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Walter Johnson writes about the stories that southern whites told themselves about race and slavery and about how one young enslaved woman employed those stories in a daring scheme to escape. Sold in the slave market in New Orleans, Alexina Morrison ran away and filed suit against her owner, claiming that she was a white person who had been wrongly enslaved. As her case made its way through the courts, it exposed tensions in the accounts of slavery that white southerners used to justify their social order—tensions over the balance between the prerogatives of slavery and those of nonslaveholding white patriarchy, over the place of white labor in a society founded on black slavery, over who was white and who was black and who had the power to say so.

United States history cannot be understood apart from Caribbean colonial history, Gervasio Luis García suggests. In the essay that won the oah Foreign-Language Article Prize for 1999, García studies the efforts of the United States to invent colonial relations with Cuba and Puerto Rico after the Hispanic/Cuban/American war of 1898. The outcome in Puerto Rico shows that colonies are the product not only of imperial impositions but also of complicities, of negotiations between the metropolis and the subalterns. Shared interests and attitudes—including a paternalistic stance toward most of the island's people—drew Puerto Rican elites and agents of the United States government together. Postmodernism's insistence on difference and exclusion clouds such similarities between conqueror and conquered.

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