Eric Weber
Intellectual Agenda
Since my first days in graduate school, I have been interested in looking at how
concepts like race, gender, and empire travel across national boundaries. My dissertation,
“John Bull and Jim Crow: Race and Empire in the US South and Great Britain, 18901910” examines American and British conversations about and with each other,
exchanges that reveal their multiple and often contradictory understandings of race and
the imperial mission. The project places race and empire in a comparative and
transnational context by exploring the attitudes that different groups within each nation
held toward the other and how conversations between them reveal the continuing
definition and revision of those unstable concepts. My work for this portfolio has both
broadened my knowledge about these two states and focused my theoretical questions
about transnational constructions and conversations. By bringing together historiographic
essays, book reviews, syllabi, and original research, it highlights the work that I have
done thus far in my graduate career and points to what I will do.
At the heart of my work is a desire to look at foreign relations away from the
centers of state power, to see how people interact across national boundaries, and to
uncover their imaginations of themselves as connected to or distinct from other peoples.
The protagonists of my dissertation will not be national leaders like Henry Cabot Lodge
or Theodore Roosevelt, but world travelers like Ida B. Wells and W. Laird Clowes, and
local politicians like William Northen of Georgia. While Lodge, Roosevelt, and others in
the US government certainly articulated a racialized and masculinized understanding of
foreign relations, men and women who did not head either state also conversed with one
another about the proper conduct of race relations. In looking outside of their home
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country, they called on transnational constructions of race and gender to defend
themselves and to explain how race relations functioned in other places. Newspapers and
trans-Atlantic journals reveal regular references to race relations in each place as well as
to international affairs. Men and women of the US South imagined themselves as part of
a larger world. Looking at this discourse reveals undocumented aspects of AmericanBritish relations and urges us to look beyond the rapprochement that developed between
American and British leaders. Thus dissertation argues that the narrative of American and
British foreign relations must also include the ways in which peoples within each state
interacted with and compared themselves to each other.
My intellectual development towards this project began early. As an
undergraduate, I refused to define my interests by place or period. My classes covered
Ancient Greece and Rome, Medieval Christianity, Stuart and Tudor England, Colonial
America, twentieth century Russia/Soviet Union, nineteenth and twentieth century Italy,
and twentieth century United States. Through these classes, I became committed to
studying the past and to looking across national borders. Rather than looking at
developments within nations, I began to question where the histories of one place
interacted with events and ideas in another, and I brought these questions with me to
graduate school. At New York University, I focused on the United States and global
histories; constructions of race and empire centered my studies there. My Master’s thesis,
“Between the Devil and the Deep Sea: African Americans and the Philippine Question,
1898-1902,”1 examines African American responses to American imperialism. Both
participants in and opponents to the imperial mission, African Americans did not discuss
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A heavily revised version of this thesis is part of my major field section.
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the occupation of the Philippines with one voice. Some leaders challenged the tenets of
white supremacy that guided white politicians’ defense of the occupations. Other leaders
promoted African Americans’ actions in the Philippines as a way to challenge their status
in the United States.
While my work towards my Master’s sparked my interest in race and empire in
the United States, my work for this portfolio has further refined my understanding of
larger trends in US history. I compiled the reading for my major field, US History from
1600 to the Present, with an eye towards both expanding my knowledge of American
history and investigating the historiography of race and gender in the United States. My
projects for this field have encouraged me to develop my own take on American history
and place my research within the historiography of the United States. My first project is
an annotated bibliography drawn from the second half of my reading list. I selected
works that exemplify approaches that I found most helpful or works whose subject matter
most related to my own research.
My second assignment for this field was to compose two papers that point to
turning points in American history. The first paper, limited to American history before
1865, examines the 1760s and 1790s. By removing the French threat from the west and
creating a power vacuum there, the 1760s mark a turning point in the development of
both American expansion and American race formation. During the 1790s, trends toward
greater freedom for African-descended slaves appeared on the rise, but after slave
rebellions in Haiti and Virginia, Southern slaveholders tightened their grip on both their
human property and Southern politics. My second paper examines the New Deal and the
Cold War as turning points in the history of the twentieth century. The New Deal
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changed the relationship between the American people and their government and
constructed a new coalition that exposed tensions in the Democratic Party. These tensions
came to the fore during the Cold War. During the years immediately following the
Second World War, the New Deal coalition attempted to regroup, but redbaiting by
conservative politicians effectively broke the challenge from the American Left.
