Here one way to bookend the nineteenth century that reveals the changing position of the United States in the world: the century began with the 1814 burning of the White House and the ignominious fleeing of the president from the still mosquito-ridden District of Columbia. It ended with the 1912 planting of flowering Japanese cherry trees within a short walk of the White House. The flickering flames of 1814 were a reminder that the new nation was not so isolated as some might have wanted to believe. A century later, the perfume of those cherry trees provided scented evidence of the consumerist fascination with foreign places, products, and peoples.

Where US history has spilled across – and often violently combusted across – various geographies and borderlands, intimate relationships between American citizens and non-American citizens have been a consistent form of colonial engagement. Communities and individuals whose land and resources were coveted and eventually incorporated into the US body politic, typically by deception or force, were literally courted by Americans wanting to form colonial liaisons. Colonial intimacies made social pariahs out of some, and vital agents of empire out of others. At the same time, interethnic intimacies and encounters could offer necessary resources, companionship, and anticolonial possibilities in the face of imperial oppression that delineated who was fit or unfit for citizenship, where one could live or work, or whom one could have sex with or marry.

By 1860 the United States had earned the grudging respect of European imperial powers and Latin American neighbors. As republicanism elsewhere floundered, the United States’ success, by traditional metrics of wealth and expansion, could not be ignored. By the late 1850s, British administrations along with Russia and France sought to partner with the United States to, among other things, transfer technologies, create stability in warring Mexico and Asia, end the international slave trade, and frame clearer rules for neutrality. Prosperity, territorial growth, and decades of American bragging about republicanism’s superiority thus left many perplexed about secession and war. Ambassador John Appleton noted that Russia’s imperial court “cannot understand … how a great government like ours, whose career has been eminently prosperous can be suddenly destroyed without any apparent cause, by the very people who are themselves a part of it; and who are daily receiving its benefits.”

As contemporaries noted at the time and as scholars have explained since, European fascism and American nativism shared common ground: exclusionary nationalism, frustrations with deliberative democracy, conspiracy theories, status anxieties, hostility in the face of change, longing for strong (male) leadership, and readiness for redemptive or restorative violence.1 The history of white supremacy, of European and American racial exclusions, prejudices, persecutions, and organized violence is a story of transatlantic affinities, entanglements – and of important divergences. The Nazis seized on American practices of eugenics, miscegenation laws, immigration restrictions, and manifest destiny ideology as a “model” for the Third Reich. Yet during World War II, the two countries fought each other not only militarily but also as an ideological Other. An exploration into the underlying depths and shallows that American nativism shared with European fascism thus requires conceptual clarifications. Not the least because, since its original European incarnation, fascism has had a second career as a political term of opprobrium, usually provoking defensive outrage and forestalling further analysis.

In March of 1945, two Indian men testified before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization of the US Congress. J. J. Singh, a tall, clean-shaven Sikh man in his late forties, sporting a closely-cropped haircut and a fine suit, stood in contrast to Mubarek Ali Khan, who was older, bespectacled, plainly dressed, and most conspicuously, wore a cap as a sign of Muslim faith. Just as their appearances differed starkly, so too did the logics of their respective arguments against the racial exclusion of Indian migrants from citizenship. Khan sought naturalization for the roughly 3,000 Indians (primarily farm, factory, railroad, and lumber-mill workers, though he was careful not to mention this) who settled in the United States prior to the Supreme Court decision of 1923, arguing that after two decades of work they deserved rights as Americans. Singh’s more ambitious bill sought to make future Indian immigrants racially eligible as citizens through an annual quota allowing 100 Indians to naturalize.

