Description
This course asks if viewing the United States through the interpretive lens of empire usefully complicates our understanding of American history. In seeking to answer this question, we will explore nearly the entire breadth of U.S. history, from the American colonial period to the early twenty-first century. This course will also explore a broad swath of American imperial historiography, both temporal and thematic. Students will engage with the works of some of the earliest critics of U.S. empire, as well as some of its most recent defenders. Students will be exposed to a number of ways in which historians have attempted to understand the political, economic, military, legal, social, and cultural causes and consequences of U.S. empire. This course does not seek to create experts in U.S. empire (indeed, that topic is perhaps too deep for any one person to master), but rather to expose students to as many aspects of the historiography as possible and to ask whether or not such an explana