Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Associate Professor, University of Iowa, August 2007-.
Area of Research: 20th century US history, the United States in the world, US empire, comparative imperial history, and the politics of race and gender.
Education: Ph. D. Princeton University, Department of History, January 1998.
Major Publications: Kramer is the author of The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) [reprinted by Ateneo de Manila University Press, Quezon City, 2006).] Winner of the 2007 Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and 2007 James A. Rawley Prize, Organization of American Historians. He is currently working on Imperial Reconstructions: Racial Regimes and U. S. Globality in the 20th Century.
Kramer is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including: "Race, Empire and Transnational History," in Alfred McCoy, ed., Transitions in the Imperial State (forthcoming); "Race-Making and Colonial Violence in the U. S. Empire: The Philippine-American War as Race War," Diplomatic History, Vol. 30, No. 2 (April 2006), 169-210; "Decolonizing the History of the Philippine-American War," preface to Leon Wolff, Little Brown Brother: How the United States Purchased and Pacified the Philippine Islands at the Century's Turn (New York: History Book Club, 2006), ix-xviii; "The Darkness that Enters the Home: The Politics of Prostitution during the Philippine-American War," in Ann Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 366-404; "Empires, Exceptions and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule Between the British and U. S. Empires, 1880-1910," Journal of American History, Vol. 88 (March 2002), pp. 1315-53. Republished in Julian Go and Anne Foster, eds., The U. S. Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives ( Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); "White Sales: The Racial Politics of Baltimore's Jewish-Owned Department Stores, 1935-1965," in Enterprising Emporiums: The Jewish Department Stores of Downtown Baltimore (Baltimore: Jewish Museum of Maryland, 2001), 37-66; "“Making Concessions: Race and Empire Revisited at the Philippine Exposition, St. Louis, 1901-1905,”" Radical History Review, Vol. 73 (Winter 1999), pp. 74-114.
Awards: Kramer is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Finalist, National Book Award, Social Sciences Category, Manila Critics Circle, Philippines, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines, 2007;
Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies, 2007-8;
Fellowship, National Humanities Center, 2007-8 [declined];
Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, 2007;
James A. Rawley Prize, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines, Organization of American Historians, 2007;
American Studies Association (ASA) Delegate to "Framing American Studies in a Trans-Pacific Context," colloquium of the Japanese Association for American Studies (JAAS), Nagoya, Japan, June 2006;
Fellowship through Johns Hopkins University to attend the School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University, " Theories of Race and Resistance," June-July 2003;
Sadie Feldman Lecturer, Jewish Museum of Maryland, December 2001;
Dean's Summer Incentive Grant for research in the Philippines, Johns Hopkins University, July 2000;
Shriver Center Grant for Service Learning, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Summer 2000;
Bernath Article Prize, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), March 2000;
Fulbright Research Grant on Philippine-American Relations, Spring 2000;
Kenan Grant for innovative teaching, Johns Hopkins University, Fall 1999;
Invited Faculty Instructor, Cuban-American History Seminar, "Raza, Nación y Ciudadanía en Cuba, 1860-1920," Cienfuegos, Cuba, June 1999;
Dean's Summer Incentive Grant for research in Spain, Johns Hopkins University, July 1999;
Andrew Mellon Fellowship, Princeton University, Summer-Fall 1997. Andrew Mellon Travel Grant, Princeton University, Summer 1996;
Short-Term Research Fellowship, Newberry Library, Spring 1996;
Finalist, Pelzer Prize Competition, Journal of American History, 1996, 1997;
Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellowship, 1995-6.
Additional Info:
Formerly Visiting Associate Professor, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, January 2006-May 2007; Associate Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University, May 2004-July 2007; Assistant Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University, September 1998 - May 2004; Lecturer, Princeton University, American Studies, Spring 1998.
Co-Editor, "The United States and the World: Transnational Histories, International Perspectives" series, Cornell University Press, 2005-present; Co-Editor, American Foreign Relations Since 1600: A Guide to the Literature (Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations), chapter on the Spanish-Cuban-American War, the Philippine- American War and U. S. Imperialism, 2004-present.

