American Colonial Spaces in the Philippines tells the story of U.S. colonialists who attempted, in the first decades of the twentieth century, to build an enduring American empire in the Philippines through the production of space. From concrete interventions in infrastructure, urban planning, and built environments to more abstract projects of mapping and territorialization, the book traces the efforts of U.S. Insular Government agents to make space for empire in the Philippines through forms of territory, map, landscape, and road, and how these spaces were understood as solutions to problems of colonial rule. Through the lens of space, the book offers an original history of a highly transformative, but largely misunderstood or forgotten, imperial moment, when the Philippine archipelago, made up of thousands of islands and an ethnically and religiously diverse population of more than seven million, became the unlikely primary setting for U.S. experimentation with formal colonial governance. Telling that story around key figures including Cameron Forbes, Daniel Burnham, Dean Worcester, and William Howard Taft, the book provides distinctive chapters dedicated to spaces of territory (sovereignty), maps (knowledge), landscape (aesthetics), and roads (circulation), suggesting new and integrative historical geographical approaches. This book will be of interest to students of Cultural, Historical, and Political Geography, American History, American Studies, Philippine Studies, Southeast Asia/Philippines; Asian Studies as well as general readers interested in these areas.

Reconstruction - the rebuilding of state, economy, culture and society in the wake of war - is a powerful idea, and a profoundly transformative one. From the refashioning of new landscapes in bombed-out cities and towns to the reframing of national identities to accommodate changed historical narratives, the term has become synonymous with notions of "post-conflict" society; it draws much of its rhetorical power from the neat demarcation, both spatially and temporally, between war and peace. The reality is far more complex. In this volume, reconstruction is identified as a process of conflict and of militarized power, not something that clearly demarcates a post-war period of peace. Kirsch and Flint bring together an internationally diverse range of studies by leading scholars to examine how periods of war and other forms of political violence have been justified as processes of necessary and valid reconstruction as well as the role of war in catalyzing the construction of new political institutions and destroying old regimes. Challenging the false dichotomy between war and peace, this book explores instead the ways that war and peace are mutually constituted in the creation of historically specific geographies and geographical knowledges.

Reconstruction - the rebuilding of state, economy, culture and society in the wake of war - is a powerful idea, and a profoundly transformative one. From the refashioning of new landscapes in bombed-out cities and towns to the reframing of national identities to accommodate changed historical narratives, the term has become synonymous with notions of "post-conflict" society; it draws much of its rhetorical power from the neat demarcation, both spatially and temporally, between war and peace. The reality is far more complex. In this volume, reconstruction is identified as a process of conflict and of militarized power, not something that clearly demarcates a post-war period of peace. Kirsch and Flint bring together an internationally diverse range of studies by leading scholars to examine how periods of war and other forms of political violence have been justified as processes of necessary and valid reconstruction as well as the role of war in catalyzing the construction of new political institutions and destroying old regimes. Challenging the false dichotomy between war and peace, this book explores instead the ways that war and peace are mutually constituted in the creation of historically specific geographies and geographical knowledges.