Description:

Join the CHSS community for our fall book club, where we will be discussing Paul Frymer's Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion (2017), joined by the author. For copies of the book, please contact the CHSS student coordinators.

From the publisher: "Building an American Empire details how a government that struggled to exercise plenary power used federal land policy to assert authority over the direction of expansion by engineering the pace and patterns of settlement and to control the movement of populations. At times, the government mobilized populations for compact settlement in strategically important areas of the frontier; at other times, policies were designed to actively restrain settler populations in order to prevent violence, international conflict, and breakaway states. Paul Frymer examines how these settlement patterns helped construct a dominant racial vision for America by incentivizing and directing the movement of white European settlers onto indigenous and diversely populated lands. These efforts were hardly seamless, and Frymer pays close attention to the failures as well, from the lack of further expansion into Latin America to the defeat of the black colonization movement."

Paul Frymer is a Professor of Politics and Director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University. His research and teaching interests are broadly in American politics, law, race, labor, and historical-institutional development. He is the author of three books: Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America; Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party; and Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion, all published with Princeton University Press.