Personal Anecdote

When you work on long-suppressed histories of violence and disenfranchisement, it can be off-putting to see them resurface as somebody's aspiration. I came to this realization very abruptly one October morning in 2003, as I sat down to rest beneath the clattering schedule board at Manhattan's Penn Station, unburdening myself of a half-dozen overflowing bags from The Strand-maybe you know this particular relief?-and opening up the Sunday New York Times. There, right on the front page, George W. Bush had an outbreak of historiography. Speaking before the Philippine legislature at the start of a six-nation trip through Southeast Asia, Bush invoked a peculiar Philippine-American past. "America is proud of its part in the great story of the Filipino people," he proclaimed. "Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines from colonial rule. Together we rescued the islands from invasion and occupation."

Bush's move here was familiar enough to any student of U. S. imperial history-writing: to smother into oblivion a brutal and protracted U. S. war against the Philippine Revolution (1899-1902) and 47 years of formal U. S. colonial rule by sandwiching them between two would-be liberatory bookends, the war against Spain (1898) and the war against Japan (1941-5). But if Bush's strategy was recognizable, the use of this usable past was new: sanitized in this way, the Philippine-American past could help sanction a new imperial future in the shape of a global "war on terror." Invoking José Rizal, the Philippines' national martyr, at one moment, and Saddam Hussein in another, Bush hailed the universality of "freedom" (at least in its neo-conservative variety) and the need for nations to "earn" it in battle against "grave and gathering danger." The historical success of the Philippine-American experiment in gun-point democratization vindicated the ongoing Iraq invasion, a project in which, in a neat symmetry, Philippine troops and medics now participated. In turn, the sinister invocation of Saddam's "mass graves" and "torture rooms" contributed to a century's work erasing those once operated by conquering U. S. troops in the Philippines itself.

What were the historian's responsibilities at such a moment? The question had not presented itself so urgently when I set out in the mid-1990s to investigate the racial politics of early 20th century Philippine-American colonialism. Indeed, my chosen dissertation topic had earned me some gentle ribbing from grad-school colleagues: in a post-Cold War world, what was this particular past going to be useful for? At the same time, though, pioneering intellectual currents, crossed with ongoing U. S. interventions, were making U. S. imperial power more visible-and more richly legible-to a wider range of scholars than ever before: to American Studies scholars urged to build empire into their "domestic" critiques by scholars like Amy Kaplan; to diplomatic historians, guided towards cultural analysis by historians like Emily Rosenberg; to cultural historians inspired to see the politics of difference, and particularly structures of race and gender, through lenses provided by colonial and post-colonial studies. It was a fascinating crossroads of influences to set up shop at.

The question I found myself asking was how, in the early 20th century, at a moment when racial imaginaries saturated global politics, including U. S. international politics, Americans had come to terms with colonial rule over Filipinos, a people with whom they had had virtually no prior experience. Given my training in U. S. history, my initial hypothesis was predictably "Americanist": that U. S. colonial officials, merchants, missionaries and journalists had "exported" prior racial understandings (of African-Americans, Native Americans and Asian-Americans, in particular) to comprehend the Philippines and its peoples. This interpretation, I now recognize, conveniently aligned the past I was studying with patterns that my largely nation-bound education had prepared me to recognize and, perhaps unconsciously, with the established job categories I imagined myself applying for. If Americans simply witnessed the "same difference" in the Philippines, it demonstrated that U. S. empire could be comprehended without intellectually departing from the conventional canons of U. S. historical understanding. Entirely legible within "national" terms, the world could be "annexed" to U. S. categories without fundamentally challenging them.

