Awards

• Winner of British Association for American Studies Book Prize 2019 (United States)
• Winner of Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize 2019 (United States)
• Winner of W. Turrentine-Jackson Award 2019 (United States)

Overview

"Winner of the George Perkins Marsh Prize Winner of the Stuart L. Bernath Prize Winner of the W. Turrentine Jackson Award Winner of the British Association of American Studies Prize ""Extraordinary Deftly rearranges the last century and a half of American history in fresh and useful ways."" -Los Angeles Review of Books ""Offers unprecedented insights into the depth and staying power of American exceptionalism as generations of policymakers sought to extend the reach of U.S. power globally while emphatically denying that the United States was an empire."" -Penny Von Eschen, author of Satchmo Blows Up the World ""A smart, original, and ambitious book. Black demonstrates that the Interior Department has had a far larger, more invasive, and more consequential role in the world than one would expect."" -Brian DeLay, author of War of a Thousand Deserts When one thinks of the story of American power, the Department of the Interior rarely comes to mind. Yet it turns out that a government agency best known for managing natural resources and operating national parks has constantly supported and projected America's imperial aspirations. Megan Black's pathbreaking book brings to light the surprising role the U.S. Department of the Interior has played in pursuing minerals around the world-in Indigenous lands, foreign nations, the oceans, and even outer space. Black shows how the department touted its credentials as an innocuous environmental-management organization while quietly satisfying America's insatiable demand for raw materials. As presidents trumpeted the value of self-determination, this almost invisible outreach gave the country many of the benefits of empire without the burden of a heavy footprint. Under the guise of sharing expertise with the underdeveloped world, Interior scouted tin sources in Bolivia and led lithium surveys in Afghanistan. Today, it promotes offshore drilling and even manages a satellite that prospects for Earth's resources from outer space."

Full Product Details

9780674271197

Table of Contents

Reviews

Black's extraordinary book...demonstrates the remarkable reach of the Interior Department...By zooming in on the work of this important but too easily forgotten agency, The Global Interior deftly rearranges the last century and a half of American history in fresh and useful ways...Most notably, her book allows us to see how settler colonialism served as the staging ground for the United States's rise to its superpower status. -- Dexter Fergie * Los Angeles Review of Books * The Global Interior offers unprecedented insights into the depth and staying power of American exceptionalism. Black offers a lively rendering of the torturous obfuscation of the inside and outside, domestic and foreign, as generations of policymakers sought to extend the reach of U.S. power globally while emphatically denying that the United States was an empire. -- Penny M. Von Eschen, author of <i>Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War</i> A smart, original, and ambitious book. Black demonstrates that the Interior Department has had a far larger, more invasive, and more consequential role in the world than one would expect from its carefully cultivated image of domestic scientific benevolence. -- Brian DeLay, author of <i>War of a Thousand Deserts</i> In this stimulating book, Black succeeds in showing both the central importance of minerals in the development of American power and how the realities of empire could be obscured through a focus on modernization and the mantra of conservation. -- Ian Tyrrell, author of <i>Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt's America</i> The Global Interior is a model of how to seamlessly combine distinct literatures-environmental and diplomatic histories, Native American studies and the American West-in a fresh and important contribution to our understanding of the United States in the world. -- Gretchen Heefner, author of <i>The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland</i>

Author Information

Megan Black is Associate Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available