This book examines the development of the Filibuster War as the main symbol of Costa Rican national identity. By analyzing the ways in which national narratives have been created around the war, the author argues that national identity is a dynamic process defined according to local, national, and international contexts.

The Legacy of the Filibuster War: National Identity and Collective Memory in Central America analyzes the development of the Filibuster War as a symbol of Costa Rican national identity and presents several challenges to traditional theories of modernization and the creation of nationalism. By focusing on the development of cultural features defined by the transformation of collective memory, Marco Cabrera Geserick argues that national identity is a dynamic process defined according to local, national, and international contexts. Modernization theories connect the creation of symbols of official nationalism with the period of consolidation of the nation-state, yet the Filibuster War started its rise to Costa Rican national identity years later. Cabrera Geserick analyzes the threats to sovereignty and imperialist advances that served to promote the memory of the Filibuster War, while local social transformations—such as the abolition of the army, the rise of popular forces, and internal political conflict—have continued to force drastic changes on the interpretation of the war.

This fascinating study sheds new light on antebellum America's notorious "filibusters--the freebooters and adventurers who organized or participated in armed invasions of nations with whom the United States was formally at peace. Offering the first full-scale analysis of the filibustering movement, Robert May relates the often-tragic stories of illegal expeditions into Cuba, Mexico, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and other Latin American countries and details surprising numbers of aborted plots, as well. May investigates why thousands of men joined filibustering expeditions, how they were financed, and why the U.S. government had little success in curtailing them. Surveying antebellum popular media, he shows how the filibustering phenomenon infiltrated the American psyche in newspapers, theater, music, advertising, and literature. Condemned abroad as pirates, frequently in language strikingly similar to modern American denunciations of foreign terrorists, the filibusters were often celebrated at home as heroes who epitomized the spirit of Manifest Destiny. May concludes by exploring the national consequences of filibustering, arguing that the practice inflicted lasting damage on U.S. relations with foreign countries and contributed to the North-South division over slavery that culminated in the Civil War.

With a new epilogue on filibuster battles under the Biden administration THE CASE FOR ENDING THE FILIBUSTER "A truly excellent book… blistering and persuasive.” —Ezra Klein, New York Times An insider’s account of how politicians representing a radical white minority of Americans have used “the world’s greatest deliberative body” to hijack our democracy. Our democracy is under assault from homegrown authoritarians, with most observers blaming Donald Trump and the Republican Party that submitted to him. Yet as Adam Jentleson shows, the problem not only goes back to the nineteenth century, but is less about the presidency than it is about our nation’s most venerated institution: the United States Senate. A revelatory history of minority rule in America as expressed through the Senate filibuster, Kill Switch shows that white conservatives have long relied on the filibuster—which is not featured in the Constitution, and which, as Jentleson demonstrates, the Framers would have opposed—to shut down attempts to create a multiracial democracy. Featuring a new epilogue on filibuster battles under the Biden administration, Kill Switch will remain an essential warning about the costs of empowering this nation’s right-wing minority. • “Jentleson understands the inner workings of the institution, down to the most granular details, showing precisely how arcane procedural rules can be leveraged to dramatic effect.” —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times • “Careful and thorough and exacting.” —Michael Tomasky, New York Review of Books • “[An] excellent, surprising new book.” —Benjamin Wallace-Wells, The New Yorker

This volume examines the historical connections between the United States’ Reconstruction and the country’s emergence as a geopolitical power a few decades later. It shows how the processes at work during the postbellum decade variously foreshadowed, inhibited, and conditioned the development of the United States as an overseas empire and regional hegemon. In doing so, it links the diverse topics of abolition, diplomacy, Jim Crow, humanitarianism, and imperialism. In 1935, the great African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois argued in his Black Reconstruction in America that these two historical moments were intimately related. In particular, Du Bois averred that the nation’s betrayal of the South’s fledgling interracial democracy in the 1870s put reactionaries in charge of a country on the verge of global power, with world-historical implications. Working with the same chronological and geographical parameters, the contributors here take up targeted case studies, tracing the biographical, ideological, and thematic linkages that stretch across the postbellum and imperial moments. With an Introduction, eleven chapters, and an Afterword, this volume offers multiple perspectives based on original primary source research. The resulting composite picture points to a host of countervailing continuities and changes. The contributors examine topics as diverse as diplomatic relations with Spain, the changing views of radical abolitionists, African American missionaries in the Caribbean, and the ambiguities of turn-of-the century political cartoons. Collectively, the volume unsettles familiar assumptions about how we should understand the late nineteenth-century United States, conventionally framed as the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It also advances transnational approaches to understanding America’s Reconstruction and the search for the ideological currents shaping American power abroad.

This insightful collection of essays details the political life of one of the most prominent and gifted American statesmen of the twentieth century. From his early training in international law to his five terms in the US Senate, J. William Fulbright (1905–1995) had a profound influence on US foreign policy, and his vision for mutual understanding shaped the extraordinary exchange program bearing his name. As a senator for Arkansas for thirty years and the longest serving chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Fulbright was one of the most influential figures of United States politics. His criticism of US involvement in Vietnam exemplified his belief in the effective management of international norms by international organizations—including the United Nations, which was the subject of his first bill in Congress. Yet alongside his commitments to liberal internationalism and multilateral governance, Fulbright was a southern politician who embraced the interests of the region's conservative white population. This juxtaposition of biased and broad-minded objectives shows a divide at the center of Fulbright's vision, which still has consequences for America's global policies today. This multidimensional volume covers Fulbright's development as a national and global voice on foreign relations, as he wrestled with the political controversies of the US South during the civil rights movement, worked with and challenged executive power, and shaped the Fulbright program for educational exchange.