Reimagining the Nation and Selling Civilization: Ideological Foundations of American Imperialism

Dartmouth College, Hanover NH

Investigators

Abstract

The goals of this project are three-fold: (1) to document to what degree and in what ways late 19th-century American businesses incorporated gender and racial ideology into images of American identity in order to sell "civilization" and their products overseas, (2) to examine how, in turn, images of the commercial empire were used to sell products at home, and by so doing, (3) to contribute to our theoretical understanding of the relationships between imperialism, national identity, gender, and "race." This research will focus on the transformations of the image of the American garden -- the symbolic space of American nation-building -- as it was used to construct and legitimize American commercial expansion in the late 19th century. The goals will be accomplished through an analysis of: (1) images of American identity used as promotional devices and corporate advertisements at the 1876 and 1893 Expositions, and (2) advertising campaigns of select American corporations who were successful in selling their products overseas in the late 19th century (Singer, McCormick, Heinz, Colgate-Palmolive, Kodak), and (3) the use of such images in popular 19th-century journals. The project will involve the use of different methodologies appropriate to the diverse range of source material (corporate archives, manuscript collections, advertising histories, contemporary guidebooks and pamphlets, 19th-century journals). This research will provide the first empirical study of the ideological underpinnings of American commercial imperialism, and will advance our understanding of the relationships between American imperialism and national identity in the late 19th century. This empirical work will contribute to our theoretical understanding of the links between notions of "race," gender, national identity, and imperialism in late 19th-century America. By so doing, this study should provide a necessary context for understanding the on-going cultural and economic dominance of the United States over large portions of the world based on the selling of its consumer products.