"In this book, Amy Kaplan shows how U.S. imperialism - from "Manifest Destiny" to the "American Century" - has profoundly shaped key elements of American culture at home, and how the struggle for power over foreign peoples and places has disrupted the quest for domestic order.".

"The neatly ordered kitchen in Catharine Beecher's household manual may seem remote from the battlefields of Mexico in 1846, just as Mark Twain's Mississippi may seem distant from Honolulu in 1866, or W. E. B. Du Bois's reports of the East St. Louis race riot from the colonization of Africa. But, as this book reveals, such apparently disparate locations are cast into jarring proximity by imperial expansion.

In literature, journalism, film, political speeches, and legal documents, Kaplan traces the undeniable connections between American efforts to quell anarchy abroad and the eruption of such anarchy at the heart of the empire."--BOOK JACKET.