God's Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898-1902 (Imagining the Americas)
"InGod's Arbiters, Susan K. Harris deftly evokes the potent intermingling of nationalism, war, and culture at the end of the nineteenth century as the United States conquered the Philippines and took the first, halting steps toward empire." --David Silbey, author ofA War of Frontier and Empire"Susan Harris has produced a smart, readable, and timely book-timely in its view of the Christian narrative by which the United States undertakes imperialist ventures, and timely in its investigation of the relationship between religion and American foreign policy." --Jean Pfaelzer, author ofDrivenOut: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans"God's Arbitersmakes an important contribution to ongoing debates over the role of religion in American life. This is a book that clearly resonates with contemporary debates about race, religion, and America's place in the world." --Amy S. Greenberg, author ofManifest Manhood and the AntebellumAmerican Empire"Harris's meticulously researched study provides fresh insight into a chapter of the past that has key implications for debates that are as current as the evening news. This well-written and ambitious book is an impressive and welcome contribution to transnational American Studies and to Twain studies." --Shelley Fisher Fishkin, editor ofThe Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Work"[An] intriguing study of America's rise as an imperial power...Harris, author of two booksand many articles on Mark Twain, is in top form. In her able telling, Twain was a manon a mission. He had become a critic of the very ideology to which he had longbeen captive: the grand narrative of American supremacy and conquest...For a very long time, Americans have resisted recognizing and confronting their imperial impulses and admitting to the massive footprints they've left here and there around the globe. Harris's timely study reveals that these footprints have deep historical and ideological roots." --Christian Century"A masterful job...Definitive." --Mark Twain Forum"Harris has written a compelling, well-researched, and very readable account of how religious discourse provided a common ground for the debates about American expansion between 1898 and 1902. The book makes an important intervention into the scholarship on American imperialism, and its admirable work across disciplinary boundaries should make it appealing to both historians and literary scholars." --The Journal of American History"By linking Latin American and Filipino/a resistance to U.S. imperialism in theoretical rather than practical politics, Harris shows how hemispheric and transpacific studies can be coordinated in the new American Studies...God's Arbitersis an invaluable scholarly interpretation and critique of U.S. imperial policies still corrupting our democratic aspirations." --John Carlos Rowe,American Literary Realism