Susan K. Harris – författare

When the U.S. liberated the Philippines from Spanish rule in 1898, the exploit was hailed at home as a great moral victory, an instance of Uncle Sam freeing an oppressed country from colonial tyranny. The next move, however, was hotly contested: should the U.S. annex the archipelago? The disputants did agree on one point: that the United States was divinely appointed to bring democracy--and with it, white Protestant culture--to the rest of the world. They were, in the words of U.S. Senator Albert Beveridge, "God's arbiters," a civilizing force with a righteous role to play on the world stage.Mining letters, speeches, textbooks, poems, political cartoons and other sources, Susan K. Harris examines the role of religious rhetoric and racial biases in the battle over annexation. She offers a provocative reading both of the debates' religious framework and of the evolution of Christian national identity within the U.S. The book brings to life the personalities who dominated the discussion, figures like the bellicose Beveridge and the segregationist Senator Benjamin Tillman. It also features voices from outside U.S. geopolitical boundaries that responded to the Americans' venture into global imperialism: among them England's "imperial" poet Rudyard Kipling, Nicaragua's poet/diplomat Rubén Darío, and the Philippines' revolutionary leaders Emilio Aguinaldo and Apolinario Mabini. At the center of this dramatis personae stands Mark Twain, an influential partisan who was, for many, the embodiment of America. Twain had supported the initial intervention but quickly changed his mind, arguing that the U.S. decision to annex the archipelago was a betrayal of the very principles the U.S. claimed to promote.Written with verve and animated by a wide range of archival research, God's Arbiters reveals the roots of current debates over textbook content, evangelical politics, and American exceptionalism-shining light on our own times as it recreates the culture surrounding America's global mission at the turn into the twentieth century.

Mark Twain called it "pious hypocrisies." President McKinley called it "civilizing and Christianizing." Both were referring to the U.S. annexation of the Philippines in 1899. Drawing on documents ranging from Noah Webster's 1832 History of the United States through Congressional speeches and newspaper articles, and the anti-imperialist writings of Mark Twain, Harris keenly assesses the attitudes of Americans and the moralistic rhetoric that governed national and international debates over America's global mission at the turn into the twentieth century. She offers a provocative reading both of the debates' religious framework and of the evolution of Christian national identity within the U.S. She also moves outside U.S. geopolitical boundaries, reviewing responses to the Americans' venture into global imperialism among Europeans, Latin Americans, and Filipinos.

This study proposes interpretive strategies for nineteenth-century American women's novels. Harris contends that women in the nineteenth century read subversively, 'processing texts according to gender based imperatives'. Beginning with Susannah Rowson's best-selling seduction novel Charlotte Temple (1791), and ending with Willa Cather's O Pioneers! (1913), Harris scans white, middle-class women's writing throughout the nineteenth century. In the process she both explores reading behaviour and formulates a literary history for mainstream nineteenth-century American women's fiction. Through most of the twentieth century, women's novels of the earlier period have been denigrated as conventional, sentimental, and overwritten. Harris shows that these conditions are actually narrative strategies, rooted in cultural imperatives and, paradoxically, integral to the later development of women's texts that call for women's independence. Working with actual women's diaries and letters, Harris first shows what contemporary women sought from the books they read. She then applies these reading strategies to the most popular novels of the period, proving that even the most apparently retrograde demonstrate their heroines' abilities to create and control areas culturally defined as male.

Passionate readers both, Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain courted through books, spelling out their expectations through literary references as they corresponded during their frequent separations. Surprisingly, in the process Olivia Langdon reveals herself not as a hypochondriacal hysteric, as many twentieth-century critics have portrayed her, but as a thoughtful intellectual, widely read in literature, history and modern science. Not so surprisingly, Samuel Clemens reveals himself as a critic and a sceptic, lampooning Langdon's physics lessons and her literary heroines. He also shows himself as an astute strategist, carefully manipulating Langdon and her parents. At the same time, Clemens's letters exhibit his own conservatism about women's nature and women's roles, while Langdon's show her carefully choosing from her culture's array of possible role models.

Bringing together an international set of scholars, this volume presents integrative theoretical and methodological perspectives linking two complementary approaches in anthropological archaeology: cultural landscapes and human ecology. Authors grapple with issues ranging from the hunter-gatherer populations of North America and the emergence of the Neolithic in Europe to contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, using approaches from ethnoarchaeology to geomorphology, and methodological specialties from stable isotopes to social networks, in order to shed light on prehistoric human adaptations and how they produce cultural variation on a landscape scale. Together, contributions to this volume illustrate how interdisciplinary and integrative perspectives can aid archaeology by providing the means necessary to interpret and explain long-term records of human activity.This book capitalizes on the unique position of archaeology, and the long-term records of human ecology and cultural resilience the discipline develops, to make significant contributions to contemporary discussions of long-term climate human-environment interactions throughout the Holocene. The book is therefore produced during a perfect time in which other disciplines are focusing on the unique contribution that can be made by archaeology.