History and the Robert Charles Riot of 1900

Abstract

American soldiers to symbolically claim the West. It also erased a village of emancipated freemen at Arlington to create an imperialistic “Valhalla” that reframed the CivilWar as a conflict of reunification rather than emancipation. Abroad, the military tried unsuccessfully to claim the Philippines through the burial of slain soldiers (their bodies were eventually repatriated). Bontrager shows the domestic and colonial politics of race and citizenship to be one and the same, highlighting why historians need to be clear about who is included in the term “American.” The complexity ofDeath at the Edges of Empire, however, means that stories of alternative cultural memories (or even contests over memory) are only occasionally discussed. Still, Bontrager’s wide sweepmeans that scholars with different specialties will find this book valuable. Military historians will benefit from Bontrager’s tracing of the ideological link between Lincoln’s Gettysburg promise and the imperialistic successes and failures of the Spanish-AmericanWar andWorldWar I. Methodologically, the book also highlights how memory studies allow us to locate new relationships between war, national identity, citizenship, and imperialism in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Finally, scholars in death studies will be especially interested in the debates and struggles that accompanied the military’s physical handling of soldiers’ remains and the debates that surrounded the decision to bury World War I soldiers in France.