0.6 Discovering u.s. empire through the archive

Discovering u.s. empire through the archive

An important turn in American Studies over the past twenty years has begun to read U.S. expansionism in the nineteenth century as part of a larger imperialist project. Whereas older histories tended to coordinate the U.S.’s territorial growth with the spread of democracy across the Americas, the “New American Studies,” as it came to be called, saw in it an aggressive desire for economic and political domination that echoed contemporary European imperial powers. The established historical narrative largely accepted that at the turn of the century the Spanish American War, during which the U.S. occupied such locales as Cuba and the Philippines, marked a turn in U.S. political activity toward an imperialist-inflected globalization. However, newer critics now pointed toward earlier instances, including the U.S.-Mexican War and the subsequent appropriation of vast Mexican lands, as manifestations of U.S. imperialism. Moreover, in their studies, they applied the paradigms of imperialism to longstanding U.S. practices such as Native American removal and African slavery. One of the earliest significant works to mark such a shift in scholarly perception was a collection of essays entitled Cultures of United States Imperialism , edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease. Several studies followed that took seriously the proposal that the nineteenth-century U.S. operated as an empire, including Malini Schueller’s U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature , Shelley Streeby’s American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture , and Eric Sundquist’s Empire and Slavery in American Literature . What most of these works shared in common was that they emerged from the field of cultural studies, rather than from a straight historical perspective. Indeed, the concept of nineteenth-century U.S. imperialism has had a profound impact on cultural studies, as critics began to interpret literary and artistic productions in terms of either their participating in or critiquing the U.S. as empire.

The ‘Our Americas’ Archive Partnership , a collection of rare documents that promotes a hemispheric approach to American Studies, contains a host of writings that places the nineteenth-century U.S. within a broader network of inter-American relations, whether they be economic, political, or cultural. As such, this archive will prove to be of particular value to scholars and students who wish to track the long history of U.S. imperialism. It possesses an especially rich amount of content on the state of U.S.-Mexican relations during the early-to-mid nineteenth century, particularly as they revolved around the contested Texas territory. One such document is the travel journal of Mirabeau B. Lamar – held physically in the special collections library at Rice University – which offers a ground level view of the tensions in 1835 between Mexico and the emerging Republic of Texas. Lamar fought for Texas independence at the Battle of San Jacinto and was named Sam Houston’s Vice President once Texas was declared a republic. In 1838, Lamar was chosen to succeed Houston and became the second President of the Republic of Texas. He fought in the U.S.-Mexican War and was cited for bravery at the Battle of Monterey. Toward the end of his life, from 1857 to 1859, he served as the Minister to Nicaragua under President James Buchanan. Several schools throughout Texas are now named in his honor. In addition to being an accomplished politician and soldier, Lamar was a prolific writer during his lifetime, authoring not only travel narratives but a great deal of poetry as well. For a thorough account of his life and writings, see Stanley Siegel’s biography, The Poet President of Texas: The Life of Mirabeau B. Lamar, President of the Republic of Texas.