Teaching the US in/as World History: Scholarship on Gender and Empire that Connects US and World History

Karen Phoenix

     It's an exciting time to be a scholar of the US and the World. The field has greatly expanded over the last twenty years, since the Organization of American Historians (OAH) joined with the International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University to create the "Project on Internationalizing the Study of American History." This group met several times, culminating in a 1997 meeting at LaPietra in Italy, after which it issued a "Report to the Profession" in 1999 (published through the OAH). This report called for placing US history within an international context, and Thomas Bender and the other participants at the conference proposed a substantial change to US history curriculum, incorporating transnational focus in training graduate students as well as the topical focus of the undergraduate classroom.¹ Coming at the end of the 1990s, the report occurred at a moment when historians with a variety of national foci were increasingly looking at the global and international connections of their own nation-states.²

     In some ways, the change that the participants in LaPietra called for has occurred. There are a growing number of scholars (myself included) who examine US influence abroad. While specialist journals like Diplomatic History have focused on the traditional aspects of US formal diplomacy and international relations, we also increasingly find articles on "US and the World" (now its own job sub-category) in broader US History journals such as the Journal of American History and American Historical Review. There are also a number of substantial anthologies that have been published in the last twenty years that discuss the US as an empire.³ In addition to this growing awareness of internationalism for US historians, as the authors of the "World History: A View from North America" noted in the Bibliography of Global History, "a younger generation of scholars have now built upon…diverse intellectual foundations to produce a flourishing, heterogeneous scholarship on various topics in world history."⁴ There is therefore a growing awareness of the place of US History within a global context, and more US historians researching, writing, and teaching about World History.

     Yet despite the increased presence of work on US and the World, there is still a great deal of work to be done to incorporate cultural histories that include race, class, and gender. For example, "women" does not appear at all in the LaPietra report, and "gender" only once. In a reasonably long list of themes that Bender et. al. propose scholars address, gender is absent (while other types of systemic ideologies and hierarchies are present).⁵ In the edited volume of selected papers from the conference, Rethinking American History in a Global Age, women's and gender history is not a central category of analysis for any of the chapters. This failure has extended to some of the US history subfields. In the last 5 years of Diplomatic History, only twelve out of 230 articles have the words "girls," "women," or "masculinity" in the title or subject lines, and five of the articles that did mention these topics were in a single issue on gender and sexuality in American foreign relations. ⁶ Instead, work on the role of gender in US and the World tends to appear more frequently in journals that focus on women's and gender history in many nations, such as Gender & History and the Journal of Women's History. In their bibliography of World History by US scholars, the authors of the "View from North America" note that "the literature on global social, especially gender, history is sparse." ⁷

     The subfield of US and the World as a whole, then, is in an optimal situation—of interest to the broader US historical community and able to publish in the major journals, and yet with a great many topics yet to be explored. My own work, which focuses on gender and the expansion of US interests abroad from the 1890s to World War II, is part of a growing body of literature that is making some exciting interventions in the field of women's and gender history in US and the world. Fifteen or twenty years ago, it would have been difficult for instructors who wanted to focus on gender in US transnational history to come up with enough secondary literature. Today, as the body of this essay will demonstrate, there is a growing quantity of scholarship extending the field in some interesting directions. 

     I come to this topic from the perspective of someone who has made the "transnational" turn on an individual level. As an undergraduate and MA student at Brandeis University in the mid- and late-1990s, I was focused on US history, intending to look at some aspect of women in the US West for a dissertation. When I arrived at the University of Illinois for my doctoral studies, I became steeped in imperial history, particularly of the US and British Empire. I began working with Kristin Hoganson and did preliminary dissertation research on Americanization programs aimed at immigrant women in California during the early 20^th century. After consulting with Dr. Hoganson, I realized that I wanted to focus on the US Young Women's Christian Association (USYWCA), which was part of a global movement to Americanize women abroad (although they would not have used the term "Americanization" since they saw their work as supra-national). As I researched and wrote the dissertation, I became increasingly aware of the fact that the USYWCA women often operated in areas controlled (either de facto or formally) by the British. This has led me to examine the interactions between empires, as individuals navigated multiple governments from both insider and outsider perspectives.

