstruction and the ideological forces shaping American power abroad.