Jackson Lears is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers and the Editor in Chief of Raritan. He is the author of Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920, among other books. (February 2017)
The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire
by Stephen Kinzer
For decades, anti-imperial thought has been largely absent from public discourse. So has the word “imperialism.” The chief substitute for it has been “internationalism.” The rhetorical shift from imperialism to internationalism suggests a sanitizing process at work during the twentieth century, as the United States moved away from a formal empire based on the occupation of foreign territory to an informal empire based on proxy governments backed by occasional US invasions.