     As a teacher, I have also made a transnational turn. After my degree I taught the combined US history survey (colonialism to the present in one semester) at Georgia State University. For the past five years, however, I have been teaching in the "Roots of Contemporary Issues" program at Washington State University. This is a thematic world history class and has allowed me to extend my knowledge of how the US operated (both formally as a government and informally) abroad, and the connections between US History and World History.

     What follows is therefore a reflection of my training, scholarly interests, and teaching experience in connecting US and the World to World History, particularly for college-level (and potentially advanced high school) introductory survey classes. My intention is that instructors who teach either World or US History can use this essay and bibliography as a starting point to bridge the gap that still exists between the two. My criteria for selecting the books and articles in this overview are as follows: 1) women or gender must be a central category of analysis, and 2) the books and articles must address some aspect of US transnational or imperial history or serve as a comparison for a US and the World topic mentioned in this essay. By "gender" I mean the ways that society designated certain roles and activities as masculine or feminine, including topics such as child rearing, work roles, domestic structures, relationships between the individual and the state, etc. Gender and US and the World is a more recent field of scholarship, with some notable exceptions. The works I discuss are listed in a bibliography at the end of the article, as well as a list of some digital resources that contain primary sources. The end of the essay is a lesson plan proposal for comparing the ways that World War I influenced gender norms, including sources for students to use.

European Settlement

     Is relatively easy to incorporate gender and empire during European settlement of (what is today) the United States into a survey course. Classic texts on the role of the household, such as John Demos' A Little Commonwealth, discuss the role of British-origin patriarchy in Plymouth colony, and the ways this informed various roles within the household—not only parent and child, but also master and servant. Susannah Shaw Romney's article on family in New Netherland also serves as a good comparison point for the role of European women in colonization within the Dutch empire. For the southern coastal colonies, Kathleen M. Brown's Good wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs examines the ways that gender and race worked together to structure social relations in Virginia. In terms of pairing these readings with primary sources, Fordham University's "Colonial North America" section in their Modern History Sourcebook has some good legal primary sources, which would allow students to explore the ways that laws structured relationships between people (and vice versa).⁸

     Several recent works highlight the role of both masculinity and religion in the relationship of Europeans with indigenous peoples in New England. Ann M. Little's Abraham in Arms and R. Todd Romero's Making War and Minting Christians both make a strong case for the ways that masculinity influenced contact and to some extent, what could be called early American foreign policy, particularly through warfare. Both books argue that there was a religious basis for British notions of masculinity, although Romero focuses more on aspects of conversion, while Little addresses the implications of these differences. These secondary sources can be paired with primary sources such as captivity narratives. Mary Rowlandson's and John William's narratives (the latter explored in John Demos' The Unredeemed Captive: a Family Story in Early America) would fit well here, particularly because they allow a discussion of Native American-French-British relationships and gender roles.

     One interesting comparison point for the ways that gender influenced gender norms vis a vis indigenous people to examine gender norms in New England versus the French in Canada. A useful contrast to Little and Romero's work above is Karen Anderson's Chain Her by One Foot, which focuses on gender relations in new France. The fur trade also provides some interesting case studies about how the Hudson Bay Company (English) and the North West Company (a combination of British and French Canadians) interacted with indigenous peoples, company policies regarding mixed-race marriages, and the presence of European women in fur trade forts. Here, early scholarship on indigenous and mixed-race women by Jennifer S. H. Brown and Sylvia Van Kirk is excellent. For work that focuses more on gender roles, Bruce M. White's article in Ethnohistory, "The Woman Who Married a Beaver" and Brenda MacDougall's article in Labour/Le Travail on Hudson Bay Company family life provide more narrowly focused arguments that can be useful as lecture case studies. In terms of the expansion Europeans to the West along the Canadian border, Richard White's The Middle Ground is a foundational text for the Great Lakes/Mississippi River region, and Adele Perry's work on settler masculinity in British Columbia provides a fascinating examination of the role of gender, race and nationalism in the mid Nineteenth Century.  

