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Writing Center

Thursday, April 12
7:30 pm
Classroom Building 313.

(April 12, 2007)

Dateline: 1899
Headline: US Senate Votes to Annex the Philippines
Quotation: “We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee of God, of the civilization of the world” (Senator Alfred Beveridge, Jan. 9, 1900).

How did the United States present itself when it first became an imperialist nation? Susan K. Harris’s talk will explore the role that religion played in the rhetorical development of American imperial identity. Focusing on debates over the U.S. annexation of the Philippines in 1899, she will begin by arguing that 19th-century American schoolbooks fused Enlightenment and Protestant histories to teach children that specifically “American” values could only be achieved by white Protestants. She will then show how the resulting representation of the “typical American” as white and Protestant was used by both expansionists and anti-expansionists as they debated the legitimacy of annexing the Philippines. Finally, she steps outside U.S. geopolitical borders to suggest how Filipinos and other citizens of Spain’s former colonies responded to this representation.

Suggested Pre-Reading:

• Senator Alfred Beveridge, Congressional Speech, January 9, 1900. http:www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/ajb72.htm.
• Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands.” http://www.boondocksnet.com/ai/kipling/kipling.html.
• Mark Twain, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” (Most anthologies of Twain’s short works; also the new Heath Anthology; also http://www.boondocksnet.com/ai/twain/persit.html)
• “Platform of the American Anti-Imperialist League,” October 17, 1899. Richard Hofstadter and Beatrice Hofstadter, Great Issues in American History: From Reconstruction to the Present Day, 1864-1981. Vintage Books, 1982.
• Rubén Darío, “A Roosevelt” (“To Roosevelt”). Rubén Darío, Selected Writings. Penguin Classics, 2005. http://www.worldpolicy.org/globalrights/nicaragua/1904-Dar%C3%ADo.html (Spanish version) http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/dario.html (English Translation)

And for anyone who is really interested:

• Ernest Crosby, Captain Jinks, Hero (1903; out of print; check your library)

Susan K. Harris is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Kansas. She is the author of Annie Adams Fields, Mary Gladstone Drew, and The Work of the Late 19th-Century Hostess (Palgrave, 2002); The Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain (Cambridge University Press, 1996); 19th-Century American Women's Novels: Interpretive Strategies (Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Mark Twain's Escape from Time: A Study of Patterns and Images (University of Missouri Press, 1982). She also has edited Kate Douglas Wiggins's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (Penguin, 2005); Catharine Maria Sedgwick's A New-England Tale (Penguin, 2003); Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Houghton Mifflin, 2000); Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing (Penguin, 1999); and Mark Twain: Historical Romances (The Library of America, 1994). Her essays have appeared in collections published by Oxford, Johns Hopkins, and Rutgers University presses, and in journals such as American Literature, New England Quarterly, and Studies in the Novel. She has edited Legacy: A Journal of American Women's Writing and has served on the advisory boards for American Literature, Leviathan: the Melville Society Journal, The Oxford Reader's Companion to Mark Twain, and the Mark Twain Museum in Hannibal, Missouri.

Her lecture is funded by a grant from the Kirkpatrick Foundation and is sponsored by the OSU Department of English. It is free and open to the public.

For more information contact the English Deparment at 744-9474 or english.information@okstate.edu