Overview

This volume navigates the course of US imperialism between two major wars – the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) and the Spanish-American War (1898) – both of which saw significant US territorial expansion. However, these conflicts alone do not tell the whole story. Alongside the territorial acquisitions that followed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) this volume’s sections also explore the so-called “winning of the West,” the controversial Alaska Purchase of 1867, early US intrigue in the Caribbean, and the nation’s expansion into the Pacific in the years leading up to the formal annexation of the Hawaiian Islands in 1898. This volume shows clearly that US expansion and imperialism took on a wide variety of guises in the second half of the nineteenth century, making even formal territorial expansion very difficult to characterise. The varied first-hand perspectives provided here also make it clear that the nature and purpose of “American imperialism” was always very much in the eye of the beholder.

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9781032436067

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Dr Adam Burns is Head of Politics at Brighton College. He completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh and EdD at the University of Leicester. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Arts, and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He has written widely on US imperialism and political history, including the books American Imperialism: The Territorial Expansion of the United States, 1783-2013 (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), The United States, 1865-1920: Reuniting a Nation (Routledge, 2020) and William Howard Taft and the Philippines: A Blueprint for Empire (University of Tennessee Press, 2020).

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