     For the role of indigenous gender norms in the colonial south, the Lennai Lenape (Algonquin speakers in what is today Delaware) are a thought-provoking case study. As Gunlög Fur describes in A Nation of Women, gender norms among the Lenape were more about behaviors than biology (as was the case with many other indigenous groups as well).⁹ The Lenape differentiated work roles based on gender, but these were valued equally; for example, while they considered leadership to be primarily a masculine task, diplomacy was a feminine undertaking. This meant that even among indigenous groups, the Lenape were known as a "nation of women." The Lenape therefore make an interesting comparison to indigenous groups such as the Iroquois, which Gail D. Danvers explores in her article "Gendered Encounters: Warriors, Women, and William Johnson." In this, Danvers argues that William Johnson and other European colonial administrators used Iroquois gender norms to advance European political aims. Another potential comparison point is the Cherokee, whom Theda Purdue explores in her book Cherokee Women. Tiya Miles' work on Cherokee and slavery is also of interest here. Although they aren't centered around gender, Ties that Bind and The House on Diamond Hill both provide rich case studies for Cherokee life in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Sandra Slater and Fay Yarbrough's edited volume, Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America, 1400–1850 provides a very useful overview of different Native American groups and is a good starting point for exploring other peoples.

     California and (what would become) the US Southwest also provide interesting examples for the ways that gender influenced the ways that Europeans and Native Americans interacted—this time largely through the Spanish empire. Albert L. Hertado's Intimate Frontiers provides a good overview of the changes in cultural constructions of gender under Spanish, Mexican, and then US political systems. Richard C. Trexler's Sex and Conquest has useful insight for how Europeans used gender in their encounters with indigenous peoples. Juliana Barr's study of Spaniards and Native Americans in Texas, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman, is also an excellent examination on this topic (it is well written and accessible, making it potentially useful in upper-level undergraduate classes). The topic of Spanish gender norms and indigenous two-spirit people is also of interest, although it is more politically fraught. Ramon Gutierrez's When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away is a good starting point for this topic.¹⁰ Historians are divided about how prevalent two-spirit people were in Native North American cultures. Here, the work of Pete Sigal on two-spirit peoples and gender norms in Central American indigenous cultures (particularly the Nahua) can serve as an excellent comparison point.

     In addition to examining how Europeans and indigenous peoples interacted within North America, there is a growing body of literature that places Native Americans within a transnational context, as some physically moved from "new" to "old" world. Camilla Townsend's book Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma situates Pocahontas both in the context of Powhatan gender roles, as well as her life in London. Instructors may also want to pair this book with another of Townsend's books, on Malintzin, a Nahua woman who was present on Cortez's expeditions in what is today Mexico. Both of Townsend's books are very accessible for an undergraduate audience.¹¹

Transatlantic Slave Trade

     In addition to early colonial contact, the Transatlantic slave trade, and slavery in the British North American colonies and early United States is another good moment to bring World History and US History together. There is a substantial literature on women and slavery but works that examine gender have tended to be scarcer.¹² Jennifer Morgan's Laboring Women is an excellent contribution to this scholarship, partly because she traces women's gendered experience from Africa to the Americas. Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother is similar in that it uses a trip Hartman took to Ghana as a central thread to discuss family and the slave trade. Both of these focus on women to tell the story of slavery. It is interesting that works that specifically examine the masculinity of slaves are very sparse (with the exception of a few locally-focused studies), given that there is general agreement among historians that the bulk of the slaves brought to the Americas were men. However, as David Eltis points out in his essay "Construction of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database" the data of the slave voyages is sporadic and incomplete.¹³ In fact, instructors may find it a useful exercise to have students explore The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database to draw these conclusions about the gender disparity of slaves for themselves (www.slavevoyages.org). In addition to the ship manifests, students can also explore the images, under "Resources," and the resources under the "Educational Materials" tab are excellent. I find that having students work with the database also illustrates that the United States was a relatively small part of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade as a whole (thus countering a US-centric world-view).

