Subject and Course Guides: U.S. History After 1865: American Empire

Online Resources

American Imperialism: The Spanish-American War - Digital Public Library of America
Review the sources in this set to gain insight into the motivations for US engagement in the Spanish-American War.
The Spanish-American War: The United States Becomes a World Power - Library of Congress
Crucible of Empire: The Spanish-American War
The Spanish-American War in Motion Pictures
This presentation features 68 motion pictures, produced between 1898 and 1901, of the Spanish-American War and the subsequent Philippine Revolution.
Philippine Revolutionary Papers, 1898-1900
This collection includes letters, military orders and official government programs and invitations during the Philippine Revolution (1896-1898) and the Philippine American War (1899-1902).
The Philippine Revolution - Library of Congress
The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902
Office of the Historian

Databases

America: History and Life (Full-Text) This link opens in a new window
Provides indexing, abstracts, and full-text for U.S. and Canadian historical and cultural literature, from prehistory to present. NOTE: Only 6 simultaneous users allowed.
America: History and Life is a comprehensive source for U.S. and Canadian history and culture, from prehistoric times to the present. The database contains indexing, abstracts, and full-text for over 1,700 journals as well as books, book reviews, theses/dissertations, and film project reviews. A strong English-language journal coverage is balanced by an international perspective on topics and events, including English abstracts of articles published in more than 40 languages. This database is an excellent bibliographic reference tool for students and scholars of American history, Canadian history, popular culture, American studies, literature/folklore, genealogy, women's studies/gender studies, multicultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and the history of science. The database corresponds to the print America: History and Life, which is produced by ABC-CLIO. Updated regularly.

NOTE: Only 6 simultaneous users allowed.
American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collections This link opens in a new window
The American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collections include digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals from the American Antiquarian Society, the premier library documenting the life of America's people from the Colonial Era through the Civil War and Reconstruction. This content is not available for acquisition in digital form from any source other than EBSCO Publishing, and keyword searching is available on all titles.
The American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collections exists as a series of five databases created from a comprehensive collection of American periodicals published between 1691 and 1876. These databases include 6,500 titles featuring more than 10 million pages of content from the seventeenth century through the late nineteenth century. The collection also contains titles in more than
two dozen languages including French, German, Norwegian, Spanish, and more.
C19: The Nineteenth Century Index This link opens in a new window
A super-index to nineteenth century books, periodical, official documents, newspapers and archives.
C19: The Nineteenth Century is a source for discovering nineteenth-century books, periodicals, official documents, newspapers and archives. It's a super-index to more than 16 million documents that includes the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, and the British Periodicals. It links to other 19th century full-text sources in the UTA Library's collection such as American Periodical Series Online, Periodicals Archive Online and Palmer's Full-Text Online.
JSTOR: The Scholarly Journal Archive This link opens in a new window
JSTOR provides access to more than 12 million academic journal articles, books, and primary sources in 75 disciplines.
JSTOR (Journal Storage) is an archive collection of over 620 full-text scholarly journals primarily from university presses and professional society publishers. Additional titles are added to the collection as back files are digitized. Subject areas include: African American Studies, Anthropology, Asian Studies, Botany, Ecology, Economics, Education, Finance, Folklore, History, History of Science Technology, Language Literature, Mathematics, Philosophy, Political Science, Population Studies, Public Policy Administration, Science, Slavic Studies, Sociology, Statistics.
NINES: Nineteenth-century Scholarship Online This link opens in a new window
NINES contains peer-reviewed scholarly and educational materials dealing with the all aspects of British and American culture during the long nineteenth century (1770-1920).
NINES vets freely-available digital objects in nineteenth-century studies for scholarly integrity and aggregates metadata (or descriptive information) about them in a faceted search-and-browsing interface. The objects themselves are accessible via links to the federated websites that have contributed them.
Included are traditional texts and documents as well as “born-digital” materials. Also there are software tools that aid collation and comparative analysis and enable pedagogical applications.
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories This link opens in a new window
This collection includes 2,162 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information, so providing a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950.
Composed of contemporaneous letters and diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives, the series provides a rich source for scholars in a wide range of disciplines. In selected cases, users will be able to hear the actual audio voices of the immigrants. The collection will be particularly useful to researchers, because much of the original material is difficult to find, poorly indexed, and unpublished; most bibliographies of the immigrant focus on secondary research; and few oral histories have been published.
This work in progress is composed of the personal narratives of immigrants to North America, including Canada
North American Women's Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new window
This database includes diaries, journals, and letters written by women visiting or living in North America between the years 1700 and 1950.
This work in progress, when completed, will be the largest collection of women's diaries and correspondence ever assembled and include the personal experiences of 1,500 women from all social classes.
ProQuest Recent Newspapers: The New York Times This link opens in a new window
Full-page images of the New York Times from 2008 to recent (1 month embargo). This digitized newspaper provides genealogists, researchers and scholars with cover-to-cover access to recent newspaper content. Every page is full-text searchable.

