| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 286 words from this article are provided below; about 432 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution. Ed. by Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. xvi, 422 pp. Cloth, $69.95, ISBN 0-8223-2689-2. Paper, $23.95, ISBN 0-8223-2698-1.)

This important and thoughtful book, the product of a 1998 symposium at Yale University, presents nineteen essays on an American constitutional anomaly. The Caribbean island Puerto Rico, annexed by the United States a little over a century ago, has not followed the usual path to statehood spelled out in Article IV, Section 3, of the Constitution but has remained an "Associated Free State" with second-class citizenship for more than fifty years. All of the essayists, half of them from Puerto Rico and half of them from the mainland, agree that this "separate and unequal" treatment of American citizens is a disgraceful survival of turn-of-the-century racial and cultural prejudice, preserved into a new millennium, and that reform is long overdue. 1

Many of the essays remind us of the taken-for-granted imperialist attitudes of the 1890s, the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Negro disenfranchisement and lynching, and the "White Man's Burden." They quote casual and studied remarks about "half-monkey savages," "mongrels," and "people with black skin, closely curling hair, flat noses, thick lips, and large clumsy feet." The racist rantings of Gen. Arthur MacArthur about the "great civilization [of] our Aryan ancestors," as he brutally suppressed the Philippine insurrection, might have come straight from the pages of Adolf Hilter's Mein Kampf (1925–1927). All of the authors agree with the Puerto Rican law professor Roberto Aponte that "the time has come for the United States to decide what type of relationship, if any, it finally envisions with Puerto Rico." . . .

There are about 432 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.