Recommended Resources
Empire Building
The books, articles, films, and websites in this section will enhance the materials included on our website for this era of American history. Many of the books are by the historians whose essays and lectures you have read and listened to here and offer in-depth studies of the topics that have caught your interest. The websites and other resources open new ways to explore American history and take advantage of new interpretations and new technologies to enhance classroom or at-home learning.
Abrahamson, James L. America Arms for a New Century: The Making of a Great Military Power. New York: Free Press, 1981.
Tompkins, E. Berkeley. Anti-Imperialism in the United States: The Great Debate, 1890–1920. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970.
Karnow, Stanley. In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines. New York: Ballantine Books, 1990.
Rosenberg, Emily S. Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.
Freidel, Frank. The Splendid Little War. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1958.
Thomas, Evan. The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010.
Trask, David F. The War with Spain in 1898. New York: Macmillan, 1981.
Beale, Howard K. Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956.
Beisner, Robert L. Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900. Chicago: Imprint Publications, 1992.
Clements, Kendrick A. William Jennings Bryan: Missionary Isolationist. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982.
Recommended Resources from Other Sub-Eras
Stephanson, Anders. Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.
McGurl, Mark. The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Delbanco, Andrew. The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Morris, Edmund. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1979.