| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Amy Kaplan. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. (Convergences: Inventories of the Present.) Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2002. Pp. 260. $35.00.
The idea of the United States as an imperial nation has gained much popular purchase over the last two years. This understanding flies in the face of the Cold War conviction that, in contrast to the "Evil Empire," the United States has always stood for freedom; that empire might be a sordid part of our Western European allies' histories but is not a concept that can be applied to the United States. Although diplomatic historians such as William Appleman Williams and historians of the U.S. West and ethnic studies have worked to counter the myth of U.S. imperial innocence, imperial denial has persisted, both within and beyond the academy.	1
Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease's co-edited anthology, Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993), made a landmark contribution to the post-Cold War struggle against U.S. imperial denial. In her introduction to that book, Kaplan admonished Americanists to consider culture in their histories of imperialism, recognize the significance of empire in their studies of culture, and wake up to postcolonial scholarship. In this book, Kaplan speaks more fully to the movement that she helped precipitate. Indeed, this collection of essays can be seen as Kaplan's reply to her own call. To elucidate the imperial dimensions of U.S. culture, Kaplan takes her readers through a range of authors and genres. Some of her subjects—including Theodore Roosevelt and W. E. B. Du Bois—come as no surprise in a book on empire; others—including Catherine Beecher and Sarah Josepha Hale—are more startling. But even her treatment of the usual suspects is illuminating: her chapter on Du Bois, for example, focuses on one of his lesser-known works, Darkwater (1920), and it goes beyond Du Bois's condemnation of U.S. imperialism to argue that he used the framework of empire to "recenter his own international authority" (p. 21).	. . .

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