But the deeper I dove into the archival boxes, the less the world appeared to organize itself in this way. Far from tracking the seamless incorporation of the Philippines into older frameworks, I confronted profound arguments-among and between divergent groups of Americans and Filipinos-over the racial character of the Philippine population and the relevance of this question to matters of power and sovereignty. I witnessed new, imperial racial formations emerging from the specific, historical dynamics of colonial conquest and rule. As Americans engaged in heated debate amongst themselves-were Filipinos uniformly "savages" and in need of permanent, violent suppression, as the U. S. military held, or backward "children" in need of disciplinary "tutelage," as civilian officials and missionaries believed-collaborating Filipino elites came to play a decisive role in framing the racial terms of Philippine-American colonial state-building. The result of this charged and uneven dialogue was a racial state whose principal dividing line was an essentially religious one, separating Hispanicized Catholics from "non-Christian" animists and Muslims. As I attempted to trace this race-making process across national histories, it became clear to me that it could not simply be "annexed": embedded in both U. S. and Philippine pasts, it required me to find a way to narrate a history between them. It was going to involve learning Philippine history, with the help of a rich historiography and patient colleagues. And it was going to require paying careful attention to the varied and paradoxical ways that, as the U. S. rose as a world power in the 20th century, it became increasingly subject to the constraints and mandates of a global history. This would be the goal, however incompletely realized, of my first book.

But was my version of the U. S. imperial past obliged to answer George W. Bush's? Historical training and years of scouring archives had made me-and continue to make me-suspicious of streamlined historical analogies and genealogies, even those that hope to connect a critical past to a contemporary politics that I support. Faced with the journalist's question to historians-isn't the past you study just like the present I'm writing about on deadline?-one becomes painfully aware of the price of shaving history's ragged eccentricies down to "precedents," "parallels" and, perhaps most dangerously, "lessons." The Vietnam War, for example, had allowed the Philippine-American War to resurface in historical debate in the 1970s and 1980s and, in important ways, the earlier war would never again sink as far in the wells of American forgetting. But during both the Vietnam War and its aftermath, the search for analogies constrained as much as it enabled this scholarship, on both the right and left. In the face of the vast egotism of the present, the persistent but periodical assertion of a history's "relevance" ultimately serves to deny it its own "weight." Tethered to "exceptional" moments in the present, such histories are built to vanish.

As I revised my book and, in the post-9/11 period, became involved in the anti-war movement on my campus, and as Bush undertook his own effort at past-making, the question took shape with rising immediacy. What was I to do with McKinley's and Roosevelt's exceptionalist war waged in the name of "civilization"? With American publics learning their Southeast Asian cultural and religious anthropology by military means? How was I to make sense of extreme, racialized brutality by U. S. forces, including late-Victorian versions of "water-boarding"? How to read a refusal of Filipino self-government on the malleable grounds of intractable, racial-cultural failings, and a Philippine "nation-building" project characterized by an endless regress of "benchmarks"? How, ultimately, was I to interpret a denial of "empire" predicated on an occupation's permanently temporary character?

Inevitably, struggles over the neo-imperial present were raising certain elements of the past into sharper relief for me. And I wanted my work, in whatever miniscule way, to contribute to those struggles. But I did not want to surrender to them or their terms, either. My answer-a highly imperfect one, worked out more in the practice of writing than as a set principle-was to acknowledge but also to resist the force of the present, to write both playfully and darkly in a critical counterpoint between past and present. This meant acknowledging the often eerie resemblances that I observed, but-backing away from rigid analogy or direct lineage-also respecting the history's infinite distinctiveness. After all, it is from that limitless idiosyncrasy, the puzzling pasts that frustrate both the historian's standard frames of reference and the journalist's eternal present, that vital possibilities can emerge.

Quotes

By Paul A. Kramer

This book is about the articulation of race and empire in the making of Philippine-American colonial history. Like works that precede it, it argues that race as a mode of power and knowledge was a core element in the making of formal colonialism in the Philippines. But breaking from earlier accounts, it suggests that the intersections of race and empire were contingent, contested, and transnational in scope. Race was the site of intense struggle in Philippine-American colonial history, between Filipinos and Americans, between actors in metropole and colony, between actors inside and outside the colonial state. This struggle was, at its narrowest, transpacific in scope, involving participants not only in the United States and the Philippines but in Europe and its colonial outposts. These struggles were never detached from their political contexts: rather, the colonial racial-formation process was intimately tied to broader shifts in colonial politics, which it decisively shaped and by which it was shaped in turn. (pp. 4-5) Paul A. Kramer in "The Blood of Government Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines"

