In the twentieth century, American territorial expansion and continued bids for supremacy in the Cold War generated new forms of governance. They also dispossessed new groups of people, who in turn developed ways of challenging the hegemony of the United States. This panel puts three new histories of American expansion and empire in conversation with moderator Nikhil Pal Singh. Together, the works will highlight these historical transformations in the realms of labor, law, and the military.
Jeff Schuhrke is an Assistant Professor at the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies at SUNY Empire State University. His book Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade (Verso Books, 2024) traces the AFL-CIO’s role in the United States’ anticommunist campaigns in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Allison Powers Useche is an Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin, Madison (and Ph.D. alumna of the Columbia History Department). In Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2024), Useche focuses on the law, uncovering how dispossessed peoples – colonized subjects, former slaves, and migrant workers – petitioned international law to secure legal protections of life and property. Justin Jackson is an Associate Professor of History, Bard College at Simon’s Rock (and also a Ph.D alumnus of the Columbia History Department). The Work of Empire: War, Occupation, and the Making of American Colonialism in Cuba and the Philippines (University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming May 2025) uncovers how the nascent U.S. Army learned to wage war fighting Spain and nationalist rebellions in Cuba and the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century.
Moderator Nikhil Pal Singh, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University. Singh’s work joins contemporary U.S. history and political theory and has examined the relationships between race, the black freedom movement, war, and policing.
Sponsored by the Lehman Center for American History and the Department of History.