Customer Reviews

Literary Culture and U.S Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II

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The low rating is for the kindle version only, which was so poorly formatted as to make me put off reading Rowe's book until I can get it out of the library. Periods are frequently used instead of commas, dates are split across lines and the endnotes are not linked, which in my experience means they might as well not exist for the good they do me.

When one thinks of overt American imperialism, it is commonly associated with the period just before World War 1, when jingoism entered the public parlance, in association with an aggressive expansionism and, incidentally, Teddy Roosevelt. Specifically, the Spanish-American war and the annexation of Cuba and Philippines are now considered the 'high noon' of that era.

But Rowe takes us back further. He traces antecedents in thought back to the Revolution itself. From popular contemporary writings, some now quite obscure, he shows attitudes that conflated expansion of the nation with an ideal that made this seem natural or ordained by God. Where the technological superiority of the American settlers over natives or Mexicans reflected an innate superiority.

The broad outlines of the book have already been well known in many analyses of the doctrine of manifest destiny. Though the gleanings from writings that Rowe gives here are interesting, in that they are rarely found in those studies.