About Paul A. Kramer

Basic Facts

Position: Director, Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, National Archives and Records Administration, July 2007- Current
Area of Research: American Government and Politics, Cold War, Foreign Policy, Intelligence and Espionage
Education: Ph.D., History, Harvard University, 1993
Major Publications: Nafatli is the author of George H. W. Bush, (New York: Times Books, 2007); Khrushchev's Cold War: The Inside Story of An American Adversary co-author with Aleksandr Fursenko, (New York: Norton, 2006); Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism, (New York: Basic Books, 2005); US Intelligence and the Nazis co-author with Richard Breitman, Norman Goda, and Robert Wolfe, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); US Intelligence and the Nazis co-author with Richard Breitman, Norman Goda, and Robert Wolfe, (Washington, DC: National Archives Trust Fund, 2004); The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, Volume 1, ed., (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001); The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, Volume 2, ed., co-editor with Philip Zelikow, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001; and "One Hell of a Gamble": Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958-1964, co-author with Aleksandr Fursenko), New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.
Naftalu is also the author of numerous articles, book chapters and reviews which have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Contemporary Austrian Studies, The Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Diplomatic History, Journal of American History, and the popular media including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, among others.
Awards: Naftali is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Duke of Westminster's Medal for Military Literature (with Aleksandr Fursenko), 2007;
Principal Investigator, "Why Terrorists Stop," Two-year grant from the Smith Richardson Foundation, 2006-Present;
Principal Investigator, Three-year grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, 2003-2006;
Sesquicentennial Fellowship, University of Virginia, 2003-2004;
Akira Iriye Prize for International History (with Aleksandr Fursenko), 1997-1998;
Olin Fellowship in National Security, International Security Studies, Yale University, 1996-1998;
Research Fellowship, Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1996;
Charles Warren Fellowship for Studies in American History, Harvard University, 1995;
Fellowship in National Security, John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Harvard University, 1991-1993;
National Intelligence Study Center Prize for best student paper, 1992;
Harvard MacArthur Fellowship in International Security, (3 Semesters), 1990-91;
John Addison Porter Prize for best essay in American History by an upperclassman, Yale 1983.
Additional Info:
Naftali is currently General Editor, Presidential Recordings Series, 2003 - Current;
Historical Consultant, Nazi War Crimes and Imperial Japanese Government Records Interagency Working Group, National Archives and U.S. Department of Justice, 1999- Current Naftali is formerly Director, Nixon Presidential Materials Project, National Archives and Records Administration, October 2006 - July 2007;
Associate Professor, General Faculty and the History Department, University of Virginia, 1998 - 2006;
Director, Presidential Recordings Program and Kremlin Decision-Making Project, The Miller Center of Public Affairs, 1999- 2006;
Instructor, Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies (CI Centre), 2003 - 2006;
Historical Consultant, National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (9/11 Commission), 2003-2004;
Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of History, Yale University, 1996-1998;
Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Hawai'i, 1993-97.

Personal Anecdote

Among my favorite anecdotes involves a weird and nerdy coincidence. In February 1984, not too long out of College, I made my first visit to what was then called the Public Record Office in Kew, outside London. As I awaited the train at the end of my day, I noticed that the evening newspapers carried the headline "Andropov dies." The Soviet leadership had reached a point where it was as decrepit as the Soviet economy. That was my last trip to the PRO for a little over a year.

My next visit came on March 10, 1985. Sure enough as I reached the train station to catch the tube home, I saw the headline of the newspaper lying on the platform: "Chernenko Dies." I don't know what possessed me, but I then burst into laughter that I know the other passengers found unsettling and distinctly disrespectful to the dead. Thereafter I used to kid that Gorbachev's friends were asking me never to return to the PRO. It would be mischievous to now claim that because I never returned to the PRO, the Cold War ended and, well, you know the rest. But I did go back to the PRO plenty of times and, of course, and fortunately Mr. Gorbachev is still with us.

