Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917

The years between the Centennial Exhibition in 1876 and World War I were a period of dramatic change, when the rate at which Americans came in contact with foreign peoples rapidly accelerated. In Barbarian Virtues, Matthew Frye Jacobson draws upon political documents, novels, travelogues, academic treatises, and art to demonstrate the close relationship between immigration and America's newly expansionist foreign-policy ambitions. This keenly argued and persuasive history recasts American political life and shows how today's attitudes about "Americanism" - from Border Watch to the Gulf War - were formed in this crucial period.