My final paper for this field is a revised version of my Master’s thesis. In it, I
refine my argument to look specifically at tensions within Black responses to American
imperialism. The focus of my thesis changed from the ambiguity of African American
responses to American imperialism to the role of African Americans in constructions of
themselves as members of an imperial state and as active participants in the imperial
mission. The invasion of the Philippines occurred at a key time in American race
formations. Just a year after the violent overthrow of a fusionist government in North
Carolina and simultaneous to the growth of Jim Crow regimes in the US South, the racial
imperialism that justified American governance of the Philippines did not sit well with
many African Americans. However, Black soldiers fought the Philippine insurgents as
part of segregated units. For many African Americans, their service in the imperial
mission justified their claims for greater rights at home. By linking themselves to their
country’s mission they put forward ideas about civilization and Americanness that
challenged white racial ideologies which linked them to the savage Filipinos and charged
that they belonged with the imperialists not the colonized.
While my major field exposed to me to broad themes in American history, my
minor field, US Foreign Relations, 1850-present, was more focused. My papers for this
field critique the historiographical treatment of gender, empire, and ideology in the study
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of US foreign relations. The first paper, “The Gender of Policy: Masculinity, the State,
and Culture in US Foreign Relations,” argues that many works thus far have allowed us
to see how gender functioned in the formation of American foreign policy, but that more
work must be done both to move the field away from a concentration on those at the head
of the state and to look at transnational constructions of gender and how they have
affected gender constructions in the United States. The second paper, “The Birth of the
American Century: Americanization, Empire, and Cultural Exchange, 1890-1940,”
maintains that the field has produced compelling narratives of both formal American
imperialism and the informal empire that developed over the course of the twentieth
century, but that we should bring these two narratives into conversation to see how each
affected the form that the other would take and to understand how the insights of scholars
looking into both forms can inform each other’s narrative. The final paper, “Culture and
Foreign Relations: Unstable Ideologies in US Foreign Policy,” examines ideology and
culture in the creation of American foreign relations. In it I point out that culture and
ideology are inherently linked in American foreign relations but that we can move the
narrative forward by looking at contingency and revision in the (re)creation of American
ideologies. These papers allowed me to work through dominant themes in the history of
American foreign relations and position my own work within this field.
The final two projects that make up this field highlight my desire to look at
American race relations in a global perspective and my plans to teach American foreign
relations. The first, “The Wide Civil Rights Movement? Internationalizing the Black
Freedom Struggle,” is a historiographical paper that explores recent works on the
international effects on the American Civil Rights Movement. It argues that most of the
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work about Black internationalism concentrates on northern African Americans, like
W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and their colleagues, who were sidelined by the Cold
War. I maintain that we need to do more work in the international aspects of the Civil
Rights Movement itself, the internationalist visions of its participants in the United
States, and its influences on and links to Africa and the Caribbean. I posit a Wide Civil
Rights Movement that would incorporate the connections between struggles for Civil
Rights in the northern and southern United States to anti-colonial struggles abroad. A
second, related goal of the paper is to place white responses to the Civil Right Movement
in an international context. It compares the political careers of George Wallace, governor
of Alabama and presidential candidate, and Enoch Powell, Conservative MP and member
of the Conservative Party’s Shadow Government. By seeing how each tapped into the
fears of white working-class men and women, it maintains that while there are
compelling reasons to separate Black Briton rights movements from the American Civil
Rights Movement, there are also compelling reasons to examine international attempts to
maintain white privilege. The final project for this field is an annotated syllabus for a
seminar about American foreign relations from 1850-1920. “Race, Gender, and US
Foreign Relations, 1850-1920” focuses on the role of culture and constructions of race
and gender in the making of foreign relations. Relying on recent works that explore these
themes, it examines the varying ways that scholars have looked at them in the history of
American foreign policy and exposes students to this growing field.
My readings in my outside field, Imperial Britain, have focused on two main
themes: racial ideology and imperial culture in Britain and its Empire, 1859-1950.
