race and war - u.s. power, home, & abroad (1850-1900)

Jim Crow Era

1870s-1960s

Mass European immigration (met with migration restrictions by the 1920s)

1880s

Chinese Exclusion Act

1880s

Wounded Knee

1890s

“Closing of the frontier” with a “new frontier” in Asia and Latin America

1890s

War and empire in Philippines and Cuba, invasions and occupations in Latin America into 1920s

1890s

US territory in Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, Cuba, and PR

1890s

Plessy case: The Court established the "separate but equal" doctrine, arguing that segregation did not violate the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause

1890s

Wilmington coup: A white supremacist mob of about 2,000 men violently overthrew Wilmington’s democratically elected, biracial Fusionist municipal government. The mob burned down The Daily Record, the city's only Black-owned daily newspaper. They rampaged through Black neighborhoods, murdering at least 14 to upwards of 60–300 Black residents

1890s

1893 Chicago World’s Fair — Frederick Jackson Turner’s take

Frontier Thesis — America’s character came from the frontier. Roosevelt’s version: the frontier moves from American to abroad

1893 Chicago World’s Fair — Frederick Douglass on Haiti

The US has “not yet forgiven Haiti for being black” and free. US refused to recognize Haiti long after other nations did

Motives for US power around 1900 (5):

1. racial and religious logic, Social Darwinism

2. white man’s burden and world white supremacy

3. uniting the north and south, “white” and European immigrants

4. bases and outposts during the European colonial “scramble”

5. US economic expansions, the Open Door, free-trade capitalism

Kipling (1899)

“White Man’s Burden” — Americans should rule colonies as a d

H.T. Johnson (1899)

“The Black Man’s Burden” — challenged the hypocrisy of the United States intervening in overseas territories like Cuba and Hawaii while simultaneously enforcing Jim Crow laws

How Black and Native struggles linked to international empire (1898)

• Roosevelt’s Rough Riders (Spanish War) re-deployed Indian War veterans to Cuba

• Black Buffalo Soldiers fought in the Indian Wars then in the Philippines

• Native “experts” became Philippines “experts”

• Black troops from Civil and Indian Wars were sent to global Wars