“This is a record of land: of soil, rather than people,” begins Pare Lorentz’s 1936 documentary, The Plow that Broke the Plains: “a story of the Great Plains, the 400,000,000 acres of wind-swept grass lands that spread up from the Texas panhandle to Canada; a high, treeless continent; without rivers, without streams; a country of high winds, and sun, and of little rain.”1 Ostensibly, the film’s purpose was to boost New Deal efforts to resettle struggling farmers and rehabilitate impoverished soil. Rex Tugwell, as head of the New Deal Resettlement Administration (RSA), sponsored Lorentz’s film on the recommendation of Henry Wallace, who was at that time Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture. Yet coverage of these topics was confined to scarcely three minutes of expository text, hastily tacked on to what Lorentz characterized as “a melodrama of nature – the tragedy of turning grass into dust.” In just over twenty-eight minutes of film, Lorentz’s first attempt at movie-making tracks the boom and bust of Midwestern agriculture and the ecological crisis of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s (). Stylistically, the film owed more to silent pictures than talkies. For the score, the popular composer Vergil Thompson wove an epic tapestry of military marches, ragtime, popular spirituals, and folk songs. Finis Dunaway dubbed Lorentz’s film a “secular prayer to the possibilities of New Deal reform,” but Thompson’s score made it otherwise: over a meditative shot of a horse’s skull on cracked earth, an organ slowly pounds out the Lord’s Prayer.2 Thompson’s musical references help us understand how shared crises can be made nationalist ones. They also serve as a reminder that, contrary to Lorentz’s claims to deal in soil rather than people, liberal reforms were social and political projects, and that the hopes pinned to them were not universally held.

While President William McKinley claimed he had no idea about the location of the Philippine Islands until the War of 1898, the US government was not ignorant of the strategic importance of this archipelago, as well as other islands in the Pacific and Caribbean. Nor was the country a newcomer to empire. As demonstrated by the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the United States had long pursued Thomas Jefferson’s dream of an empire of liberty, meaning a vision of land access and acquisition for white males as key to the growth and strength of the country. White Americans went on to embrace the idea of manifest destiny, which implied a providential and moralistic duty to civilize non-Anglo-Americans and lands. The racial chauvinism, self-interest, and professions of benevolence that justified the expansion of US federal control across the continent also extended to the Pacific and the Caribbean during the nineteenth century.

One of nineteenth-century North America’s most consequential international events took place during the hot summer of 1840, on the Arkansas River. Representatives of half a dozen sovereign nations met for a summit to bury old grievances and commit to a future of peace and commerce. Over the next several days, thousands of men, women, and children arrived to celebrate the diplomatic breakthrough, settling into noisy, joyful camps for miles along a wide bottom of the Arkansas. Southern Cheyennes and Arapahos waded south across the river to accept hundreds of horses as presents from their former enemies. The next morning Kiowas, Kiowa Apaches, Yamparikas, and Kotsotekas (two of the four nations of the Comanche confederacy) made the trip in reverse to receive guns, ammunition, and other coveted manufactured goods. Dignitaries sat down to a meal sweetened with molasses from New Orleans and reflected on the dividends of their diplomacy.

By the eighteenth century, North America thrived on its global commercial connections. For colonists like Benjamin Fuller, a Philadelphia dealer, and Thomas Nightingale, a South Carolina trader, these connections were the engine of their working lives. Over the middle of the eighteenth century, both men constructed complex business networks as they made their way by buying and selling a huge variety of commodities with an equally eclectic variety of people. Their complicated networks were the matter of which early American commercial connectivity was constituted, and they illustrate how Americans’ trading worlds were a complex combination of overseas, hemispheric, and continental ties.

In 1900, Governor Theodore Roosevelt of New York wrote a new foreword to The Winning of the West, his four-volume history of English-speaking settlers’ conquest of North America. Composing his new foreword in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt unambiguously connected that conflict to English-speaking settlers’ colonization of North America beginning in the seventeenth century. “In the year 1898 the United States finished the work begun over a century before by the backwoodsman, and drove the Spaniard outright from the western world,” he wrote. “The backwoodsmen had pushed the Spaniards from the Mississippi, had set up a slaveholding republic in Texas, and had conquered the California gold fields, in the sheer masterful exercise of might.”

For nearly three decades after the end of World War II the US government, across both Republican and Democratic administrations, pursued a foreign aid strategy premised upon the expansion of state capacity to achieve what US scholars, policymakers, and their brethren in industrialized and decolonizing states around the world, called development. The US and other Western governments, philanthropic foundations, multilateral development agencies such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, self-described “development economists,” and even private corporations broadly agreed that strong states could perform functions that markets performed poorly or not at all. States could build infrastructure, create new institutions of governance and administration, train teachers, scientists, engineers, and bureaucrats, modernize armies and agriculture, engage in varieties of economic and social planning, create social capacity among ordinary people, and pursue strategies for industrialization toward a common modernity.