     Logical comparison points for US slavery are the Caribbean and Brazil. Several works on women make for interesting contrasts. Barbara Bush's Slave Women in Caribbean Society gives a good summary of women in the Caribbean generally. Jamaica, as a British colony, provides an important case study for examining the Atlantic Anglo world. Here, instructors could use Sasha Turner's Contested Bodies as a way to talk about women's reproductive health and slavery. Turner argues that in the late 1700s and early 1800, well before the international slave trade ended, Jamaican plantation owners were concerned with women's reproductive health (anticipating that the slave population would need to increase via reproduction rather than importation). Richard S. Dunn's recent book comparing Jamaica and Virginia plantations is also a good resource to examine these issues as well. Although he does not focus specifically on gender, his two central subjects are women. Daniel Livesay's Children of Uncertain Fortune traces the experience of mixed-race children and illuminates some of the differences between British and US ideas of race. For the French Atlantic, Jennifer Palmer's Intimate Bonds explores family and household structure and is a good starting point for comparisons of gender and slavery with the French empire.

     In addition to the experience of slave women, there are also a number of excellent books on free women of color, which provide an interesting contrast to work that focuses on the United States.¹⁴ Lisa Ze Winters' The Mulatta Concubine is a valuable study of the intersection of gender, race, and slavery, and she bridges several locations: Gorée Island, New Orleans, and Saint Domingue in the eighteenth century. Kit Candlin and Cassandra Pybus' book Enterprising Women examines free women in the British Caribbean, focusing on women business owners. Kathleen J. Higgin's "Licentious Liberty" provides and interesting case study for Sabrá in Minas Gerais, Brazil, and demonstrates that gender had a strong impact on the experience of slavery and freedom and reminds us that that slaves were not just workers on sugar or cotton plantations.¹⁵

     Several Anglo-American men involved in slave systems kept extensive diaries which serve as windows into the world of plantation slavery. Thomas Thistlewood has been the subject of several works, most notably Trevor Burnard's Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire. Trevor Burnard and Richard Follett's article adds to these biographical studies by examining the public image of slave-owning men in England; at the beginning of the Eighteenth Century their unrestrained sexual habits were accepted, but by the end of the century the monogamous and family-oriented father was the ideal. Instructors could use Thistlewood as a comparison point to other notions of masculinity in the Anglo-American world, such as Landon Carter (see Rhys Isaac's book), and potentially William Byrd (although there is no comparable biography for Byrd). Elborg Foster and Robert Foster's examination of French plantation owner Pierre Desalles gives us a similar picture for Martinique.

     As the Burnard and Follet article gestures towards, abolition and emancipation were also gendered. Pamela Scully and Diana Paton's anthology, Gender and Slave Emancipation, and  Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart's anthology, Women's Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation make this clear, and both books include a number of different geographic locations. Camillia Cowling's Conceiving Freedom also provides a gendered lens for urban women in Cuba and Brazil (whose emancipation occurred later in the nineteenth century). These add to works that focus on abolition and women within the United States.¹⁶

US Continental and Overseas Expansion before 1898

     US continental expansion is another topic where it is easy to bring in gender and imperialism. Here, there are several anthologies that provide good introductions to the field in terms of US and European women (and some of the essays can be easily assigned to undergraduates). These include So Much to Be Done, edited by Ruth Barnes Moynihan, Susan Armitage, and Christiane Fischer Dichamp, along with Armitage's two volumes with Elizabeth Jameson—The Women's West, and Writing the Range. There are also several excellent books that discuss indigenous women. Katherine M. B. Osburn's Southern Ute Women tells a similar story to Theda Purdue's (mentioned above), in which Southern Ute women adapted Euro-American ideas of gender norms to their own lives, changing some gender roles while keeping others. Tai Edwards examination of Osage Women—Osage Women and Empire—continues this trend, as she finds that gender complementarity continued well after colonization.

     While early scholarship focused on European and American women, several recent works examine the role of masculinity in Manifest Destiny and the Western US. Amy Greenberg's Manifest Manhood discusses the ways that masculinity influenced the ideas of Manifest Destiny in the mid-1800s. This is a lively tale of filibusters and other aggressive expansionists who viewed US dominance in the Western Hemisphere as both natural and inevitable (students find the tale of William Walker in Nicaragua to be particularly interesting). This type of masculinity influenced foreign policy in the leadup to the War of 1898, as Kristin L. Hoganson explores in Fighting for American Manhood. These works pair well with Gail Bederman's, Manliness and Civilization (particularly the chapter on Theodore Roosevelt) to span the bulk of the nineteenth century. For more specific case studies, Susan Lee Johnson's Roaring Camp is an excellent examination of gender, race, and nationality and the California Gold Rush, which was a largely masculine homosocial environment. Johnson demonstrates that race worked alongside gender as men of different nationalities were stereotyped into gender roles (i.e. that French men were naturally good cooks).

