American Exceptionalism and Overseas Expansion

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American Exceptionalism and Overseas Expansion

American exceptionalism is the belief that the United States occupies a distinctive place in history because of its republican institutions, democratic ideals, religious traditions, economic system, or supposed mission to advance liberty. Supporters have often described the country as an example for other nations or as a power with a special responsibility to promote freedom and political progress. Critics argue that these claims have also provided moral justification for territorial conquest, military intervention, economic domination, and colonial government.

The history of American expansion reveals a persistent tension between republican ideals and imperial power. A country founded through an anticolonial revolution eventually acquired territories across North America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. American leaders frequently presented these acquisitions as defensive, humanitarian, commercial, or civilizing projects rather than as conventional imperialism. Nevertheless, many of the affected populations experienced war, dispossession, military occupation, restricted sovereignty, racial hierarchy, and government without equal political representation.

Exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, and National Mission

American expansion was supported by overlapping ideas about national destiny, continental development, religious mission, racial superiority, commercial opportunity, and strategic security. Manifest Destiny portrayed the expansion of the United States across North America as natural, inevitable, and sometimes divinely sanctioned. This ideology helped justify the displacement of Indigenous nations, the annexation of Texas, the Mexican-American War, and the acquisition of vast western territories.

Exceptionalism allowed expansion to be distinguished rhetorically from European colonialism. American leaders commonly argued that the United States expanded to spread republican government, protect vulnerable populations, develop commerce, or prevent rival empires from gaining territory. This language obscured the extent to which American policies resembled other imperial systems based on conquest, unequal treaties, military force, settler occupation, economic control, and assumptions that some populations were unprepared for self-government.

The Monroe Doctrine originally warned European powers against further colonization in the Americas. Over time, however, it became a foundation for claims of United States predominance in the Western Hemisphere. The Roosevelt Corollary expanded this principle by asserting an American right to intervene in Latin American and Caribbean countries experiencing political instability or financial problems.

Continental Expansion and the Origins of Empire

The overseas empire of the late nineteenth century developed from an earlier history of continental expansion. Settlers, soldiers, investors, missionaries, and government officials extended American authority across Indigenous lands and Mexican territory. The Mexican-American War transferred California, New Mexico, and other extensive regions to the United States, transforming the country into a continental power reaching the Pacific.

Territorial expansion generated disputes over slavery, land ownership, citizenship, racial classification, and the political status of conquered populations. Mexican landowners frequently struggled to defend property rights under the new government, while Indigenous communities faced warfare, forced removal, treaty violations, and settlement on their lands. These experiences created administrative, legal, and ideological precedents that later influenced American rule in overseas territories.

The United States also acquired Alaska and numerous islands through purchase, annexation, occupation, and legislation such as the Guano Islands Act. These acquisitions reflected growing interest in natural resources, maritime commerce, coaling stations, naval routes, and access to Asian markets.

The War of 1898 and the Overseas Imperial Turn

The Spanish-American War marked a decisive stage in the emergence of the United States as an overseas power. Although the war was publicly associated with Cuban independence and opposition to Spanish colonial rule, victory gave the United States control of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Cuba formally became independent but remained subject to extensive American influence through military occupation and the Platt Amendment.

The Treaty of Paris transferred Spanish territories without meaningful representation from the populations being governed. American leaders then debated whether acquiring overseas colonies was compatible with republican principles. Expansionists argued that the territories were necessary for national security, commerce, naval power, and the spread of Christianity and civilization. Anti-imperialists warned that governing people without their consent would betray the Declaration of Independence and transform the United States into the kind of empire it had once opposed.

The war also elevated political and military figures such as Theodore Roosevelt and encouraged the development of a modern navy. Overseas possessions provided bases from which the United States could project power into the Caribbean, Latin America, and East Asia.

The Philippines and American Power in Asia

The Philippines became the site of the most violent resistance to American colonial expansion. Filipino revolutionaries had fought Spain and declared an independent republic, but the United States refused to recognize their sovereignty. The resulting Philippine-American War involved conventional battles, guerrilla warfare, civilian displacement, military occupation, detention, and extensive destruction.

American officials described colonial rule as a program of “benevolent assimilation” intended to provide education, infrastructure, public health, stable government, and eventual self-rule. These reforms existed alongside coercion, censorship, racial paternalism, economic dependency, and the denial of immediate independence. Colonial authorities constructed schools and political institutions while retaining ultimate control over security, foreign affairs, and administration.

The Philippines also became central to American strategy in Asia. Its location supported naval operations and commercial ambitions in China, particularly the Open Door policy. Colonial rule created migration routes that brought Filipino workers to Hawaii and the continental United States, where their legal status as American nationals shaped employment, community formation, and later labor activism.

Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, and Pacific Expansion

American influence in Hawaii grew through missionary activity, plantation agriculture, trade, and the political power of foreign business interests. The overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani and the subsequent annexation of Hawaii occurred despite substantial Native Hawaiian resistance. Supporters portrayed annexation as essential for naval defense and Pacific commerce, while opponents emphasized the loss of Hawaiian sovereignty and the absence of popular consent.

Guam became an American possession after the Spanish-American War and developed into an important military outpost. Chamorros remained under a territorial system that provided limited political power and no voting representation in Congress. American Samoa was governed for decades through naval administration and retained a distinctive political and citizenship status.

After the Second World War, the United States administered additional Pacific islands through the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. Military strategy strongly influenced negotiations over independence, free association, land rights, and political status. Nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands caused forced displacement, radioactive contamination, health consequences, and lasting environmental damage.

The Caribbean, Latin America, and the Panama Canal

American expansion was not limited to formally annexed territories. The United States developed an informal empire through military occupations, financial supervision, protectorates, commercial agreements, and support for friendly governments. Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Panama, and other countries experienced varying degrees of intervention.

The construction of the Panama Canal strengthened American commercial and naval power by connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The United States supported Panama’s separation from Colombia and obtained control of the Canal Zone under terms that gave it extensive authority over the surrounding territory.

Dollar Diplomacy combined banking, loans, customs control, private investment, and military pressure. American officials frequently justified intervention as necessary to restore stability, protect property, prevent European involvement, or promote modernization. Critics argued that these policies subordinated local sovereignty to American strategic and corporate interests.

Naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan argued that national greatness depended upon merchant shipping, battleships, overseas bases, and control of important sea routes. His ideas influenced policymakers who believed that industrial production required foreign markets and that commercial expansion needed military protection.

The modern steel navy made possible the rapid defeat of Spain and the administration of distant possessions. Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet demonstrated that the United States could deploy military power around the world. Later aircraft carriers, island bases, and overseas installations expanded this capacity further.

American empire therefore developed through both territorial and nonterritorial forms. Some places were annexed, while others became protectorates, occupied states, treaty partners, financial dependencies, or hosts for military installations. This flexible network allowed the United States to exercise considerable influence without always establishing formal colonial government.

Race, Religion, and the Civilizing Mission

Racial and religious ideas played an important role in legitimizing expansion. Political speeches, missionary writings, textbooks, exhibitions, and cartoons frequently depicted colonized populations as children, dependents, or uncivilized peoples requiring American supervision. The language of the “White Man’s Burden” presented colonial government as a moral responsibility rather than an assertion of power.

These claims existed alongside segregation, lynching, Indigenous dispossession, Asian exclusion, and the political disenfranchisement of Black Americans at home. African American soldiers and intellectuals debated whether military service offered a path toward citizenship or made them participants in the subjugation of another people. Black anti-imperialists argued that a government denying equality to its own citizens lacked credibility when claiming to bring freedom abroad.

Education was often presented as evidence of benevolent rule. Schools could increase literacy and provide opportunities, but they could also impose English, American political values, cultural assimilation, and colonial interpretations of history. Religious missions similarly combined humanitarian work with assumptions about cultural hierarchy and the expansion of American influence.

Constitutional Empire and Unequal Citizenship

The acquisition of overseas territories raised a fundamental constitutional question: Did the Constitution fully apply wherever the United States governed? The Insular Cases created a distinction between incorporated territories expected to become states and unincorporated territories governed by the United States without all constitutional provisions automatically applying.

