This panel explores how American imperial power was wielded and negotiated in the context of labor, education, and warfare from the 1870s to the 1970s, a period in which the United States emerged as a global power and expanded its influence despite internal and external challenges. Central to each of these case studies in American empire are the people who worked on its behalf or sought to limit its reach, and in all of the papers, race and gender weigh heavily. Collectively, these case studies demonstrate the shifting boundaries of American empire.

Eittreim opens the conversation by examining the work of Marianna Burgess, a white teacher who worked among Native peoples from the mid-1870s through the 1920s. Burgess played a central role in building and expanding the Carlisle Indian School’s mission of assimilating Native students to white cultural norms. Significantly, after her time at the Indian school, former students active in the pan-Indian rights movement (that Carlisle inadvertently helped to create) invited her to participate in their work of Indian reform, demonstrating the complex power dynamics within U.S. imperial education.

Relatedly, Whalen investigates the work of George LeMieux (Bad River Ojibwe) who sought to improve Native American lives and livelihoods by reforming a US government vocational labor program from within during the early twentieth century (1900-1930). While LeMieux succeeded in improving Native laborers’ living and working conditions in eastern Colorado and western Kansas beet production, he was unable to secure permanent labor protections in the face of corporate power and federal bureaucracy. LeMieux’s story demonstrates the shifting boundaries of labor and sovereignty for Natives during a time when their access to rights and protections of American citizenship within the American empire remained uncertain.

Shifting beyond US borders, Angsusingha examines how Jesuit educators and Iraqi students negotiated gender norms and redefined notions of citizenship at Baghdad College from 1932 to 1958. While Jesuits sought to impose ideals of American masculinity through academic and extracurricular programming at Baghdad College, male students adopted or rejected these teachings to varying degrees. Angsusingha argues that understanding Jesuit teachers’ experiences demonstrates how, more than acting simply as agents of empire, these teachers helped create new meanings of masculinity within the Iraqi context.

Noting the strong correlation between masculinity and warfare, Zdencanovic wraps up the session with his study on the US government’s efforts to expand its military manpower during the Vietnam War by appealing to the poor and working-class through “Project 100,000” (1966-1971). This program attracted tens of thousands of predominantly black males by offering vocational training, stable pay, and benefits in exchange for military service. Zdencanovic argues that such programming was a precursor to the rise of the carceral state as it sought to discipline this marginalized community.

With scholars from diverse academic specialties and research focuses, this panel will stimulate discussions on the shifting imperatives of American Empire and the evolving power dynamics between the US and its subjects within the country and abroad.