Quotes

By Timothy J. Naftali

After years of studying the intelligence and security world I have come to believe less in the efficiency of conspiracies than I do in the inefficiency of government. Most of the supposed conspiracies of modern American history dissolve when you examine them closely. The Roosevelt administration would have had advance warning of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had not interservice rivalry and overclassification of intelligence led to a decision to focus on the wrong Japanese communication channel. Japanese diplomats had not been told about the attack; Japanese admirals, on the other hand, had been. Unfortunately, US intelligence had chosen to break the Japanese diplomatic cipher instead of that of the Japanese Admiralty. In 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald exploited a last-minute change by the US Secret Service in the route of the presidential motorcade through central Dallas. Oswald had delusions of grandeur and was looking to kill someone famous. A few weeks earlier he had shot at Edwin Walker, a prominent right-wing extremist. Now he would have a chance to use his marksmanship against an even more famous man, John F. Kennedy. Certainly there have been real conspiracies in US history -- Watergate and Iran-Contra come to mind -- but our society is open enough that we eventually hear about them. Someone is bound to leak to Bob Woodward. -- Timothy J. Naftali in "Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism"

About Timothy J. Naftali

"The 41st president's political persona was the stuff of greatness, argues this entry in the American Presidents series. Historian Naftali (Khrushchev's Cold War) credits Bush less with principles than with "tendencies" toward flexibility, realism and a moderate Republican version of decency. In his foreign policy, these qualities helped him nudge communism toward a soft collapse and build an international alliance to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait; domestically they led him to a budget compromise with Democrats, in which he acquiesced to unpopular tax hikes for the good of the nation. Bush's flexibility had a dark side, the author notes, that came out in his repeated tactical embrace of racial politics, from his opposition to civil rights legislation during his 1964 Senate run to the 1988 Willie Horton ads, and in his public support for Reaganomics despite deep private misgivings. Naftali forthrightly dissects Bush's misdeeds-especially his role in the Iran-Contra scandal-but he's less skeptical about the substance of Bush's policies, which he pointedly contrasts with Bush Jr.'s failures; he credits Bush's wars in Panama and Kuwait with helping America "overcome the burden of Vietnam," without wondering whether this paved the way for the son's misadventure in Iraq. Naftali's is a brisk, useful, but not always penetrating overview of a pivotal presidency. -- Publisher's Weekly review of "George H. W. Bush: The American Presidents Series: The 41st President, 1989-1993"

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Professor of American History, joint appointment in the Women's Studies program, The Pennsylvania State University (PSU)
Area of Research: The social, cultural, and political history of the United States, 1789-1865; gender history and constructions of masculinity; American territorial expansionism and Manifest Destiny, Latin America and the United States; urban history.
Education: Harvard University Ph.D. History 1995
Major Publications: Greenberg is the author of Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City (Princeton University Press, 1998) and is currently working on The U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848) in American Culture and Memory. Greenberg is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others: "Domesticating the Border: Manifest Destiny and the Market in the United States-Mexico Border Region, 1848-1854," in Disrupted Boundaries: Consumption in the United States-Mexico Borderlands, Alexis McCrossen, ed. (Forthcoming from Duke University Press, 2008); "Fayaway and Her Sisters: Gender, Popular Literature, and Manifest Destiny in the Pacific, 1848-1860" in "Whole Oceans Away": Melville and the Pacific, Jill Barnum, Wyn Kelley and Christopher Sten, eds. (Kent State University Press, 2007); "Pirates, Patriots, and Public Meetings: Antebellum Expansionism and Urban Culture." Journal of Urban History 31 (July 2005): 634-650. "The Origins of the American Municipal Fire Department: Nineteenth-Century Change from an International Perspective," in Municipal Services and Employees in the Modern City: New Historic Approaches, Michèle Dagenais, Irene Maver, and Pierre-Yves Saunier, eds. (Ashgate Press, 2003), 47-65.
Awards: Greenberg is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
The Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching, 1999. University award given to top instructors of undergraduates in the Pennsylvania State University System;
The Kent Forster Memorial Award for Excellence in Research and teaching, 1998, awarded by the Penn State History Department to an outstanding junior faculty member;
Junior Faculty Semester Research Leave, Fall 1998, awarded by the Dean of Liberal Arts;
Derek Bok Center Awards for Excellence in Teaching, Fall 1991, Spring 1992, Fall 1992, Harvard University awards based on student evaluations of teaching performance;
Gilder Lehrman fellowship at the New-York Historical Society, June 2005;
Archibald Hanna, Jr. Fellow, the Beinecke Library, Yale, May, 2003;
Andrew Mellon Foundation Fellow, the Huntington Library, July - August, 2002;
W. M. Keck Foundation Fellow, the Huntington Library, May, 2000;
Institute for Arts and Humanistic Studies, Research Grant, 1999, Penn State University;
Global Fund Grant for International Conference Travel, 1998, Penn State University;
Office of Research and Graduate Studies Faculty Support Grants for Research, Spring 1996, Spring 1997;
Eliot Fellowship for Dissertation Completion, 1995, awarded by Harvard University for exceptional dissertation progress;
Mellon Foundation, Graduate Society Fellowship finishing year dissertation grant, 1994-1995.
Additional Info:
Formerly Acting Director, Richards Civil War Era Center, PSU, 2005-2006, Visiting Scholar, Department of History, University of California at Berkeley, Fall 2002, and Co-Director, Program in American Studies, PSU, 1998-2000.