This doctrine permitted Congress to exercise broad authority over Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the Philippines, and other possessions. Residents could be subject to American sovereignty while lacking equal representation, full voting rights, or the same constitutional status as residents of the states.

Territorial status remains a continuing legacy of expansion. Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the United States Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands remain under United States sovereignty but do not possess voting representation in Congress or participation in presidential elections on the same basis as states. Debates over citizenship, statehood, independence, free association, cultural preservation, debt, military land use, and self-government continue to reflect the unresolved constitutional structure of American empire.

Anti-Imperialism and the Debate over National Ideals

American expansion generated organized resistance from writers, labor leaders, religious figures, civil-rights advocates, politicians, veterans, and members of the Anti-Imperialist League. Critics such as Mark Twain, William James, Carl Schurz, Edward Atkinson, and numerous Black intellectuals argued that colonial rule contradicted the principles of consent and self-government.

Anti-imperialism was not a single unified movement. Some opponents defended universal equality and national self-determination, while others opposed annexation because they did not want nonwhite populations incorporated into the United States. The debate therefore exposed both principled objections to empire and racial limitations within American reform movements.

Political cartoons and popular imagery became important instruments in this struggle. Expansionist images celebrated national strength, commerce, education, and civilization. Anti-imperialist images emphasized coercion, hypocrisy, military violence, and the contradiction between colonial government abroad and democratic language at home.

Continuing Colonial Legacies

The influence of overseas expansion did not end when individual colonies achieved independence. Colonial administration helped shape American policing, education, public health, racial classification, bureaucratic government, constitutional law, and military organization. Migration from the territories transformed communities in Hawaii and the continental United States.

A worldwide network of military bases became a modern form of power projection. Supporters regard these installations as essential to alliances, deterrence, trade, and international security. Critics describe the network as an informal empire that can produce environmental harm, unequal political relationships, local displacement, and dependence on American military spending.

American exceptionalism also remains influential in foreign-policy debates. It can encourage public service, international cooperation, democratic solidarity, and confidence in the possibility of political reform. It can also discourage critical examination by portraying American actions as inherently benevolent or fundamentally different from those of other powerful states.

Conclusion

American overseas expansion emerged from the interaction of national ideals, economic interests, military strategy, racial hierarchy, religious mission, and political ambition. The United States sometimes introduced schools, infrastructure, public-health programs, and representative institutions, but these developments occurred within systems that frequently denied sovereignty and equal political participation to the people being governed.

The history of American exceptionalism is therefore neither a simple story of benevolent leadership nor one of uninterrupted domination. It is a history of competing ideals and interests in which liberation and conquest, reform and coercion, democracy and colonial rule often existed together.

Understanding this history requires including the perspectives of Indigenous peoples, Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, Native Hawaiians, Chamorros, Samoans, Marshall Islanders, African Americans, migrants, soldiers, anti-imperialists, and colonial administrators. Their experiences reveal how the expansion of American power shaped both the wider world and the political institutions, constitutional debates, and national identity of the United States itself.

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American Exceptionalism, Empire, and National Mission

250 Years of American Foreign Policy

| Council on Foreign Relations Experts and Staff | Council on Foreign Relations | March 9, 2026 

Traces the transformation of the United States from a vulnerable republic into a global superpower, emphasizing recurring tensions between national ideals, commercial interests, security concerns, territorial expansion, and international leadership.
Study Finds Influential Textbooks Labeled American Actions as Imperialist, Contradicting American Exceptionalism

| Mike Krings | University of Kansas | October 28, 2024 

Examines how American history textbooks have portrayed late nineteenth-century expansion as imperialism while often describing it as an unusual departure from the country’s supposedly anti-imperial traditions.
The U.S. Is Leaving Millions Behind: American Exceptionalism Needs to Change by 2030

| Sarah E. Mendelson | Brookings Institution | April 10, 2023 

Challenges celebratory interpretations of American exceptionalism by comparing the country’s domestic inequalities, international commitments, and human-rights record with those of other industrialized nations.
What Donald Trump and Dick Cheney Got Wrong About America

| Jake Sullivan | The Atlantic | January–February 2019 

Defends a reinterpreted form of American exceptionalism based on democratic renewal, alliances, restraint, and international cooperation rather than unilateral dominance or claims of inherent national superiority.
Telling the History of the U.S. Through Its Territories

| Anna Diamond | Smithsonian Magazine | January 2019 

Discusses Daniel Immerwahr’s history of the “Greater United States,” including overseas territories, military bases, colonies, and the tendency of mainland-centered maps to conceal the country’s imperial geography.
Requiem for American Exceptionalism

| David Frum | The Atlantic | March 21, 2015 

Questions whether the United States has ever been as politically, socially, or historically unique as exceptionalist narratives claim, particularly when compared with other industrial and imperial powers.
Old Paradigms in History Die Hard in Political Science: U.S. Foreign Policy and American Exceptionalism

| Hilde Eliassen Restad | American Political Thought | 2012 

Argues that American foreign policy has consistently combined exemplary and expansionist ambitions rather than moving neatly between isolationism and internationalism.
The Myth of American Exceptionalism

| Stephen M. Walt | Foreign Policy | October 11, 2011 

Critiques claims that the United States is uniquely virtuous, peaceful, generous, or committed to liberty, arguing that exceptionalist beliefs can obscure the consequences of American power abroad.

Origins and Ideologies of Expansion

The Republican Party and U.S. Foreign Relations

| Oxford Research Encyclopedias Editors | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History | June 25, 2019 

Surveys Republican approaches to foreign policy, including commercial expansion, naval power, the Open Door, territorial acquisition, unilateralism, preparedness, and competing interventionist and noninterventionist factions.
The History of the American West Gets a Much-Needed Rewrite

| Stephen Aron | Smithsonian Magazine | August 16, 2016 

Explains how historians have moved away from triumphalist frontier narratives toward interpretations emphasizing conquest, settler colonialism, Indigenous resistance, environmental damage, and the relationship between continental and overseas expansion.
How the Gold Rush Led to Real Riches in Bird Poop

| Jackson Landers | Smithsonian Magazine | February 17, 2016 

Describes how the Guano Islands Act enabled American citizens to claim distant islands, creating an unusual commercial and territorial empire across the Pacific and Caribbean.
William McKinley: Foreign Affairs

| Lewis L. Gould | Miller Center, University of Virginia | n.d. 

Explores the influence of frontier ideology, naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, overseas markets, missionary arguments, racial assumptions, and national prestige on expansion under President William McKinley.
United States Maritime Expansion Across the Pacific During the Nineteenth Century

| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | n.d. 

Traces American commercial and naval expansion across the Pacific, from the China trade and whaling routes to Hawaii, Japan, strategic islands, and the eventual acquisition of the Philippines.
Telling All Americans’ Stories: An Overview of the Role of the U.S. in the World Community

| National Park Service | National Park Service | n.d. 

Connects Manifest Destiny and Indigenous dispossession within North America to the later search for overseas markets, resources, investment opportunities, strategic bases, and imperial territories.
Monroe Doctrine, 1823

| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | n.d. 

Reviews the declaration opposing further European colonization in the Americas and its later transformation into a justification for expanding United States influence throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Mahan’s “The Influence of Sea Power upon History”: Securing International Markets in the 1890s

| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | n.d. 

Explains how Alfred Thayer Mahan connected national greatness with battleships, overseas bases, merchant shipping, control of sea routes, and access to foreign markets.