A broad perspective on the history of American antislavery in the revolutionary era might begin with the geographic and demographic conditions that first made the Atlantic slave trade and colonial slavery controversial. In the mid-eighteenth century, the thirteen colonies occupied the northern end of the long chain of plantation colonies that arced down the western shore of the Atlantic Ocean from the Chesapeake Bay to Rio de Janeiro. In North America, captured Africans and their descendants labored predominantly in the staple-producing colonies of Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, and Georgia. Ninety percent lived either in the Chesapeake or the Lowcountry. Those 500,000 captives, though, represented just a tenth of the enslaved population of the Americas in 1760. The beating heart of the plantation complex lay in the Caribbean where 3 to 4 million toiled, predominantly on sugar plantations. Further south, Brazil contained perhaps one-and-a-half million Africans, roughly three times the number who resided in the thirteen colonies that declared independence from Britain in 1776. The provinces that formed the new American republic, therefore, sat at the margins of this system.

“Religion” is an expansive idea, but not, to use the words of Jonathan Z. Smith, a “native category.” Smith’s pithy phrase reminds historians not to approach the religious history of contact and colonization as a moment in which European, Indigenous, and African peoples came to confront one another’s religions, because the concept itself – its grouping of ethical systems, origin stories, and beliefs about transcendent truths – was an exclusively European idea. It was an important one, however, because religion functioned for Europeans as an organizing concept in the dynamics of conquest, enslavement, and revolution. They used religion to define the borders between peoples, and those boundaries influenced the shape and tenor of empires. Two religious boundaries warrant particular attention. The first is the border between Christians and non-Christians. This distinction existed primarily for Europeans; it justified expansion across the globe and the conquests that followed. The second border is between Protestants and Catholics, the confessional competition that shaped politics and warfare in the early modern period and also marked the boundaries of civic participation for those in the British Empire.

On August 6 and 9, 1945, the 503rd Composite Group of the Army Air Forces dropped a single bomb on each of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The cities were devastated, with tens of thousands killed in the blast, the subsequent firestorm, and the days of starvation and chaos that followed, not to mention the many more who suffered from lingering effects in the years to come. As is universally known today – but was not always understood then – these were atomic (more precisely, nuclear or fission) bombs, which generated their tremendous power from the splitting of the heavy atomic nuclei of uranium (Hiroshima’s Little Boy) or plutonium (Nagasaki’s Fat Man). They have never been used in combat since, yet from this first catastrophic revelation to global humanity they have been integral to the relationship of the United States with the world.

Calls to revolution echoed throughout the Atlantic world at the end of the eighteenth century. Beginning with the American War for Independence from the British, insurrection spread to four continents. From the Americas to Geneva, from the Low Countries to France and the Caribbean, then up and down the West African coast and through the Andes, revolutionaries challenged an old order built on privilege. Thomas Paine proclaimed the decades following the American War for Independence “an Age of Revolutions.” Like the revolutionaries who followed on both sides of the Atlantic, Paine was convinced that anything was possible as empires unraveled and monarchs toppled off their thrones. A new era of rights appeared on the horizon.

On September 2, 1945, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan, General Douglas MacArthur, boarded the USS Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay. He was there to preside over the unconditional surrender of the Empire of Japan. The site for the ceremony closing the Asian chapter of World War II was intentional: In 1853, US Admiral Matthew Perry’s coal-burning Black Ships had first entered this harbor to “open” Japan to the world as the Americans pushed an arc of power across the Pacific Ocean from California to Canton. And open Japan did. By World War I, Japan had begun industrializing, joined the club of the “great powers,” and was playing the Western “imperial game” with nationalist gusto. So much so that its expansionism in the 1930s triggered war with the Americans in 1941, when Tokyo tried to make an empire of the Asia-Pacific by seizing Guam, attacking Hawai‘i, and then conquering Southeast Asia.

In 1775 Benjamin Franklin reflected on the precarious existence of thirteen colonies that sought independence in a world of empires. “[T]he circumstances of a rising State,” he observed, “make it necessary frequently to consult the law of nations.”1 Other founders agreed. This is why the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence makes an appeal to “the powers of the earth” and offers “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” In order to survive, flourish, and attract foreign support, a fledgling nation needed to observe the existing rules of international law.