     Several recent works explicitly pair the US with Britain and Australia in order to examine gender roles in settler colonialism and "frontier" culture. These include Monica Rico's Nature's Noblemen, which compares British and American ideas of strenuous masculinity. Rico's book centers each chapter around a different man, which makes the book both engaging as a whole and as individual chapters. Margaret D. Jacob's White Mother to a Dark Race compares policies of the removal of indigenous children from their households in Australia and the US. In doing so, both Australian and US programs placed emphasis on the role of white women as domestic caretakers and maternal figures.

     The field of US missionary women also continues to expand, particularly in terms of the Pacific Rim. Jennifer Thigpen's Island Queens and Mission Wives extends the scholarship on missionary women from the continental US to Hawai'i, showing that Hawai'ian women had a great deal of power in their interactions with US missionary women. Noriko Kawamura Ishii's work on Kobe College—American Women Missionaries at Kobe College­­—and Cindy Yik-yi Chu's study of the Marykoll Sisters in Hong Kong are both excellent recent additions to this field. Amanda L. Izzo's recent Liberal Christianity and Women's Global Activism brings the study of the Marykoll Sisters further into the 20^th century.

     There are several digital collections that have primary source materials related to gender and US continental expansion, which can be used to have students examine these issues. The Library of Congress' (LOC) "California as I Saw It" includes narratives from 1849–1900. It therefore contains a variety of sources relating to contact with indigenous groups, as well as from the Gold Rush. The "Teaching Resources" section has information on further readings (I have not included them here because they do not specifically address gender) as well as a good overview of the topic. The Edward Curtis Collection, also at the LOC, is also a great collection for examining indigenous people through photography. Curtis collected ethnographic information and created different types of primary sources from a variety of indigenous groups at the beginning of the twentieth century. These pair well with the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center primary sources; taken together these illustrate that reformers and people in general saw changes in race and gender as strikingly visual, and used this in order to promote their own agendas.

Formal Colonization after 1898

     The War of 1898 and the expansion of the US into Puerto Rico and the Philippines is of course a natural place to include gender and imperialism. Here, several scholars have addressed masculinity. Laura Wexler's Tender Violence discusses the role that women photojournalists played in "domesticating" military men and imperial contexts. Instructors may want to pair this with the Edward Curtis collection above for an intensive look at the role of photography for political and cultural ends (the Jacob Riis photos taken during this time period could serve as a comparison point as well). The LOC has materials from several of the photographers Wexler discusses, although instructors will need to search the LOC catalog for materials that have been digitized (there is a page of "Women Photojournalists" but this is a mixture of digital and physical resources—see https://www.loc.gov/rr/print/coll/596_womphotoj.html).

     Several scholars have also explored gender and imperialism in the Philippines and Puerto Rico. These include Warwick Anderson, whose book Colonial Pathologies focuses on male US military and medical personnel to examine the ways that these men used public health to create regimes of social control. Vincente Rafael's work, including White Love and Other Events and his edited volume Discrepant Histories, fairly substantially address gender. Interestingly, while scholars of US imperialism in the Philippines have tended to focus on masculinity, those who work on Puerto Rico have tended to concentrate on femininity, particularly sexuality and birth control. Of these, Eileen J. Suárez Findlay's Imposing Decency is focused on the earliest period—at the end of the nineteenth- and beginning of the twentieth-centuries. This means that she covers the impact of the War of 1898, and the transition from Spanish to US control. Laura Briggs' work, Reproducing Empire addresses similar types of issues beginning in 1898 and stretching until the 1970s, including the testing of the birth control pill on Puerto Rican women. Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci's recently published Contraceptive Diplomacy serves as an excellent comparison point here, as Takeuchi-Demirci addresses the birth control movement in the United States and Japan.