The War of 1898 and the Imperial Debate

The Changing of the Guard: Puerto Rico in 1898

| Marisabel Brás | Library of Congress | August 25, 2025 

Examines the American invasion of Puerto Rico, the transition from Spanish to United States rule, and the island’s uncertain political and constitutional status after 1898.
Overview Essay: World of 1898

| Hispanic Division, Library of Congress | Library of Congress | August 25, 2025 

Presents the Spanish–American War from international perspectives and examines how Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, and the Philippines moved into an expanding sphere of American control.
Cuba in 1898

| José M. Hernández | Library of Congress | August 25, 2025 

Describes Cuba’s independence struggle, American intervention, the defeat of Spain, and the restrictions on Cuban sovereignty imposed through occupation and the Platt Amendment.
The Overlooked Histories Behind America’s Rise as a World Power

| Maya Wei-Haas | Smithsonian Magazine | May 30, 2023 

Introduces an exhibition examining competing American, Cuban, Filipino, Puerto Rican, Hawaiian, and Chamorro perspectives on the War of 1898 and the emergence of the United States as an overseas power.
Spanish-American War: A Resource Guide

| Library of Congress | Library of Congress | July 6, 2022 

Collects primary sources, photographs, newspapers, maps, films, and scholarship documenting the war, its causes, its public presentation, and the territorial settlement that followed.
Spotlight: The Spanish-American War Through Photographs

| Sarah Bseirani | National Archives | July 16, 2020 

Uses archival photographs to document American military operations in Cuba and the Philippines and the rapid transformation of an intervention against Spain into an overseas war.
Documenting United States Naval Activities During the Spanish-American War

| Richard W. Peuser | National Archives | Spring 1998 

Surveys naval records concerning Manila Bay, Cuba, Puerto Rico, coaling stations, fleet logistics, strategic planning, and the creation of an American maritime empire.
1898: Birth of an Overseas Empire

| Office of the Historian | U.S. House of Representatives | n.d. 

Examines congressional debates over annexation, commerce, race, military strategy, republican government, and whether acquiring distant populations violated the principles of the United States.

The Philippines, Asia, and Pacific Power

The American Anti-Imperialist League at Faneuil Hall

| National Park Service | National Park Service | 2026 

Recounts organized opposition to annexing the Philippines and Hawaii, including arguments that colonial government, militarization, and conquest contradicted the Declaration of Independence.
The Philippines in 1898

| Library of Congress | Library of Congress | August 25, 2025 

Introduces the Philippine Revolution, the alliance against Spain, the declaration of Philippine independence, and the conflict that followed the United States’ refusal to recognize the new republic.
Essay 1: Imperialism and Migration

| Gary Y. Okihiro | National Park Service | 2019 

Places American expansion in a longer history of European colonialism, Asian migration, Pacific commerce, racial hierarchy, military conquest, and resistance to empire.
Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the Making of the Nation

| National Park Service | National Park Service | 2018 

Connects Asian and Pacific Islander migration to American commerce, plantation labor, territorial expansion, exclusion laws, colonial administration, and the Philippine-American War.
The Philippines, 1898–1946

| Office of the Historian | U.S. House of Representatives | n.d. 

Surveys conquest, colonial government, Filipino representation in Congress, economic dependency, independence campaigns, elite collaboration, resistance, and the eventual establishment of the Philippine Republic.
The Philippine-American War, 1899–1902

| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | n.d. 

Describes the war between United States forces and the Philippine Republic, including guerrilla resistance, civilian suffering, military occupation, and the establishment of American colonial rule.
Secretary of State John Hay and the Open Door in China, 1899–1900

| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | n.d. 

Explains how American leaders sought equal commercial access to China while opposing its formal partition, linking the Philippines to wider economic and strategic ambitions in Asia.
Exclusion and Empire, 1898–1941

| Office of the Historian | U.S. House of Representatives | n.d. 

Examines how overseas expansion and Asian exclusion developed together as Congress governed Pacific territories while restricting immigration, citizenship, and political participation.

Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Territorial Citizenship

Iolani Palace: A Hawaiian Place of History, Power, and Prestige

| National Park Service | National Park Service | 2024 

Uses Iolani Palace to explore Hawaiian sovereignty, constitutional conflict, the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani, Native opposition to annexation, and the effects of American imperialism.
(H)our History Lesson: Liliuokalani, Hawaii’s Last Queen

| National Park Service | National Park Service | 2023 

Recounts Queen Liliuokalani’s resistance to foreign business interests, the American-supported overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, imprisonment, anti-annexation petitions, and continuing sovereignty movements.
The Department of State and Oversight of Puerto Rico, 1900–1909

| David Langbart | National Archives | March 15, 2022 

Describes records documenting the creation of civil government in Puerto Rico and the federal administrative structures imposed after the island was seized from Spain.
A Brief, 500-Year History of Guam

| Doug Herman | Smithsonian Magazine | August 15, 2017 

Surveys Chamorro history under Spanish, American, and Japanese rule while explaining how Guam became a strategically important but politically unequal United States territory.
Jeff Sessions’ Hawaii Comment Was a Throwback to American Imperialism

| Doug Mack | Time | April 25, 2017 

Connects modern attitudes toward Hawaii and the territories to the imperial expansion of the 1890s and the unequal political status created by the Insular Cases.
Puerto Ricans Got U.S. Citizenship 100 Years Ago—But Their Identity Remains Fraught

| Lorraine Boissoneault | Smithsonian Magazine | March 7, 2017 

Examines the Jones-Shafroth Act, military recruitment, limited self-government, economic interests, and the unresolved relationship between United States citizenship and Puerto Rican sovereignty.
Puerto Rico

| Office of the Historian | U.S. House of Representatives | n.d. 

Reviews Puerto Rico’s government, congressional representation, citizenship debates, economic relationship with the mainland, and classification as an unincorporated territory after the Insular Cases.
Joint Resolution to Provide for Annexing the Hawaiian Islands to the United States

| National Archives | National Archives | n.d. 

Presents the annexation resolution alongside the political struggle between Native Hawaiians, the monarchy, American business interests, naval strategists, and supporters of overseas expansion.

The Caribbean, Latin America, and the Panama Canal

Woodrow Wilson: Foreign Affairs

| Saladin Ambar | Miller Center, University of Virginia | n.d. 

Contrasts Wilson’s language of democracy and self-determination with military interventions in Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic and the purchase of the Virgin Islands.
U.S. Invasion and Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934

| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | n.d. 

Reviews the American occupation of Haiti, including financial control, constitutional changes, forced labor, armed resistance, racial paternalism, and the stated goal of creating political stability.
Theodore Roosevelt: Foreign Affairs

| Sidney Milkis | Miller Center, University of Virginia | n.d. 

Examines Roosevelt’s efforts to convert the new overseas empire into sustained global power through naval expansion, colonial administration, the Panama Canal, and intervention in the Caribbean.
The Roosevelt Corollary

| Theodore Roosevelt Center | Dickinson State University | n.d. 

Provides historical context for Roosevelt’s expansion of the Monroe Doctrine, including European debt disputes, canal strategy, Latin American criticism, and the growth of American interventionism.
Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, 1904

| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | n.d. 

Explains how the United States claimed an international police power in the Western Hemisphere and used the doctrine to justify intervention in Caribbean and Central American states.
Platt Amendment

| National Archives | National Archives | n.d. 

Presents the provisions that restricted Cuban sovereignty, authorized American intervention, and permitted the United States to maintain naval facilities such as Guantánamo Bay.
Dollar Diplomacy, 1909–1913

| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | n.d. 

Examines the use of American loans, banks, investments, customs control, and military force to expand influence under President William Howard Taft.
Building the Panama Canal, 1903–1914

| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | n.d. 

Describes American support for Panamanian independence, the acquisition of the Canal Zone, construction of the canal, and its significance for naval mobility, commerce, and hemispheric power.