Personal Anecdote

Although in the abstract I agree with the premise that all writing is autobiographical, years of deep thought haven't yet allowed me to make the link in the case of my own work. I seem to be drawn, in my historical writing, to violent young men with serious problems with authority and/or borderline sociopathic tendencies. Urban volunteer firemen who regularly get into street battles with gang members and other firemen, filibusters and their supporters who attempt to invade neighboring countries for fun and profit, Gold Rush travelers who raise the American flag in Panama in the 1850s, and now Mexican-American War soldiers. Not only do I not see myself in them, I wouldn't even like to have them over for dinner (except to mine them for research purposes, of course).

While my work has focused on the evolution of masculine norms in antebellum America, it wasn't my original intent to study gender. After my dissertation adviser died four months into my first year of graduate school, I stumbled through classes and comps, less focused on history than on my outsider status as a Southern Californian at Harvard, unable to accept the reality that winter boots, tights, and heavy overcoats were not optional in January. I started looking at urban volunteer firemen, a group of rowdy men who protected antebellum America's cities from the constant threat of fire without pay, after reading an account of their working-class republican ethos. I must admit I was attracted to a group that proudly proclaimed their own social norms and found a way to command respect from the emerging middle class whose property their protected. After compiling a database of firemen and their occupations (like a good social historian), I was, I admit, shocked and dismayed to find that a substantial portion of these "working-class" firemen were actually merchants and clerks. This was when I began to play around with the idea that what bound these men together was not working-class ideology, but some vision of manhood that was, in its own way, equally radical and deviant and important to those who proclaimed it.

A number of San Francisco volunteer firemen left their firehouses in the 1850s to follow the adventurer William Walker, first to Sonora Mexico, and then to Nicaragua, so I followed them into the filibustering project. I found the same celebration of martial masculinity in the ports of Central America and at urban public meetings in support of filibusters like Walker and Narciso Lopez (who repeatedly tried to take over Cuba). Most of the filibusters got their initial taste for imperial adventuring in Mexico in 1847, so now I find myself in their company once again, reading letters from somewhat under-socialized men who have an investment in the physical domination of those they consider their inferiors. I find my undergraduates have less of a problem understanding these guys than I might have imagined before entering the world of Big Ten football.

Quotes

By Amy S. Greenberg

Manifest Destiny did not mean the same thing to all Americans. Some Americans, who supported a martial vision of masculinity, advocated an aggressive expansionism that supported territorial acquisitions through force of arms, and particularly through filibustering. Other Americans, advocates of a more restrained vision of manhood. . . . believed America's Manifest Destiny would best be accomplished through the proliferation of her superior political and religious forms. . . . In other words, competing gender ideals at home shaped very different visions of American expansionism. Gendered visions of women and men abroad, from Latin America to the islands of the Pacific, justified and reinforced particular practices of manhood and womanhood in the United States. . . . Hegemonic American masculinity, this study will attempt to show, was actually made manifest through the process of antebellum territorial expansionism. -- Amy S. Greenberg in "Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire"