     In terms of women's sexuality and formal state imperialism, an interesting comparison point is the Contagious Disease acts, prostitutes, and women and gender in Britain and the British Empire (Philippa Levine's Prostitution, Race and Politics is an excellent overview of this topic). However, the British Empire has by far the most scholarship devoted to it and is too numerous to list here. Philippa Levine's edited anthology, Gender and Empire is an excellent starting place for those wanting to make connections between the British and US empires. There are also some excellent anthologies that include areas outside of the British Empire, such as Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler's Tensions of Empire, and Ann Laura Stoler's Haunted by Empire. Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda's Domesticating the Empire, focuses on women and the family in the French and Dutch empires. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton's edited collection, Moving Subjects, focuses mainly on the British and Pacific regions. Ann Laura Stoler's Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power is a central book for this topic as well.

     The LOC has two collections that are of interest to those focusing on primary sources and imperialism during and after 1898. The first is "Puerto Rico at the Dawn of the Modern Age" which contains printed material. While this collection is generally in Spanish, the essay by Danna Bell "Puerto Rico at the Dawn of the 20^th century" has some excellent context and links to other works.¹⁷ The LOC collection "The Spanish-American War in Motion Pictures" includes a series of moving images that would provoke a good discussion when compared to the photograph collections I mentioned above.

     Although the US did not permanently and formally colonize Haiti, Mary Renda's book Taking Haiti examines soldiers and the occupation of Haiti. Instructors can use the book as a basis to examine the intersection of gender and race, focusing specifically on primary sources from some of the people she discusses (such as Eugene O'Neill and Zora Neale Hurston—see the digital resources section for more information).

     Also of note here are several studies that discuss the relationship between the US abroad and the US "at home" during the late 19^th century and the 20^th century, which touch on gender and domesticity. The first is Amy Kaplan's The Anarchy of Empire, which is an excellent articulation of the connections between abroad and at home, even though gender is not a central category of analysis. Similar to Renda's Taking Haiti, Kaplan uses familiar works to trace these relationships, and instructors may want to use these sources to examine imperialism more generally. The second is Kristin L. Hoganson's Consumers' Imperium, which focuses on the continental United States to examine the ways that events, products, and ideas from "abroad" influenced US culture. Christina Klein's Cold War Orientalism adds to this focus later, during the Cold War. Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose's anthology At Home with the Empire serves as a nice comparison for the British Empire.

World War I, World War II and the Cold War

     World War I and World War II are also natural points for including discussions of gender and US and the World into US History courses. War expanded women's role in the public sphere, both within the United States and abroad, and new industrialized warfare changed expectations for male soldiers. For World War I, Susan Zeiger's In Uncle Sam's Service traces the involvement of women in the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in Europe. There are two excellent studies that have been published in the last year—Lynn Dumenil's Second Line of Defense and Elizabeth Cobbs' The Hello Girls. Both of these expand our knowledge of women's work during the war both at home at abroad. Kathleen Kennedy's Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens serves as an interesting counterpoint to Dumenil and Cobbs, discussing the women who were against WWI. For masculinity, Nancy K. Bristow's Making Men Moral is an excellent overview.

     For World War II, there are several studies of masculinity and soldiers during and after the war. Mary Louise Robert's What Soldiers Do focuses on sex and masculinity of US soldiers in France. Miriam Gebhardt's study of the rape of German women at the end of the war focuses on allied soldiers actions in Germany; scholars have tended to concentrate on Soviet soldiers, but Gebhardt finds that US, French, and British soldiers also engaged in violence against women. Shifting to after the war, Maria Höhn and Petra Goedde's studies of gender in post-war Germany are excellent windows into both the change in how US soldiers re-worked the masculinity of defeated enemies, and the impact of large numbers of US men upon the gender norms of local communities. Victoria de Grazia's Irresistible Empire addresses the spread of US consumerism in Europe, although it addresses gender more implicitly than explicitly (with the exception of the chapter "A Model Mrs. Consumer"). In terms of US soldiers in Asia, there are several excellent works. Naoko Shibusawa's America's Geisha Ally outlines the shift in gendering of the Japanese soldiers and would pair well with Höhn or Goedde. Two articles also explore US gender in Japan—Yasuhiro Okada's "Race, Masculinity, and Military Occupation" discusses African-American Soldiers in Japan, and Mire Koikari's "Exporting Democracy?" examines the influence of feminist reforms.