American Exceptionalism and the Idea of Empire

About 1898: U.S. Imperial Visions and Revisions

| National Portrait Gallery | Smithsonian Institution | 2023 

Examines how a nation founded through an anticolonial revolution became an overseas empire through war in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines and the annexation of Hawaii.
Philippine Independence in U.S. History: A Car, Not a Train

| Daniel Immerwahr | Pacific Historical Review | May 1, 2022 

Reconsiders Philippine independence within the broader history of American foreign policy, anticolonialism, international institutions, and competing definitions of the United States’ global mission.
American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea

| Ian Tyrrell | University of Chicago Press | 2022 

Traces exceptionalist ideas through religion, settler colonialism, continental conquest, labor conflict, overseas imperialism, and repeated challenges to claims of American uniqueness.
Aesthetic Regime Change: The Burnham Plans and U.S. Landscape Imperialism in the Philippines

| Scott Kirsch | Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints | 2017 

Analyzes Daniel Burnham’s plans for Manila and Baguio as attempts to express American authority through architecture, urban planning, public space, and colonial aesthetics.
American Latino Theme Study: Empires, Wars, Revolutions, and Immigration

| National Park Service | National Park Service | December 9, 2015 

Connects Manifest Destiny, the Mexican-American War, the War of 1898, Caribbean intervention, migration, and the development of a nationalist mythology that legitimized expansion.
Anglo-American Inter-Imperialism: U.S. Expansion and the British World, c. 1865–1914

| Jay Sexton | Oxford University Research Archive | 2014 

Explores cooperation and competition between British and American commercial networks, showing that United States expansion often operated through rather than entirely against the British imperial system.
American Empire

| The American Yawp Editors | The American Yawp | June 7, 2013 

Surveys the economic, military, cultural, religious, and racial forces behind American interventions in the Pacific, Latin America, China, and the Caribbean.
American Imperial Expansion

| Natsu Taylor Saito | Oxford Academic and NYU Press | 2010 

Examines how scientific racism, economic pressure, constitutional doctrine, and claims of national exceptionalism supported the acquisition and administration of overseas possessions.
Spanish-American War

| National Museum of American History | Smithsonian Institution | n.d. 

Explains how war against Spain provided an opportunity for the United States to seize overseas possessions and begin constructing an extensive Pacific and Caribbean empire.
Geographies of Empire

| The American Yawp Editors | The American Yawp | n.d. 

Links conquest of Indigenous lands and the United States–Mexico borderlands to overseas missionaries, commercial ambitions, naval power, racial ideology, and the imperial interventions of 1898.
Expansion Beyond the Continent

| National Museum of American History | Smithsonian Institution | n.d. 

Introduces the late nineteenth-century expansion into Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and other Pacific islands as a new stage in the growth of American territory and power.
American Imperialism: The Territorial Expansion of the United States, 1783–2013

| Adam Burns | Edinburgh University Press and JSTOR | n.d. 

Places Hawaii, Alaska, the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Guano Islands, and later forms of intervention within a continuous history of territorial and informal expansion.

War, Annexation, and Colonial Government

Treaty of Paris of 1898

| Library of Congress | Library of Congress | August 25, 2025 

Reviews the negotiations in which Spain relinquished Cuba and ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, despite the absence of representatives from the affected populations.
Military Government in Puerto Rico

| Library of Congress | Library of Congress | August 25, 2025 

Describes the American military government’s control over Puerto Rican courts, municipal laws, taxation, customs, currency, and civil administration after the invasion of 1898.
T. R. the Rough Rider: Hero of the Spanish-American War

| National Park Service | National Park Service | March 9, 2025 

Examines Theodore Roosevelt’s wartime celebrity and how the conflict helped destroy Spain’s remaining empire while initiating a new era of American overseas expansion.
The Road to Independence for the Philippines

| The Alexandrian | Troy University | 2025 

Investigates why the Philippines was governed as a colony rather than incorporated as a prospective state and why American officials eventually committed to independence.
Guide to House Records: Records of the Committee on Insular Affairs

| National Archives | National Archives | 2021 

Describes congressional records concerning colonial administration, commercial interests, territorial government, independence demands, and American rule in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Samoa.
War with Spain and the Age of Imperialism: Primary-Source Sheets

| Center for Legislative Archives | National Archives | 2018 

Uses political cartoons and documents to illustrate the USS Maine crisis, the imperial turn, territorial acquisition, constitutional disputes, and opposition to annexation.
The Mock Battle That Ended the Spanish-American War

| Theodore S. Gonzalves | National Museum of American History | 2018 

Explains the arranged battle for Manila, the exclusion of Filipino forces from the city, and the transition from war against Spain to war between the United States and the Philippine Republic.
Spanish-American War—“A Splendid Little War”

| National Park Service | National Park Service | February 28, 2015 

Challenges the simple image of a brief war by tracing the relationship between Cuban and Filipino independence struggles and subsequent American colonial expansion.
Sailors, Soldiers, and Marines of the Spanish-American War

| Rebecca L. Collier | National Archives | Spring 1998 

Reviews military records of the conflict and explains how victory left the United States in possession of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.
The Spanish-American War: The United States Becomes a World Power

| Library of Congress | Library of Congress | n.d. 

Provides newspapers, maps, photographs, films, and cartoons addressing intervention in Cuba, annexation of the Philippines, yellow journalism, and anti-imperialist opposition.
Records of United States Army Overseas Operations and Commands, 1898–1942

| National Archives | National Archives | n.d. 

Catalogs records of American military commands in Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, China, Panama, Hawaii, and other overseas locations associated with the expansion of United States power.
Records of the Bureau of Insular Affairs

| National Archives | National Archives | n.d. 

Describes federal records concerning colonial government, education, commerce, policing, infrastructure, and military administration in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, Haiti, and other territories.
Defeating Spain in the Philippines

| National Museum of American History | Smithsonian Institution | n.d. 

Explains how the Battle of Manila Bay destroyed Spanish naval power but was followed by an American decision to annex rather than recognize Philippine independence.
America and the World

| Center for Legislative Archives | National Archives | n.d. 

Presents primary sources on imperialism, war, diplomacy, global rivalry, territorial government, and the congressional debates surrounding the emergence of the United States as a world power.

The Philippines and the Making of American Power

Alcatraz and the Philippine-American War

| National Park Service | National Park Service | 2026 

Uses the imprisonment of soldiers who resisted service to examine conscience, dissent, military discipline, and claims that the United States was spreading civilization in the Philippines.
Philip Vera Cruz

| National Park Service | National Park Service | 2025 

Relates Filipino migration and labor activism to the colonial status that allowed Filipinos to enter the United States as nationals before the Philippine Independence Act restricted migration.
Honorable Duty

| National Park Service | National Park Service | 2025 

Presents Filipino, African American, imperialist, anti-imperialist, and military perspectives on the Philippine-American War through newspapers, testimony, and soldiers’ accounts.
Filipino American Stories Revealed

| Smithsonian Institution | Smithsonian Institution | 2025 

Connects American colonial rule in the Philippines with labor migration to Hawaii and California, plantation agriculture, community formation, and Filipino American identity.
Theophilus Gould Steward

| National Park Service | National Park Service | 2024 

Follows an African American chaplain and educator whose service in Cuba and the Philippines exposed connections among race, military expansion, education, and citizenship.
Better Lives, Bitter Lies

| National Park Service | National Park Service | 2021 

Examines the claim that American rule would bring education and self-government to Filipinos while contrasting benevolent-assimilation rhetoric with military occupation and colonial violence.
A Brief History of U.S.-Philippine Relations

| Rishi Iyengar | Time | October 26, 2016 

Surveys colonial war, education, political institutions, military alliances, elite collaboration, historical memory, and continuing disagreements over the legacy of American rule.
Empire and Migration in Filipino America

| Rick Baldoz | Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center | October 2011 

Discusses how American colonial government created migration routes, legal categories, labor systems, and racial identities that shaped Filipino life in the United States.
Visualizing American Empire: Orientalism and Imperialism in the Philippines

| David Brody | Smithsonian Institution | n.d. 

Explores travel writing, exhibitions, maps, architecture, interior design, and public celebrations as cultural mechanisms for representing and normalizing American rule in the Philippines.
The First Philippine Question

| University of Michigan | University of Michigan | n.d. 

Examines debates over annexation at the University of Michigan and shows how both imperialists and many anti-imperialists frequently marginalized Filipino voices.
The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines

| Paul A. Kramer | Smithsonian Institution | n.d. 

Examines the Philippine-American War as a racial conflict and traces how colonial government, exhibitions, immigration restrictions, and ideas of national identity developed together.
Islanders in the Empire: Filipino and Puerto Rican Laborers in Hawai‘i

| JoAnna Poblete | Smithsonian Institution | n.d. 

Investigates how colonial legal status enabled corporations to recruit Filipino and Puerto Rican laborers for Hawaii’s plantations while denying them many protections associated with citizenship.

