| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Power and Progress: American National Identity, the War of 1898, and the Rise of American Imperialism. By Paul T. McCartney. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. x, 373 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8071-3114-8.)

We seem so often to return to 1898—as if, "In the beginning...." And never is the return to the beginning undertaken with a greater sense of purpose than on those occasions when the American imperial project goes awry. Paul T. McCartney's 1898 takes as its point of departure the invasion of Iraq, specifically "the sincerity of the Bush administration ... in seeking to democratize Iraq and in believing that doing so is consistent with American principles" (p. 1). It is to 1898, hence, that McCartney turns to identify the "principles" that the Americans have invoked in order to persuade themselves of the virtue of their purpose and the nobility of their cause. McCartney offers a thoughtful meditation on the development of those ideals, specifically how they insinuated themselves into the larger political debates and policy outcomes of 1898. These ideals serve as the moral content of national identity, that narrative arc along which the Americans represented their purpose at the end of the nineteenth century. For McCartney, 1898 serves as a defining moment, an occasion on which these values revealed themselves with a new-found clarity, thereupon to crystallize as the cosmology with which the Americans arrived at an understanding of their purpose in the world: simply put, that the "United States has been especially entrusted with the responsibility to improve their world" (p. 11).

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