ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how Hampton's monthly paper, The Southern Workman, taught its readers to think about American empire in connection with "the race problem" domestically. From the mid-1870s onward the Workman was consistently linking first Hawaii, and later Puerto Rico and the Philippines, to Hampton and the education of "dependent" domestic races in ways that made the US empire's situations, places, and people familiar to its readers. The seminary provided much more than manual education as did Hampton, where ninety percent of its African American graduates in its early years went on to become teachers not manual laborers. The solution to "the Negro problem" the British failed to see or extend was education that would "ameliorate his condition, leaving him in his ignorance and barbarism to flounder about." Paternal industrial education domestically could "evolve" in symbiotic relation to its counterpart in US empire, as the "brown brother" grew into civilization so too grew the nation.