Race, Religion, Education, and the “Civilizing Mission”

Women, Empire, and Commemoration in the North American Pacific West

| National Park Service | National Park Service | August 8, 2025 

Explores how women participated in, benefited from, resisted, and commemorated American expansion across the Pacific, connecting empire with citizenship and suffrage.
Chinese Immigrants Confront Anti-Chinese Prejudice

| The American Yawp Reader | The American Yawp | 1885–1903 

Provides firsthand responses to exclusion and racial discrimination during the same era that the United States was expanding its commercial and territorial influence across the Pacific.
James D. Phelan, “Why the Chinese Should Be Excluded”

| James D. Phelan | The American Yawp Reader | 1901 

Illustrates the racial and assimilationist arguments that accompanied Pacific expansion and shaped debates over which peoples could belong within the American political community.
American Missionaries and the Boxer Crisis

| Edwin H. Conger and U.S. Department of State | Office of the Historian | June 11, 1900 

Documents how attacks on missionaries and Christian converts in China became connected to demands for diplomatic pressure, military protection, and expanded intervention by foreign powers.
If They’ll Only Be Good

| S. D. Ehrhart | Library of Congress | 1900 

Depicts American soldiers leaving the Philippines as women associated with patriotic organizations arrive to educate Filipinos, revealing gendered and paternalistic ideas about colonial uplift.
School Begins

| Louis Dalrymple | Library of Congress | January 25, 1899 

Shows Uncle Sam teaching Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines while Native and African American figures are excluded from the classroom, revealing contradictions in exceptionalist claims.
The White Man’s Burden

| Rudyard Kipling | The American Yawp Reader | 1899 

Presents the famous appeal urging Americans to assume colonial rule over supposedly dependent peoples, exposing the racial hierarchy embedded in civilizing-mission rhetoric.
The White Man’s Burden Political Cartoon

| William H. Walker | Library of Congress | 1899 

Uses the image of Uncle Sam and John Bull carrying colonized peoples toward civilization to visualize racial assumptions supporting British and American imperial expansion.
African Americans Debate Enlistment

| The American Yawp Reader | The American Yawp | 1898 

Presents contrasting Black newspaper arguments about serving in the Spanish-American War while African Americans remained exposed to lynching, segregation, and political exclusion at home.
Chinese Immigration and the Chinese Exclusion Acts

| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | n.d. 

Explains how racial exclusion developed alongside Pacific commerce and territorial expansion, eventually extending restrictive policies to Hawaii and the Philippines.
Anti-U.S. Imperialism as Assertion of Black Subjectivity at the Turn of the Last Century

| Lorenzo Alexander L. Puente | Kritika Kultura | n.d. 

Analyzes Kelly Miller’s opposition to Philippine colonization and his argument that racial oppression inside the United States undermined claims that expansion served freedom or civilization.

Anti-Imperialism and Critiques of Exceptionalism

Edward Atkinson

| National Park Service | National Park Service | January 16, 2023 

Profiles an abolitionist, economist, and Anti-Imperialist League member who distributed writings condemning annexation and the war against Philippine independence.
In Time of Hesitation: American Anti-Imperialists and the Philippine-American War

| S. J. Arcilla | Philippine Studies | 1985 

Examines the arguments, limitations, political divisions, and delayed responses of American opponents of colonial rule during the Philippine-American War.
Mark Twain, “The War Prayer”

| Mark Twain | The American Yawp Reader | c. 1904–1905 

Uses satire to expose the violence concealed beneath patriotic prayers for military victory and the moral certainty often associated with overseas intervention.
William James on “The Philippine Question”

| William James | The American Yawp Reader | November 28, 1903 

Rejects the belief that Americans were fundamentally different from European imperial powers and argues that conquest of the Philippines betrayed the republic’s founding ideals.
William McKinley on American Expansionism

| William McKinley | The American Yawp Reader | 1903 

Presents McKinley’s claim that strategic necessity, commerce, Christianity, and national duty required the United States to retain and govern the Philippines.
The Open Door

| J. S. Pughe | Library of Congress | May 31, 1899 

Portrays the Philippines as an American-controlled gateway for international commerce, illustrating the close connection between territorial possession and access to Asian markets.
Who Will Haul It Down?

| Louis Dalrymple | Library of Congress | 1899 

Depicts President McKinley defending American flags planted across Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines against domestic anti-annexation movements.
The Policy of Imperialism

| Carl Schurz | Library of Congress | 1899 

Argues that governing the Philippines without popular consent would violate republican principles, require permanent military force, and transform the character of the United States.
Charity Begins at Home

| Louis Dalrymple | Library of Congress | 1899 

Satirizes American claims to offer equal commercial opportunity in the Philippines while political and economic inequalities persisted within the United States.
Whither?

| Minneapolis Tribune | Library of Congress | 1898 

Shows Uncle Sam choosing between the traditional Monroe Doctrine and a new “Imperial Highway,” capturing contemporary uncertainty about the direction of American foreign policy.
Uncle Sam Reeling in Hawaii, the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico

| Clifford K. Berryman | Library of Congress | 1898 

Visualizes overseas territories as prizes caught by the United States and reflects the casual language of acquisition that accompanied the War of 1898.

Territorial Status and the Continuing Colonial Legacy

A U.S. Territory’s Colonial History Emerges in Disputes over Voting and Citizenship

| Rebecca Boone | Associated Press | 2025 

Examines American Samoa’s distinctive citizenship status and how current legal disputes remain shaped by colonial acquisition, racialized congressional debates, and local concerns about cultural sovereignty.
How the United States Ended Up With Guam

| Becky Little | History | 2017 

Explains Guam’s seizure during the Spanish-American War, its military importance, Chamorro political status, and the territory’s lack of voting representation in Congress.
Proclamation of Philippine Independence

| Harry S. Truman | National Archives | July 4, 1946 

Formally recognizes Philippine independence after forty-eight years of American jurisdiction while recording the treaties and laws through which the United States acquired and governed the islands.
The Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State

| Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano, Editors | Smithsonian Institution | n.d. 

Collects studies showing how governing overseas colonies influenced American policing, education, social science, racial classification, constitutional law, public administration, and consumer culture.
Stories: Filipino American History

| Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center | Smithsonian Institution | n.d. 

Connects colonial rule in the Philippines and Hawaii to labor migration, sugar production, the legal category of United States national, and Filipino struggles for belonging.

Continental Expansion and the Origins of an Overseas Empire

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

| National Archives | National Archives | March 28, 2024 

Presents the treaty that ended the Mexican-American War and transferred an enormous portion of Mexico’s territory to the United States.
Afro-Latinidad on the Anza Trail

| National Park Service | National Park Service | 2024 

Connects the Mexican-American War and United States expansion into California with the declining political influence and legal status of Afro-Latine communities in the borderlands.
Diseños: An Impact of the Mexican Cession

| National Archives Museum | National Archives | 2023 

Examines the maps and land-grant records used to determine property ownership after the United States annexed vast Mexican territories under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
The Mexican-American War

| National Park Service | National Park Service | 2022 

Describes the conflict as a central expression of Manifest Destiny that transformed the United States into a continental empire extending to the Pacific.
The Lands of the Overland Trails: Protests Against the Mexican-American War

| National Park Service | National Park Service | 2021 

Surveys opposition from Abraham Lincoln, Henry David Thoreau, abolitionists, religious critics, and others who regarded the war as territorial aggression.
American Latino Theme Study: Law

| National Park Service | National Park Service | 2020 

Examines how conquest, citizenship provisions, land law, racial classification, and altered treaty language affected Mexicans who became residents of the United States.
Private Land Claim of Luis Mesa

| National Archives | National Archives | 2019 

Uses one disputed land claim to illustrate the difficulties Mexican property owners encountered under American territorial government after 1848.
Out of War, a New Nation

| James M. McPherson | National Archives | Spring 2010 

Explains how territory acquired from Mexico intensified disputes over slavery and helped produce the political crisis that culminated in the Civil War.
Monuments, Manifest Destiny, and Mexico

| Rachel St. John | National Archives | Summer 2005 

Investigates the surveying and physical marking of the new United States–Mexico boundary following a war driven substantially by American territorial ambitions.
The Gadsden Purchase, 1853–1854

| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | n.d. 