About Amy S. Greenberg

Basic Facts

Teaching Position: Post-Doctoral Fellow, Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department (2007-2008); Assistant Professor of History, University of North Carolina-Charlotte (August 2004-Present).
Area of Research: Modern Middle Eastern History; Modern Japanese History; Alternative Visions of World Order in International History; Literature of World History
Education: Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, November 2002.
Major Publications: Aydin is the author of Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, Global and International History Series; 2007).
Aydin is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including: "A Global anti-Western Moment? The Russo-Japanese War, Decolonization and Asian Modernity" in Sebastian Conrad/ Dominic Sachsenmaier, eds., Conceptions of World Order, ca. 1880-1935. Global Moments and Movements (New York City: Palgrave Transnational History Series, 2007): 213-236; "The 'Question of the West' and Alternative Visions of World Order in Interwar Era Japan and Turkey: What Does a Comparison Teach Us?" in Toshihiro Minohara and Kimura Masato, eds, Turbulent Decade: Japan's Challenge to the International System of the 1930s (University of Toronto Press, Forthcoming in 2007); (co-authored with Juliane Hammer) "Introduction to the Special Issue on the Critiques of the 'West' in Iran, Turkey and Japan", Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 26:3 (Fall 2006): 347-352; "Between Reverse Orientalism and the Global Left: Islamic Critiques of the West in Modern Turkey," Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 26: 3 (Fall 2006): 446-461; "Beyond Civilization: Pan-Islamism, Pan-Asianism and the Revolt against the West," Journal of Modern European History, Vol. 4:2 (Fall, 2006): 204-223; "Overcoming Eurocentrism? Japanese Orientalism on the Muslim World (1913-1945)," Princeton Papers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, (Fall, 2006): 139-164; "The Politics of Conceptualizing Islam and the West," Ethics and International Affairs, Vol. 19:1 (Winter 2005): 93-100.
Aydin's works in progress include a book project on "From Arnold Toynbee to Ali Shariati: Islam and the West under the Shadow of the Cold War," -Sponsored by a Fellowship from Princeton University Near Eastern Studies Department, and the "Selected Works of Ismail Kara" (Translation of eight selected articles by a leading historian of late Ottoman-Turkish intellectual history).
Awards: Aydin is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
Princeton University, NES, Post-Doctoral Fellowship;
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Faculty Summer Research Grant, Summer 2006;
Symposium Grant, Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, April 2005;
Academy Scholar, Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, October 2002-December 2003;
Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Supplementary Dissertation Grant, September 2001-May 2002;
Graduate Student Associate at Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, September 2000-June 2002;
Harvard University GSAS Dissertation Grant, September 2000-May 2001;
Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Summer Research Grant, Summer 2000;
Toyota Foundation, Dissertation Research Grant, Fall 1999;
Japanese Education Ministry Fellow, September 1997-April 1999;
Middlebury College, Japanese Summer School, Language Study Grant, Summer 2006;
Mellon Foundation Grant for the Study of Arabic, Summer 1995;
Graduate Study Fellowship from Center for Islamic Studies, Istanbul, 1992-1996;
Fellow of International Institute of Islamic Thought & Civilization, Kuala Lumpur, 1991-1992;
NATO Student Workshop Fellow, Brussels, June 1991.
Additional Info:
Formerly Academy Scholar, Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies (Oct.-2002-Dec-2004), and Assistant Professor of History, Department of History, Ohio State University (January 2004-July 2004).
Collaborative Research Projects include German Research Foundation (DFG), "Conceptions of World Orders in Global History," June 2004-June 2007, and Shibusawa Foundation, "Turbulent Decade: Japan's Challenge to the International System of the 1930s," September 2003-June 2006.

Personal Anecdote

Growing up in Istanbul, I always found it awkward to read the "Welcome to Asia" and "Welcome to Europe" signs at the two ends of the less-than-a mile long suspension bridge over the Bosporus waters. These innocent looking continental demarcation signs meant very little to the millions of commuters, supposedly moving between continents every day. In high school, we were taught that Turkey is an important bridge between East and West, as well as Asia and Europe. I remember one time joking with friends that we needed to tidy up our ties and jackets while crossing the bridge from the Asian to the European side of the city, sarcastically reflecting predominant judgments associated with the two continents. I would have never predicted that I would later spend years during my graduate study examining the history and politics of the historical construct of Asia and Europe (or East and West) and its impact. And ironically, but not unsurprisingly, while I was trying to historicize these civilizational and continental categories, stereotyped civilizational identities (think clash of civilization thesis...) embellished with new political and cultural inflections gained popularity in public discourse.

