This narrative essay tells the story of U. S. soldiers’ use of water torture during the Philippine-American War, its exposure by American anti-colonialist critics, and the ensuing 1902 Senate investigation and public debate over the legitimacy of the “water cure” and U. S. colonial warfare more generally.

This essay discusses racialization and colonial warfare as entangled processes during the Philippine-American War. Changing American visions of the Philippine population, and Filipino efforts to affect those visions, informed the shifting nature of U. S. combat; similarly, the dynamics of combat—especially guerrilla warfare—intensified Americans’ racialization of Filipino combatants and civilians.

Introduction to Leon Wolff’s Little Brown Brother: How the United States Purchased and Pacified the Philippine Islands at the Century’s Tur

Social History (February 2005) During the 1990s social scientists, journalists and policy-makers collaborated in the assembly ofthe powerful organizing concept of ‘globalization’. While theorizing on a global scale washardly new, ‘globalization’ was represented as both a revolutionary process and the name for anovel historical moment, one in which dense, fluid …

In Avi Y. Decter and Melissa Martens, eds., Enterprising Emporiums: The Jewish Department Stores of Downtown Baltimore (The Jewish Museum of Maryland, 2003) This essay looks at black-Jewish relations in early 20th century Baltimore through the lens of racial practices carried out in the city’s department stores, most of them …

American Historical Review (December 2002)

This essay discusses the profound ways that Americans’ debates about U. S. colonialism after 1898 were shaped by their reflections on British colonialism. Colonialism’s critics contrasted the British Empire’s tyranny with what they saw as U. S. national-exceptionalist freedom; colonialism’s defenders adapted Anglo-Saxonist ideology to make a racial-exceptionalist case for …

With John Plotz, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History (Spring 2001) This article opens a special issue of the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History dedicated to selected papers given at the 2000 conference “Pairing Empires: Britain and the United States, 1857-1947.”  It introduces the papers and discusses the conference’s goal of …

This article, winner of SHAFR’s Bernath Article Prize, reexamines the racial politics of empire at the 1904 St. Louis Fair with an eye towards the tense intersection of metropolitan and colonial agendas. Where traditional accounts emphasize the coherence of world’s fair racial hierarchies, the Philippine Exhibition at the St. Louis …