ABSTRACT
There was a time when the only people who called the U.S. an “imperialist” power were anti-war protesters, and critics of the U.S.’s war making overseas. “One of the central themes of American historiography,” the historian William Appleman Williams famously wrote in the middle of the twentieth century, “is that there is no American empire” (Williams, 1955, p. 379-395). When the U.S. appropriated Native American lands and Mexican territory in the nineteenth century, mainstream politicians called it “Manifest Destiny,” or “civilizing the wilderness.” Likewise, supporters of the U.S.’s undeclared war on the people of Vietnam in the mid-twentieth century called that conflict “containment,” or Cold War pragmatism. But in the past few years, U.S. political discourse has seen a shift: in the era of the War on Terror, mainstream pundits and politicians have begun to use the term imperialist. Indeed, as the past-president of the American Studies Association, Amy Kaplan (2004), has noted, “today, across the political spectrum, policy makers, journalists, and academics” embrace the term empire.
