This proposed session will explore how the construction of United States identity during the Gilded Age occurred through engagement with contemporary imperialism and the rhetoric of civilization. If a central paradox of U.S. history in the period between the Civil War and World War I was the emergence of a society that was conflictingly both imperialist and democratic, then the ways and means of this emergence should be a fruitful source of inquiry into the contradictory ways in which American power asserts itself in the modern world. This panel welcomes papers from a variety of disciplines exploring these contradictions through an examination of the intersection, confluence, and disjuncture, at home and abroad, of U.S. empire. Topics might include:

• American missionaries in China and Japan
• Women’s travel narratives and discourses of rescue
• Reenactment of the Boer War at the 1904 St. Louis Fair
• Democracy, Pragmatism, and U.S. foreign policy in Latin America and the Pacific
• Representations of Africa and Asia on the U.S. stage and screen
• James Weldon Johnson and African American diplomats
• Tuskegee Institute’s agricultural extension projects in Africa; “Social imperialism” and women’s suffrage