     For World War I and World War II, there are several excellent resources for primary sources that instructors can use. The Library of Congress "Newspaper Pictorials: World War I Rotogravures, 1914 to 1919" is a fascinating look at composite images that were published in newspapers. The LOC also has the collection of Stars and Stripes, a military newspaper published throughout the 20^th century (the LOC collection focuses on World War I). The LOC also has a topics page on World War I; although it doesn't have a specific page dedicated to World War II, a quick search brings up a variety of primary sources that instructors can use.

     For the Cold War, several books illustrate the impact of gender upon a variety of different activities. Jennifer Helgren's American Girls and Global Responsibility focuses on the ways that international non-governmental organizations and publications (such as Seventeen magazine) focused on girls as building friendship and peace during the early Cold War. Dennis Merrill's Negotiating Paradise examines US tourism in Latin America more generally, but also contains some good information on the impact of US people on local gender norms and sexual relations. Katharine H. S. Moon's Sex Among Allies looks at the ways that Korean prostitutes served as a bridge between US and Korean government officials. In Plutopia, Kate Brown takes an interesting look at two sites of nuclear manufacturing—Richland, Washington, and Ozersk, Russia—and the impact of the nuclear arsenal buildup during the Cold War upon the people who lived in those cities. These works join Cynthia Enloe's extensive work on foreign policy and international politics during this time period uses feminist scholarship as a central lens.

     As the above works illustrate, the field of US and the World, particularly as it relates to gender and imperialism, is vibrant and growing. Along with the books and articles I mentioned here, it is worth keeping an eye on three book series that address the US and the World (although few of the works in these series have gender as a central category of analysis). These are: The United States in the World, through Cornell University Press (http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/collections/?collection_id=186); America in the World, by Princeton University Press (https://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/series/title/america-in-the-world.html), and American Encounters/Global Interactions, which has more on gender than the Cornell or Princeton series (https://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ProductList.php?viewby=series&id=19).

Karen Phoenix is Clinical Assistant Professor of History at Washington State University. (Karen.phoenix@wsu.edu)

Appendix One

Sample Activity—Gender in World War I Lesson Plan

     The above materials can serve as an entrée into bringing US imperialism and gender into the World History classroom. In this sample activity, I am going to illustrate one potential use of digital sources that I have found successful in my Roots of Contemporary Issues (a world history survey) class. It becomes easier to have students examine digital sources in class, not only as more primary sources are digitized, but also as technology becomes more ubiquitous (both in computers in the classroom and/or as the numbers of students are very ready to use their own laptop, tablets, and smartphones increases). In terms of using these digitized primary sources over the arc of the semester, I begin by introducing students first to primary source analysis (focusing on different types of primary sources), then secondary source analysis. Once the students have mastered these skills (by about the mid-point of the semester), we look at comparing different types of primary sources and putting different sources in dialogue with one another. The following lesson falls towards the latter half of the semester, when I have students analyze different types of primary sources and then bring them together to think about what we can learn when we consider a diversity of sources.

     At this point in the semester, my students are looking at the theme of gender as a systemic ideology. In this particular lesson plan, I therefore have students examine World War I as a case study for gender. There are two main learning goals for this class meeting. In terms of the content, the goal is to familiarize students with how a pivotal moment in world history—World War I—impacted gender norms. Second, the use of different types of sources allows us to also address the use of sources in history and can lead to a discussion of historiography (depending on the length of the class meeting).

     I have the students do some readings before class. First, I give them a selection of posters from the Library of Congress and the Imperial War Museum, which demonstrate idealized masculinity and femininity. The Library of Congress has an online exhibit, "Posters: World War I Posters" http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/wwipos/ which has a lot of options. Instructors can browse the "Subjects" heading to the "Men" and "Women" subheadings (although there are obviously a lot of topics that would address gender roles rather than men and women specifically). If class time allows, instructors could ask students to view the collection (for homework or in class) and identify some of the common themes of masculinity and femininity. Second, I have students read a chapter of Leo Braudy's From Chivalry to Terrorism, on "Death at a Distance."¹⁸ This is a brief and accessible summary of the impact of technology on warfare and masculinity. Third, I have them read the Wilfred Owen Poem, Dulce et Decorum Est. I've found that most 100-level students won't really understand the poem, but it gives us a basis for unpacking it in class.

