Performing Racial Uplift: E. Azalia Hackley and African American Activism in the Postbellum to Pre-Harlem Era

Abstract

ists” had been “well established” in the preceding decades (pp. 198–199). But in attempting to debunk the common myth that the U.S. has always been an anti-imperialist nation, the country’s anti-imperialists themselves have largely been written out, as have many of the prodigious studies of them and their ideological motivations. More engagement with how European imperial projects and ideas intimately informed the U.S. anti-imperialist mind would have gone a long way, especially considering that the anti-imperialist movement was comprised of the foreign policy elite’s leading liberal thinkers. Granted, some do feature here, like Charles Sumner, William Graham Sumner, Edward Atkinson, William Cullen Bryant, and William Lloyd Garrison, but with little, if any, acknowledgement of how their Europeaninspired economic ideologies shaped their responses to European and American imperialism. The connections between U.S. anti-imperialists and European liberal radicals were strong indeed during this period, evolving into a vast network of cosmopolitan elites – journalists, academics, politicians, theologians – opposed to Euro-American colonialism. Designs on Empire is a welcome addition to the study of nineteenth-century ideology and U.S. foreign relations. Priest’s innovative ideological approach, chronology, and case studies provide a fresh vantage point for exploring the transimperial ties that bound the U.S. Empire with those of Europe. It demonstrates that, as important as the British Empire was in the growth of the Gilded Age American Empire, other European empires also played pivotal roles in shaping elite thought about U.S. expansionism.