Having researched and written “John Bull and Jim Crow: Anti-Lynching, White
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Supremacy, and Transatlantic Conversations about Race, 1890-1899” which explores
how Americans and the British spoke to and about each other’s ideas of civilization, I
sought to place that project within imperial scholarship. Several questions have recurred
throughout my reading: What does the term “imperialist” mean? Who supported the
Empire and who challenged it? What produces race and what role did race play in the
maintenance of the Empire? Why decolonization? Or, what made the Empire
unsustainable? What is the relationship between metropole and colony—how does this fit
in a US context? My interests in this field are both connective and comparative. What
light does the British colonial encounter shed on race and empire in US history at the turn
of the twentieth century?
Indeed, because the imperial project is inherently supranational and often
transnational—in the sense that it fostered nationalisms all over the globe—it provides a
means of historicizing the nation-state. Too often, American historians narrowly focus on
issues within the borders of the United States even though the US has experienced waves
of immigration for centuries. Though there are notable exceptions, international events
chiefly appear in the historiography during times of war and rarely before the twentieth
century. My work challenges this insularity. The current scholarship on Imperial Britain
counters simple dichotomies like colony/metropole or colonizer/colonized and reveals
layers and webs of connection across such false constructions. Ultimately, my reading
has suggested that such categories are like national boundaries in that they are difficult to
avoid even though they are problematic. This list has furthered my intellectual agenda by
giving me tools to approach empire while providing me with insights into the
construction of empire itself.
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The earliest work included in the portfolio sits in this field. I completed the book
review of Tensions of Empire in the Fall of 2005. Though it shows its age, I think that it
highlights my growth as a scholar. I wrote the review for a class called US History in a
Global Perspective. I had read very little scholarship about the workings or ideology of
the British Empire and was told to review the collection based on my own goals of
internationalizing American history. Without having the appropriate context, I was
unable properly to grasp the compilation’s goals or how it fit within the field as a whole.
Having read many books about empire and the attitudes of the British towards their
empire, I now disagree with the first half of my review. Cooper and Stoler, et al., do not
reproduce Eurocentric categories; they challenge them by placing interactions between
colonies and metropole at the center of an imperial history. As Cooper and Stoler say on
the first page of their introduction, “Europe was made by its imperial projects, as much as
the colonial projects were shaped by conflicts within Europe itself” (1). In re-reading
Tensions of Empire for this field, I realized that documenting those interactions
challenged Eurocentric notions of imperialism rather than reproducing them. I like the
second half of the paper where I explore connections amongst the different works Stoler
and Cooper compiled. Though it is not my strongest work, the review demonstrates my
ability to write concisely and clearly, even if it its theoretical framework needs work.
My larger project for this field was a revision of the research paper, “John Bull
and Jim Crow.” I have significantly altered the introduction and conclusion to reflect my
deeper knowledge of imperial history/historiography and with an eye towards the issues
that I mentioned above. The paper itself speaks to imperial historiography by highlighting
connections and comparisons British journalists and politicians made between the
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southern US and the British Empire. There was not a single British response, as different
groups brought their own ideas about white supremacy, empire, and civilization to the
debate about lynching. The strongest supporters of the South admitted that lynching was
uncivilized but simultaneously acknowledged its necessity, while those who challenged
lynching urged Southerners to live up to their responsibilities as civilized Anglo-Saxons.
By responding to British charges, Southerners too worked to create an image of AngloSaxon civilization by pointing out ways in which the British did not live up to it. African
American activist Ida B. Wells was able to charge white Southerners with not acting as
civilized as Anglo-Saxons should, and her British allies agreed, even if they did not
themselves believe in racial equality. Similarly, Southern opponents of empire could turn
the British critique against the British Empire and its failure to be civilized at times. In
these ways, the imperial project and its justifications could be a weapon in the hand of the
oppressor or the oppressed.
It is this project that will most inform my dissertation. Indeed, the research that I
carried out for this paper inspired my larger project. As I look back at the themes that
have developed over the course of this portfolio, I look forward to continuing my
development as a scholar as I begin my dissertation. Placing the US South in a global
perspective and seeing how it fit into an imperial world should prove fascinating, and I
am pleased to be taking another step towards this project.
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