Both authors provide granular detail about how US companies and the United States government managed their relationships with farmers, workers, and border regions. Their close observations give us more access to the details of these negotiations and thus to the ways that non-elites engaged US companies and the US government. How does each authors’ methodological approach shape their conclusions?
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Both McCoy and Poblete are interested in the understanding the dynamics that shaped American colonial terrains after the wars of 1898 helped establish U.S. rule outside of continental North America. The Supreme Court cases of the early twentieth century, collectively called the “Insular Cases,” established a new political definition for U.S. territory — spaces that would not ultimately become states, and whose residents were U.S. “wards,” but not U.S. citizens.
Each author is asking a different set of questions and using a different approach. Both are interested in how the colonial state and colonial political economies operated. But, Poblete is a social historian who examines the experiences of Puerto Rican and Filipino workers in Hawai’i, McCoy is more interested in political institutions and the ideologies and terrains they helped to produce. Reading these texts together, what new ideas about U.S. colonial rule/colonial practices did you encounter?
Writ large, both of these authors are interested in how elite white Americans engaged with places outside the borders of the US in the late nineteenth century and into the early twentieth. Hoganson explores how wealthy and middle class women understood foreign places as sites for acquisition and consumption of household goods and other commodities. American elites had other aims in the Dominican Republic, from providing substantial investment for “modernization” to forcibly taking over its finances and occupying the country. How might you compare these different global engagements?
In some ways these two pieces are very different. Smith is attuned to the experiences of non-elites. She is interested in exploring how they come to be subject to the powerful ideological regimes that she examines and explores how they fight against multiple forms of inequality. Greenberg, conversely, is clear that she is interested in dominant cultural ideas about how gender operated more than she is in exploring gender or race as a lived experience. How do these different approaches produce different kinds of analyses? How are their treatments of race and gender in the mid-nineteenth century both similar and different?
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Both authors are interested in the central role of violence to the political domination of white elites in the nineteenth century United States. How does each author deal with violence as a key tool in the assimilation of new and existing territories into the political economy of an expanding nation? How does each author deal with dissent and resistance to this violence?
Don’t feel obliged to address all of the questions above. The point of this exercise is for you to think about the two pieces together and write a reflection about what you found striking.
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