Explains how the United States acquired additional Mexican land for a possible southern transcontinental railroad after disputes left unresolved by the Mexican-American War.
The Annexation of Texas, the Mexican-American War, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | n.d. 

Reviews Texas annexation, the disputed border, President James K. Polk’s expansionist objectives, the invasion of Mexico, and proposals to annex even more Mexican territory.
Texas Independence

| National Museum of American History | Smithsonian Institution | n.d. 

Connects American settlement in Mexican Texas, the Texas Revolution, annexation, Manifest Destiny, and Polk’s determination to acquire California and New Mexico.
Mexican War: A Resource Guide

| Library of Congress | Library of Congress | n.d. 

Collects books, manuscripts, newspapers, maps, photographs, and primary documents concerning the Mexican-American War and the expansion of the United States to the Pacific.
Map of the United States Including Western Territories, December 1848

| National Archives | National Archives | n.d. 

Presents President Polk’s map displaying the dramatic territorial gains achieved through war with Mexico and the resulting debates over governing the newly acquired lands.
Lincoln’s Spot Resolutions

| National Archives | National Archives | n.d. 

Documents Abraham Lincoln’s demand that President Polk identify the precise location where Mexican forces supposedly shed American blood on American soil.
Diplomacy and Westward Expansion

| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | n.d. 

Introduces Manifest Destiny as an ideology that combined diplomacy, settlement, commerce, Indigenous dispossession, and offensive war to construct a continental nation.
A Hearty Grip: Fort Scott Soldiers in the Mexican-American War

| National Park Service | National Park Service | n.d. 

Describes how supporters interpreted the war as fulfillment of a divinely ordained national mission while American armies occupied northern and central Mexico.

Alaska, Guano Islands, Samoa, and Pacific Outposts

History and the Islands of Samoa

| National Park Service | National Park Service | April 16, 2025 

Explains how strategic and commercial rivalry among the United States, Germany, and Britain resulted in the colonial division of the Samoan archipelago.
Check for the Purchase of Alaska

| National Archives | National Archives | March 28, 2024 

Presents the government payment for Alaska and discusses William Seward’s belief that territorial acquisition would advance American commerce and power.
The American Home Front Before World War II: The Greater United States

| National Park Service | National Park Service | 2023 

Surveys Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, American Samoa, the Canal Zone, Wake Island, and the Guano Islands as parts of a geographically extensive United States.

| Ross Dardani | American Journal of Legal History | 2021 

Examines failed attempts to extend citizenship to American Samoans and the connection between nationality law, naval administration, racial attitudes, and colonial governance.
National Park of American Samoa: World War II

| National Park Service | National Park Service | April 23, 2020 

Traces American interest in Pago Pago as a coaling station, the partition of Samoa, naval government, the deeds of cession, and the territory’s strategic military role.
The Smithsonian and the Nineteenth-Century Guano Trade

| Diane Wendt | National Museum of American History | May 31, 2017 

Describes the Guano Islands Act as an early overseas land-acquisition program through which Americans claimed numerous islands for commercial resource extraction.
Secretary of State William Seward

| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | n.d. 

Reviews Seward’s efforts to acquire Alaska, Midway Island, Caribbean naval bases, and other territories as part of an ambitious post–Civil War expansion program.
Purchase of Alaska, 1867

| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | n.d. 

Places the Alaska Purchase within the expansion of American commercial, strategic, and political influence across the North Pacific and toward Asia.
American Samoa’s Role in World War II

| National Park Service | National Park Service | n.d. 

Provides historical background on the American naval station at Pago Pago, the partition of Samoa, and the military incorporation of the islands into the United States’ Pacific network.
A Brief Glimpse: Asian American and Pacific Islander National Historic Landmarks

| National Park Service | National Park Service | n.d. 

Places Samoa, Guam, Hawaii, the Philippines, migration, military installations, and commercial routes within the wider geography of American Pacific imperialism.
Emergence: The U.S. Navy’s Debut as a Sea Power, 1898–1918

| Vincent P. O’Hara | U.S. Naval Institute | June 2025 

Examines the naval buildup that enabled the United States to defeat Spain, maintain overseas possessions, display global power, and enter the First World War as a major maritime state.
America’s First Aircraft Carrier

| Roger Connor | National Air and Space Museum | Winter 2022 

Traces the emergence of aircraft carriers as mobile bases capable of projecting American military power far beyond the continental United States.
The Great White Fleet

| Naval History and Heritage Command | U.S. Navy | 2021 

Documents Theodore Roosevelt’s deployment of sixteen battleships on a worldwide cruise intended to demonstrate the reach and preparedness of the expanding American Navy.
1908

| Jim Rasenberger | Smithsonian Magazine | January 2008 

Describes the Great White Fleet’s global voyage as both a diplomatic spectacle and a carefully planned demonstration of American industrial and naval strength.
The Ships of the Great White Fleet

| Naval History and Heritage Command | U.S. Navy | n.d. 

Profiles the battleships and support vessels that participated in Roosevelt’s worldwide display of American naval capacity.
Dominating Trade

| National Museum of American History | Smithsonian Institution | n.d. 

Explores how American corporations, military power, foreign intervention, and government support combined to expand access to markets in Latin America and the Pacific.
A New Navy, a New War

| National Museum of American History | Smithsonian Institution | n.d. 

Connects the construction of a modern steel navy with Mahanian strategy, war against Spain, and the acquisition of an American overseas empire.

Caribbean and Central American Intervention

The United States Intervention in Nicaragua

| U.S. Department of State | Office of the Historian | 1927 

Reviews the 1912 military intervention, the suppression of a Nicaraguan revolution, and the prolonged stationing of United States Marines in Managua.
The United States Intervention in the Dominican Republic

| U.S. Department of State | Office of the Historian | 1918 

Provides an official account of the financial agreements, political crises, and military decisions that led to the occupation beginning in November 1916.
Negotiations for the Purchase of the Danish West India Islands

| Maurice Francis Egan | Office of the Historian | 1917 

Traces earlier American efforts to purchase strategically located Caribbean islands for naval, commercial, and defensive purposes.
Convention Between the United States and Denmark for Cession of the Danish West Indies

| Governments of the United States and Denmark | Office of the Historian | 1917 

Documents negotiations that culminated in the purchase of the Danish West Indies, subsequently renamed the United States Virgin Islands.
Continuation of the Military Occupation of the Dominican Republic

| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | 1917 

Documents the reforms, pacification policies, financial controls, and administrative measures imposed during American military rule.
Military Occupation of the Dominican Republic

| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | 1916 

Collects diplomatic documents concerning the refusal to recognize a Dominican government, the establishment of martial law, and American control over Dominican finances.
Message of the President on Cuba and American Commercial Supremacy

| Theodore Roosevelt | Office of the Historian | December 1902 

Presents Roosevelt’s argument that commercial reciprocity with Cuba should help the United States control the Cuban market and consolidate its position in the Caribbean.

Constitutional Empire and Unequal Citizenship

The U.S. Supreme Court Cases Built on a “Rotten Foundation”

| Lyle Denniston | National Constitution Center | May 2, 2022 

Reviews criticism of the racial and imperial assumptions underlying decisions that denied full constitutional protections to people in newly acquired territories.
The Insular Cases Run Amok: Against Constitutional Exceptionalism in the Territories

| Christina Duffy Ponsa-Kraus | Yale Law Journal | 2022 

Critiques expansive interpretations of the Insular Cases and examines how constitutional exceptionalism continues to shape government authority in United States territories.
Are the Insular Cases Still Binding After a Century?

| Lyle Denniston | National Constitution Center | June 17, 2016 

Examines legal challenges to the doctrine that full constitutional rights do not automatically apply in every territory governed by the United States.
Is Natural-Born Citizenship Sometimes Not a Fundamental Right?

| Lyle Denniston | National Constitution Center | July 23, 2015 

Discusses attempts to use the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to challenge the unequal status imposed on people born in American Samoa.
Guide to Puerto Rican Records in the National Archives at Philadelphia

| National Archives at Philadelphia | National Archives | 2013 

Surveys records of American military government, customs administration, federal courts, citizenship policy, economic regulation, and the Insular Cases in Puerto Rico.
Guide to Senate Records: Territories and Insular Possessions

| National Archives | National Archives | n.d. 