My undergraduate years coincided with exciting debates on Eurocentrism and post-modernism in Istanbul college classrooms and coffeehouses. It was in a senior seminar paper on Jürgen Habermas' critique of anti-modern thinking that I first remember arguing for a more global history of modernity and world order. My plan was to go either to China or Japan to have a non-Eurocentric comparative look at the question of the West and how Asian intellectuals have debated the universality of modernity in the last two centuries. But, to my frustration, the visiting Japanese professor whose guide to Istanbul I had become and who I hoped to study with in Japan told me not to come to the Far East, Tokyo, but to go to the Far West, to a university in America, if I was that interested in non-Eurocentric perspectives on global history.

Only after my first semester at Harvard did I realize the wisdom of his advice. History departments at many American research universities have experts covering all the regions of the world, with ideally half of the faculty teaching non-Western fields. This intellectual presence not only provides perspectives into the different regional histories, it also allows for important insights into world and global history. Of course, I also made it to Japan where I spent two years learning Japanese and searching archives and bookstores. Looking back, I had a wonderful time during the eight years of my graduate school education, having a chance not only to immerse myself in East Asian and Middle Eastern histories, but to learn a lot about the modern histories of Africa, the Americas and Europe. I became addicted to the 4 pm seminars, accompanied by coffee or tea and cookies, though I had to limit my attendance to 2 seminars a week to be able to finish my dissertation and keep my weight.

By the end of my graduate school years, I had become optimistic about the scholarly integrity and public mission of the historical profession. The events of and developments after September 11, 2001 did not change my confidence in my discipline. Yet, many of the achievements of my colleagues in dispelling historically rooted prejudices and misunderstandings among different societies were swept away by a flood of reasserted popular stereotypes about anti-Western Muslims and imperialist crusading Westerners. The 'us vs. them' dichotomy as well as the 'what went wrong?' and 'why do they hate us?' questions forced many in the academic community to take a stand. The increased public interest in answers, explanations and lessons from the past in order to understand the current situation better has affected my research as well as my teaching.

Last summer, a leading European politician sympathetic to Turkey's potential membership in the European Union suggested that the Istanbul Municipality remove the "Welcome to Asia" sign on the bridge over the Bosporus, arguing that the sign and its implication of the "Asian" side of Turkey would weaken Turkey's case in the European Union. Despite my awareness of the Eurocentric constructedness of these continental borders, I realized that I would not be happy to see the “Welcome to Asia” sign go away, at least not in this way. My admittedly idealist internationalism makes me want to hold on to this feeble continental tie between Istanbul, Calcutta and Tokyo. After all, our problem is not in the borders, or continental imaginations themselves, but in the value judgments and political projects vested in them. I could not help but smile when I saw the welcome signs on both sides of the Bosporus bridge during my last visit to Istanbul.

Quotes

By Cemil Aydin

The idea of the West was not first born in Europe and simply spread to other parts of the world. It was partly a product of reflection and rethinking by non-Western reformist intellectuals during the nineteenth century. While we are familiar with the grand theories on the civilization of the West formulated by Montesquieu and other European thinkers, we should recognize that non-Western intellectuals found these theories insufficient and noninclusive and insisted on a more universalist interpretation of the secrets of Europe's progress. The result, as best seen in the writings of Fukuzawa Yukichi and Namik Kemal during the 1870s, was an optimist reformist ideology of progress and civilization that refuted any permanent association of universal civilization with climate, Christianity, race, or even imperialism. This global vision of non-Western intellectuals tied their reform projects to a fine formulation of the relationship between a vision of universal civilization and the historical experience of Europe that exhibited the culmination of this universal process of progress. Their vision of a universal West was closely linked with a desire to become equal members of the perceived civilized international society and to benefit from the security and prosperity this globalizing international society promised. -- Cemil Aydin in "The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought "

About Cemil Aydin