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.
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.