Describes Senate records on citizenship, territorial administration, statehood, independence, and political status in Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii, Alaska, and the Virgin Islands.

Visual Culture and the Imperial Debate

July 4th, 1901

| Udo J. Keppler | Library of Congress | July 4, 1901 

Uses Independence Day imagery to comment on the contradiction between American celebrations of liberty and continued colonial warfare in the Philippines.
Through Peace to Happiness

| Louis Dalrymple | Library of Congress | 1900 

Presents American colonial rule as a path leading Filipinos toward peace, prosperity, and civilization while portraying armed resistance as an obstacle.
The Aguinaldo Guard

| Udo J. Keppler | Library of Congress | 1900 

Satirizes anti-imperialists as defenders of Emilio Aguinaldo and reflects the bitter domestic political struggle over the Philippine-American War.
Halt!

| Louis Dalrymple | Library of Congress | 1900 

Portrays opposition to imperialism as an attempt to tear down American flags associated with honor, commerce, national dignity, and military sacrifice.
Declined with Thanks

| J. S. Pughe | Library of Congress | 1900 

Depicts Uncle Sam refusing an anti-expansionist prescription, illustrating the political confidence of imperialists after the acquisition of overseas territories.
The Dream of the Anti-Expansionist

| Udo J. Keppler | Library of Congress | 1899 

Ridicules opponents of annexation by imagining the Philippines falling into disorder and foreign competition after an American withdrawal.
Smashed!

| Louis Dalrymple | Library of Congress | 1899 

Depicts Uncle Sam using military force to crush Filipino resistance and presents conquest as the restoration of order and authority.
Uncle Sam’s Temptation

| Minneapolis Tribune | Library of Congress | 1898 

Shows Uncle Sam considering Britain’s menu of conquest and foreign aggression instead of the traditional American doctrines of nonannexation and hemispheric defense.
The First Blow

| Minneapolis Tribune | Library of Congress | 1898 

Depicts military victory and expansionist political pressure overwhelming domestic critics who opposed the acquisition of overseas colonies.
He Can’t Let Go

| Louis Dalrymple | Library of Congress | 1898 

Shows the Philippines suspended between Spanish misrule, Filipino nationalism, and American control, conveying the imperialist claim that annexation had become a moral obligation.

American Empire, Exceptionalism, and Historical Interpretation

Sovereignty and Dependence in the American Empire: Native Nations, Territories, and Overseas Colonies

| Alvin Padilla-Babilonia | Duke Law Journal | February 2024 

Examines how American officials reconciled republican government with colonial power by portraying Indigenous nations and territorial populations as dependent peoples supposedly unprepared for self-government.
The Territories Under Text, History, and Tradition

| Andrew Willinger | Washington University Law Review | 2023 

Investigates the inconsistent treatment of territorial laws in constitutional interpretation and argues that the history of federally governed territories remains central to understanding American constitutional development.

| Joseph Blocher and Mitu Gulati | Yale Law Journal | 2022 

Uses the American acquisition of Navassa Island under the Guano Islands Act to examine how overseas territory was treated as property belonging to the United States rather than as a political community entitled to self-government.
A.G. Hopkins Has Rewritten the History of the USA from a Global Perspective

| A. G. Hopkins | History News Network | 2018 

Places American territorial development within the wider history of Western empire and challenges the assumption that the United States followed a path fundamentally different from European imperial powers.
Protectionist Empire: Trade, Tariffs, and United States Foreign Policy, 1890–1914

| Benjamin O. Fordham | Studies in American Political Development | October 26, 2017 

Argues that overseas colonies, naval expansion, and intervention in Latin America and Asia were shaped not only by the search for foreign markets but also by American protectionism and efforts to shield domestic industry.
The Two Anniversaries That Everybody’s Forgotten

| Adam Burns | History News Network | March 2017 

Compares the purchases of Alaska and the Danish West Indies and explains how the United States developed different political futures for incorporated and unincorporated territories.
Why Okinawa Matters: Japan, the United States and the Colonial Past

| Richard Falk | Asia-Pacific Journal | October 2016 

Examines Okinawa’s continuing role as a host for American military bases and connects local opposition to the colonial history underlying the United States’ projection of power in Asia.
“The Empire Will Compensate You”: The Structural Dynamics of the U.S. Overseas Basing Network

| Alexander Cooley and Daniel H. Nexon | Perspectives on Politics | December 10, 2013 

Compares the global American military-basing system with earlier imperial structures while emphasizing unequal relationships, political bargaining, resistance, and dependence among host governments.
State Building Through Partnership: Delegation, Public-Private Partnerships, and the Political Development of American Imperialism, 1898–1916

| Colin D. Moore | Studies in American Political Development | April 18, 2011 

Shows how government officials and private financiers cooperated to administer colonies, control Caribbean finances, and expand American influence through Dollar Diplomacy.
US Bases and Empire: Global Perspectives on the Asia Pacific

| Catherine Lutz | Asia-Pacific Journal | March 2009 

Analyzes the global structure of American military power and the social, political, economic, and environmental consequences of bases for communities throughout the Asia-Pacific region.
Colonialism Without Colonies: On the Extraterritorial Jurisprudence of the U.S. Court for China

| Teemu Ruskola | Law and Contemporary Problems | Summer 2008 

Examines the United States Court for China, which exercised authority over American citizens in China and created a system of colonial-style law without formally annexing Chinese territory.
America’s Empire of Bases

| Chalmers Johnson | Asia-Pacific Journal | May 2003 

Defines the worldwide network of American military installations as a modern empire whose geography, political costs, and effects on constitutional government are frequently hidden from the public.
Why It’s Time to Use the “E” and “I” Words to Describe American Policies for 200 Years

| History News Network | History News Network | n.d. 

Argues that terms such as Manifest Destiny, global leadership, the Open Door, and national security have often served as euphemisms for persistent forms of American empire and imperialism.
The Power and the Glory

| Howard Zinn | History News Network | n.d. 

Criticizes the use of divine mission, liberty, democracy, and civilization to portray American expansion and military intervention as uniquely benevolent.
The American Habit of Empire, and the Cases of Polk and Bush

| Walter Nugent | History News Network | n.d. 

Compares nineteenth-century continental conquest with later military intervention and argues that beliefs in American exceptionalism repeatedly encouraged aggressive and unilateral foreign policies.
Bursting America’s Imperial Bubble

| Emily S. Rosenberg | History News Network | n.d. 

Describes American empire as a flexible combination of annexed territories, protectorates, administrative dependencies, economic influence, cultural penetration, and overseas military bases.

Hawaii, Annexation, and Native Resistance

Search Strategies and Selected Articles: Annexation of Hawaii

| Library of Congress | Library of Congress | 2025 

Collects contemporary newspaper coverage of Queen Liliuokalani, Princess Kaiulani, Sanford Dole, American Minister John Stevens, and competing investigations of the overthrow.
Annexation of Hawaii: Topics in Chronicling America

| Library of Congress | Library of Congress | 2025 

Provides historical newspapers and research guidance concerning the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani, the Republic of Hawaii, Native resistance, commercial interests, and annexation by the United States.
European Contact and Colonization in Hawaii

| National Park Service | National Park Service | 2019 

Traces the effects of foreign trade, disease, missionaries, plantation agriculture, firearms, and American business interests on Hawaiian society and sovereignty.
Annexation of the Hawaiian Islands

| U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs | Library of Congress | May 17, 1898 

Presents congressional arguments that Hawaii should be acquired for naval defense, Pacific commerce, racial control, wartime strategy, and protection against competing foreign powers.
Hawaiian Annexation and Pacific Rivalry

| Albert S. Willis | Office of the Historian | April 14, 1894 

Describes Hawaii and Samoa as targets of international competition during a period when European and American powers were rapidly dividing Pacific islands among themselves.
Report on the Historical Policy of the United States Toward Hawaii

| John Tyler Morgan | Office of the Historian | February 26, 1894 

Presents an annexationist interpretation claiming that American strategic and commercial interests in Hawaii had long made eventual acquisition a national necessity.
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1894: Affairs in Hawaii

| U.S. Department of State | Library of Congress | 1894 

Presents diplomatic correspondence and official reports concerning the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, proposed annexation, the provisional government, and President Cleveland’s response.

| U.S. Diplomatic Correspondence | Office of the Historian | December 1893 

Illustrates how American officials frequently predicted Native Hawaiian acceptance of annexation despite extensive petitions, protests, and organized opposition.
Hawaiian Song

| Library of Congress | Library of Congress | n.d. 