Secondary Research - In our Collection

Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends by Charlotte Brooks
ISBN: 9780226075976
Publication Date: 2009-05-01
Between the early 1900s and the late 1950s, the attitudes of white Californians toward their Asian American neighbors evolved from outright hostility to relative acceptance. Charlotte Brooks examines this transformation through the lens of California's urban housing markets, arguing that the perceived foreignness of Asian Americans, which initially stranded them in segregated areas, eventually facilitated their integration into neighborhoods that rejected other minorities.
The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture by Amy Kaplan
ISBN: 0674009134
Publication Date: 2003-02-17
In this book, Amy Kaplan shows how US imperialism - from Manifest Destiny to the American Century - has profoundly shaped key elements of American culture at home, and how the struggle for power over foreign peoples and places has disrupted the quest for domestic order.
Barbarian Virtues by Matthew Frye Jacobson
ISBN: 9780809028085
Publication Date: 2000-04-12
Drawing upon a diverse range of sources--not only traditional political documents but also novels, travelogues, academic treatises, and art--Jacobson demonstrates the close relationship between immigration and expansionism. By bridging these two areas, so often left separate, he rethinks the texture of American political life in a keenly argued and persuasive history.Barbarian Virtuesshows how these years set the stage for today's attitudes and ideas about "Americanism" and about immigrants and foreign policy, fromBorder Watchto the Gulf War.
Foreign Relations by Donna R. Gabaccia
ISBN: 9780691134192
Publication Date: 2012-03-12
Donna Gabaccia examines America's relationship to immigration and its debates through the prism of the nation's changing foreign policy over the past two centuries. She shows that immigrants were not isolationists who cut ties to their countries of origin or their families. Instead, their relations to America were often in flux and dependent on government policies of the time.
God's Arbiters by Susan K. Harris
ISBN: 9780199781072
Publication Date: 2011-01-01
Mining letters, speeches, textbooks, poems, political cartoons and other sources, Susan K. Harris examines the role of religious rhetoric and racial biases in the battle over annexation. She offers a provocative reading both of the debates' religious framework and of the evolution of Christian national identity within the U.S. The book brings to life the personalities who dominated the discussion, figures like the bellicose Beveridge and the segregationist Senator Benjamin Tillman.
Race over Empire by Eric T. L. Love
ISBN: 0807829005
Publication Date: 2004-11-22
Generations of historians have maintained that in the last decade of the nineteenth century white-supremacist racial ideologies such as Anglo-Saxonism, social Darwinism, benevolent assimilation, and the concept of the "white man's burden" drove American imperialist ventures in the nonwhite world. In Race over Empire, Eric T. L. Love contests this view and argues that racism had nearly the opposite effect.
Rebirth of a Nation by Jackson Lears
ISBN: 9780060747497
Publication Date: 2009-06-09
An illuminating and authoritative history of America in the years between the Civil War and World War I, Jackson Lears's Rebirth of a Nation was named one of the best books of 2009 by The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Tender Violence by Laura Wexler
ISBN: 0807825700
Publication Date: 2000-11-06
Laura Wexler presents an incisive analysis of how the first American female photojournalists contributed to a "domestic vision" that reinforced the imperialism and racism of turn-of-the-century America. These women photographers, white and middle class, constructed images of war disguised as peace through a mechanism Wexler calls the "averted eye," which had its origins in the private domain of family photography.
White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 by Guglielmo, Thomas
ISBN: 9786612367410
Publication Date: 2004
In this title, Thomas Guglielmo explores how it was possible for newcomers to America to be automatically considered white but at the same time also be subjected to racial prejudice. Using Chicago as a case study, he argues that whiteness was the Italian immigrants' most powerful asset in America.