Books in the Imagining the Americas series

God's Arbiters provides a rich cultural history of Americans' attitudes toward empire-building in the wake of the Philippine-American War, illustrating how the conflict affected views of U.S. imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century.

Mark Twain called it "pious hypocrisies." President McKinley called it "civilizing and Christianizing." In God's Arbiters, Susan K. Harris shows that the identification of the U.S. as a "Christian Nation" played a major role in the debates over U.S. imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century.

In this sweeping study , Thomas O. Beebee explores literary treatments of the end of the world in a wide array of English, French and Spanish works to appear over the course of a five-hundred year span throughout the Americas. He provides nuanced readings of the apocalyptic vision in an eclectic group of resources, ranging from letters of Christopher Columbus to the lyrics of Bob Dylan and Bob Marley, to the poetry of Ernesto Cardenal Martinez and the bestselling Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins

The Plantation in the Postslavery Imagination examines the persistent presence of the plantation in trans-American literatures of the last century. Russ conceives the plantation to be not primarily a physical location, but rather an ideological and psychological trope through which intersecting histories of the New World are told and retold. The permutations of this imagined site (as something related to but separate from the real plantation) illuminate anumber of fundamental issues of concern in Latin American and transnational American studies. The book's comparative analyses engage in debates over gender, race, and nation by emphasizing a series of differences: between modern and postmodern imaginaries, the United States and Spanish America, and continentaland island plantation societies.

Early and nineteenth-century U.S. literary and cultural productions often presented Catholicism as a threat not only to Protestantism but also to democracy. Through analysis of a wide range of texts, Religious Liberties shows that U.S. understandings of religious freedom and pluralism emerged, paradoxically, out of a virulent anti-Catholicism.

Through a close readings of three prolific poets, Between the Lines challenges traditional literary canons and presents an African American poetry of the Americas, one that defies national and linguistic boundaries in an effort to articulate the complex relationship between slavery and freedom in the history of the Western Hemisphere.

A debate on the proper role of religion in politics as one about liberalism's failure to address the moral issues implicated in human suffering, subjugation and death as they emerge within political responses to antiblack racism, imperialism and sexism.

The Unsettlement of America explores the career and legacy of Don Luis de Velasco, an early modern indigenous translator of the sixteenth-century Atlantic world who traveled far and wide and experienced nearly a decade of Western civilization before acting decisively against European settlement.

Hemispheric Regionalism: Romance and the Geography of Genre, brings together a rich archive of popular culture, fugitive slave narratives, advertisements, political treatises, and literature to construct a new literary history from a hemispheric and regional perspective.