Provides historical context for Hawaiian political music, the weakening of Native voting rights, the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani, and cultural resistance to American annexation.
Hawaii

| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | n.d. 

Summarizes diplomatic relations with the independent Hawaiian Kingdom, growing American commercial influence, Japanese labor migration, the overthrow of the monarchy, and annexation.
Hawaii Holomua

| Library of Congress | Library of Congress | n.d. 

Preserves a Hawaiian newspaper that published Queen Liliuokalani’s protest and documented the arguments and economic pressures used against opponents of annexation.

Guam, American Samoa, and Pacific Colonial Rule

U.S. Territories: Public Debt and Economic Outlook—2025 Update

| Government Accountability Office | Government Accountability Office | June 30, 2025 

Examines the present economic and governmental conditions of Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa as enduring territorial jurisdictions.
Assan Through the Ages

| National Park Service | National Park Service | 2025 

Uses one location on Guam to examine Chamorro land use, Spanish colonialism, American missionary activity, war, military cemeteries, and the island’s continuing strategic role.
Marshall Islands

| National Park Service | National Park Service | September 13, 2024 

Describes the transition from Japanese to American rule and the selection of Bikini Atoll and other Marshall Islands locations for United States nuclear-weapons testing.
B Reactor History Room: Limited Test Ban Treaty

| National Park Service | National Park Service | January 24, 2024 

Reviews the Castle Bravo nuclear test in the Marshall Islands, the unexpectedly extensive radioactive fallout, and the international reaction against atmospheric testing.
Pacific Islanders in the United States and Their Heritage: Making Visible the Visibly Absent

| Amy Kuuleialoha Stillman and others | National Park Service | 2024 

Surveys the histories of Native Hawaiians, Chamorros, Samoans, and other Pacific Islanders affected by annexation, migration, colonial administration, and American military expansion.
The American Home Front After World War II

| National Park Service | National Park Service | November 16, 2023 

Discusses the forced relocation of Marshall Islanders and the human and environmental consequences of sixty-seven American nuclear tests conducted between 1946 and 1958.
American Samoa and the Nineteenth Amendment

| National Park Service | National Park Service | 2019 

Explains how American Samoa’s territorial status placed it outside the state ratification process and complicated the extension of constitutional voting protections.
American Samoa and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands

| Government Accountability Office | Government Accountability Office | April 2010 

Examines the effects of federal economic and labor policies in two Pacific territories whose industries and political institutions developed under distinct forms of American authority.
Samoa

| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | n.d. 

Reviews nineteenth-century American commercial activity and diplomatic competition that contributed to the division of the Samoan archipelago between colonial powers.
Records of the Office of Territories

| National Archives | National Archives | n.d. 

Describes government records concerning the administration of Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the Virgin Islands, the Philippines, and the Pacific trust territories.
Palau

| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | n.d. 

Traces Palau’s history under American trusteeship, negotiations over military and political status, and the Compact of Free Association that accompanied independence.
Micronesia

| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | n.d. 

Summarizes American administration of the Federated States of Micronesia through the United Nations Trust Territory and the later transition to independence and free association.

China, the Philippines, and Pacific Strategy

Immigration from Asia and the Pacific, 1870s to 1950s

| National Archives | National Archives | 2026 

Connects immigration restrictions with the distinctive legal status of Hawaii, the Philippines, and other American possessions used to recruit Asian and Pacific labor.
The Philippine War: A Conflict of Conscience for African Americans

| National Park Service | National Park Service | 2021 

Examines how Black soldiers and newspapers debated serving an expansionist government that claimed to liberate Filipinos while maintaining segregation and racial violence at home.
United States Policy Toward the Micronesian Trust Territory

| U.S. National Security Council | Office of the Historian | 1976 

Documents negotiations over Northern Mariana commonwealth status, Micronesian independence, free association, American military requirements, and the end of United Nations trusteeship.
Military Bases and Political Status in Micronesia

| U.S. National Security Council | Office of the Historian | 1975 

Reveals disagreements over American military land rights, termination of free-association agreements, local sovereignty, and the strategic value of Pacific islands.
President McKinley’s Instructions for Government of the Philippines

| William McKinley | Office of the Historian | December 1900 

Presents colonial rule as an obligation to deliver peace, prosperity, religious freedom, and education while demanding unconditional loyalty to United States sovereignty.
President McKinley’s Message on Cuba and the Philippines

| William McKinley | Office of the Historian | December 1899 

Describes American occupation as a temporary trust in Cuba while defending expanded government and military authority over other territories acquired from Spain.
The Opening to China Part II: The Second Opium War and the Treaty of Tianjin

| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | n.d. 

Explains how the United States benefited from unequal treaties, extraterritorial rights, expanded treaty ports, and Western military pressure without formally colonizing China.
The Mukden Incident and the Stimson Doctrine

| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | n.d. 

Describes American attempts to defend the Open Door in China and preserve regional influence while avoiding direct military confrontation with Japanese expansion.
Japanese-American Relations at the Turn of the Century

| Office of the Historian | U.S. Department of State | n.d. 

Examines agreements concerning immigration, commercial access to China, naval rivalry, and mutual recognition of American and Japanese territorial possessions in the Pacific.
His 128th Birthday

| Udo J. Keppler | Library of Congress | July 1904 

Depicts an American eagle stretching its wings from Puerto Rico and Panama to the Philippines, presenting overseas possessions and strategic routes as symbols of national maturity.
It’s “Up to” Them

| Udo J. Keppler | Library of Congress | November 20, 1901 

Shows Uncle Sam offering Filipinos a choice between an American soldier and an American schoolteacher, combining military coercion with paternalistic educational rhetoric.
Wireless Telegraphy

| J. S. Pughe | Library of Congress | 1901 

Satirizes the distance between American anti-imperialists and the Philippine battlefield while illustrating the domestic political struggle over colonial warfare.
The Philippines

| Anti-Imperialist League of New York | Library of Congress | 1900 

Presents an anti-imperialist publication opposing colonial government and arguing that Philippine independence was required by American republican principles.
The Philippines, Porto Rico and Cuba—Uncle Sam’s Burden

| Library of Congress | Library of Congress | 1899 

Uses the language of burden and dependency to represent newly acquired populations as responsibilities requiring American supervision and control.
Hit Him Hard!

| Grant E. Hamilton | Library of Congress | 1899 

Compares Filipino resistance to an infestation confronting President McKinley, demonstrating how dehumanizing imagery was used to normalize colonial warfare.
A Thing Well Begun Is Half Done

| Victor Gillam | Library of Congress | 1899 

Portrays American possessions in the Caribbean and Pacific as foundations for an interoceanic canal and a broader program of commercial and naval expansion.
Well, I Hardly Know Which to Take First!

| Library of Congress | Library of Congress | 1898 

Depicts President McKinley confronting several potential colonial acquisitions and reflects uncertainty over which overseas territories the United States should retain.
Uncle Sam’s Picnic

| Louis Dalrymple | Library of Congress | 1898 

Portrays Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and Hawaii as dependent children being added to a national wagon drawn by Liberty and Union.
A Trifle Embarrassed

| Udo J. Keppler | Library of Congress | 1898 

Shows Manifest Destiny depositing Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines at an American institution already caring for territories obtained through earlier expansion.
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