A revealing look at U.S. imperialism through the lens of visual culture and portraiture In 1898, the United States seized territories overseas, ushering in an era of expansion that was at odds with the nation’s founding promise of freedom and democracy for all. This book draws on portraiture and visual culture to provide fresh perspectives on this crucial yet underappreciated period in history. Taína Caragol and Kate Clarke Lemay tell the story of 1898 by bringing together portraits of U.S. figures who favored overseas expansion, such as William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, with those of leading figures who resisted colonization, including Eugenio María de Hostos of Puerto Rico; José Martí of Cuba; Felipe Agoncillo of the Philippines; Padre Jose Bernardo Palomo of Guam; and Queen Lili‘uokalani of Hawai‘i. Throughout the book, Caragol and Lemay also look at landscapes, naval scenes, and ephemera. They consider works of art by important period artists Winslow Homer and Armando Menocal as well as contemporary artists such as Maia Cruz Palileo, Stephanie Syjuco, and Miguel Luciano. Paul A. Kramer’s essay addresses the role of the Smithsonian Institution in supporting imperialism, and texts by Jorge Duany, Theodore S. Gonzalves, Kristin L. Hoganson, Healoha Johnston, and Neil Weare offer critical perspectives by experts with close personal or scholarly relations to the island regions. Beautifully illustrated, 1898: Visual Culture and U.S. Imperialism in the Caribbean and the Pacific challenges us to reconsider the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War, and the annexation of Hawai‘i while shedding needed light on the lasting impacts of U.S. imperialism. Published in association with the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC Exhibition Schedule National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC April 28, 2023–February 25, 2024

In the twentieth century, Americans thought of the United States as a land of opportunity and equality. To what extent and for whom this was true was, of course, a matter of debate, however especially during the Cold War, many Americans clung to the patriotic conviction that America was the land of the free. At the same time, another national ideal emerged that was far less contentious, that arguably came to subsume the ideals of freedom, opportunity, and equality, and that eventually embodied an unspoken consensus about what constitutes the good society in a postmodern setting. This was the ideal of choice, broadly understood as the proposition that the good society provides individuals with the power to shape the contours of their lives in ways that suit their personal interests, idiosyncrasies, and tastes. By the closing decades of the century, Americans were widely agreed that theirs was-or at least should be-the land of choice. In A Destiny of Choice?, David Blanke and David Steigerwald bring together important scholarship on the tension between two leading interpretations of modern American consumer culture. That modern consumerism reflects the social, cultural, economic, and political changes that accompanied the country's transition from a local, producer economy dominated by limited choices and restricted credit to a national consumer marketplace based on the individual selection of mass-produced, mass-advertised, and mass-distributed goods. This debate is central to the economic difficulties seen in the United States today.

In the twentieth century, Americans thought of the United States as a land of opportunity and equality. To what extent and for whom this was true was, of course, a matter of debate, however especially during the Cold War, many Americans clung to the patriotic conviction that America was the land of the free. At the same time, another national ideal emerged that was far less contentious, that arguably came to subsume the ideals of freedom, opportunity, and equality, and that eventually embodied an unspoken consensus about what constitutes the good society in a postmodern setting. This was the ideal of choice, broadly understood as the proposition that the good society provides individuals with the power to shape the contours of their lives in ways that suit their personal interests, idiosyncrasies, and tastes. By the closing decades of the century, Americans were widely agreed that theirs was-or at least should be-the land of choice. In A Destiny of Choice?, David Blanke and David Steigerwald bring together important scholarship on the tension between two leading interpretations of modern American consumer culture. That modern consumerism reflects the social, cultural, economic, and political changes that accompanied the country's transition from a local, producer economy dominated by limited choices and restricted credit to a national consumer marketplace based on the individual selection of mass-produced, mass-advertised, and mass-distributed goods. This debate is central to the economic difficulties seen in the United States today.

The Cambridge History of America and the World offers a transformative account of American engagement in the world from 1500 to the present. Representing a new scholarship informed by the transnational turn in the writing of US history and American foreign relations, the four-volume reference work gives sustained attention to key moments in US diplomacy, from the Revolutionary War and the Monroe Doctrine to the US rise as a world power in World War I, World War II and the Cold War. The volumes also cast a more inclusive scholarly net to include transnational histories of Native America, the Atlantic world, slavery, political economy, borderlands, empire, the family, gender and sexuality, race, technology, and the environment. Collectively, they offer essential starting points for readers coming to the field for the first time and serve as a critical vehicle for moving this scholarship forward in innovative new directions.

The second volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines how the United States rose to great power status in the nineteenth century and how the rest of the world has shaped the United States. Mixing top-down and bottom-up perspectives, insider and outsider views, cultural, social, political, military, environmental, legal, technological, and other veins of analysis, it places the United States, Indigenous nations, and their peoples in the context of a rapidly integrating world. Specific topics addressed in the volume include nation and empire building, inter-Indigenous relations, settler colonialism, slavery and statecraft, the Mexican-American War, global integration, the antislavery international, the global dimensions of the Civil War, overseas empire-building, state formation, international law, global capitalism, border-crossing movement politics, technology, health, the environment, immigration policy, missionary endeavors, mobility, tourism, expatriation, cultural production, colonial intimacies, borderlands, the liberal North Atlantic, US-African relations, Islamic world encounters, the US island empire, the greater Caribbean world, and transimperial entanglements.

Farming across Borders uses agricultural history to connect the regional experiences of the American West, northern Mexico, western Canada, and the North American side of the Pacific Rim, now writ large into a broad history of the North American West. Case studies of commodity production and distribution, trans-border agricultural labor, and environmental change unite to reveal new perspectives on a historiography traditionally limited to a regional approach. Sterling Evans has curated nineteen essays to explore the contours of "big" agricultural history. Crops and commodities discussed include wheat, cattle, citrus, pecans, chiles, tomatoes, sugar beets, hops, henequen, and more. Toiling over such crops, of course, were the people of the North American West, and as such, the contributing authors investigate the role of agricultural labor, from braceros and Hutterites to women working in the sorghum fields and countless other groups in between. As Evans concludes, "society as a whole (no matter in what country) often ignores the role of agriculture in the past and the present." Farming across Borders takes an important step toward cultivating awareness and understanding of the agricultural, economic, and environmental connections that loom over the North American West regardless of lines on a map. In the words of one essay, "we are tied together . . . in a hundred different ways."