Frymer Building an American Empire

The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4008-8535-0
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 312 Seiten

Reihe: Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparative Perspectives

How American westward expansion was governmentally engineered to promote the formation of a white settler nation

Westward expansion of the United States is most conventionally remembered for rugged individualism, geographic isolationism, and a fair amount of luck. Yet the establishment of the forty-eight contiguous states was hardly a foregone conclusion, and the federal government played a critical role in its success. This book examines the politics of American expansion, showing how the government's regulation of population movements on the frontier, both settlement and removal, advanced national aspirations for empire and promoted the formation of a white settler nation.

Building an American Empire details how a government that struggled to exercise plenary power used federal land policy to assert authority over the direction of expansion by engineering the pace and patterns of settlement and to control the movement of populations. At times, the government mobilized populations for compact settlement in strategically important areas of the frontier; at other times, policies were designed to actively restrain settler populations in order to prevent violence, international conflict, and breakaway states. Paul Frymer examines how these settlement patterns helped construct a dominant racial vision for America by incentivizing and directing the movement of white European settlers onto indigenous and diversely populated lands. These efforts were hardly seamless, and Frymer pays close attention to the failures as well, from the lack of further expansion into Latin America to the defeat of the black colonization movement.

Building an American Empire reveals the lasting and profound significance government settlement policies had for the nation, both for establishing America as dominantly white and for restricting broader aspirations for empire in lands that could not be so racially engineered.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Frymer, Paul

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Systeme Zentralregierung
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Minderheiten, Interkulturelle & Multikulturelle Fragen
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Ideologien Nationalismus
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gewalt und Diskriminierung: Soziale Aspekte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Studien zu einzelnen Ländern und Gebieten

Über Autor(innen)

Paul Frymer is professor of politics and director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America and Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party (both Princeton).