     In class, we begin by going over the propaganda posters, to discuss what the ideals of masculinity and femininity were going into the war. The students work together in groups, and I ask them to pick out the posters that they think most exemplify femininity and masculinity. We then go around the room and discuss their selections as a class (I project the one that we are discussing on a larger screen, either using a document camera or the classroom computer). Instructors can use this to generate a list of ideal masculine and feminine qualities, and can bring in issues like class (there are class implications in several of the posters, such as "On Which Side of the Window are You?" http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/wwipos/item/98503178/) and race (the posters overwhelmingly depict Euro-Americans; for a good article on wartime propaganda aimed at African-Americans see the Gilcrease exhibition "Black Bodies in Propaganda": https://gilcrease.org/exhibitions/blackbodies/ although most of the posters are WWII, the "True Sons of Freedom" is 1918).

     After going over the idealized gender roles, we discuss the reality. I begin with a 5-10 minute whole-class discussion of the Braudy article, identifying the changes in technology that led to shifts in masculinity. We then briefly discuss the Owen poem, before I play a video by the British Library of Santanu Das doing a close reading: https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/a-close-reading-of-dulce-et-decorum-est This helps them think through the poem as a form, and compares it to the John Singer Sargent monumental 1919 painting "Gassed" (https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/23722). At this point, I specifically point out to the class that we've looked at different types of primary sources—propaganda posters, poetry, and painting—and the ways that World War I impacted gender.

     I then turn to having the students look at different types of primary sources. In this, I hand out a series of worksheets to students, having parsed out which groups will example what sources before class. The sources include:

• Group 1: Films from "A Day in the Life of a Munitions Worker," Imperial War Museum: https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-munitions-worker Students should also examine the page "Nine Women Reveal the Dangers of Working in a Munitions Factory" https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/9-women-reveal-the-dangers-of-working-in-a-first-world-war-munitions-factory so that they can take a more critical examination of the "A Day in the Life" films.

• Group 2: Women's Uniforms and Textiles, Smithsonian "Women in World War I" http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object-groups/women-in-wwi I ask that students look specifically at:
  •    Women's Uniforms (I have students view also the interview with Smithsonian Curator Margaret Vining at https://youtu.be/GSSKhtsb4pw before they look at the uniforms)
  
  
  •    "Belgian War Lace"
  
  
  •    "'La Victorie' Dress Silks"
  
  
  •    "'Bolling Crest' Dress Silks"
    
    These give different examples of the ways that fashion reflected nationalism, that women used nationalist motifs in dressing, and the changes in women's dress.

• Group 3: Popular Songs from the University of California Santa Barbara Cylinder Audio Archive (http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/wwi-radio.php) particularly:
  •    "Over There"
  
  
  •    "Don't Sent my Darling Boy Away"
  
  
  •    "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning"
  
  
  •    "I Don't Want to Get Well"
  
  
  •    "The Battle in the Air"
  
  
  •    "I'd Feel at Home if They'd Let Me Join the Army"
  
  
  •    "Sister Susie's Sewing Shirts for Soldiers"
  
  
  •    As well as:  "I didn't Raise My Boy to be a Soldier"  at https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.100008457/  A copy of the recording is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fhjT93Xa3U

• Group 4: "10 Photos of Life in the Trenches" Imperial War Museum: https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/10-photos-of-life-in-the-trenches (although it is not in a specific collection, you can also have students do a search for objects using the term: "Trench" narrowed to: "Souvenirs and ephemera" and "First World War." Or you can do this search beforehand and provide students with a document and URLs to specific artifacts)

After giving the students 25-30 minutes to examine the sources and answer questions about them (I've adapted these from the National Archives, Document Analysis Worksheets: https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/worksheets). We then come back together as a class for a large discussion. One group from each of the different types of sources (film, songs, clothing, etc.) volunteers to tell the class what they found in terms of the ways that type of artifact reflects changing gender norms. We then spend the last 10 minutes of the class going over what they learned about different types of documents, and I ask questions such as: is one more reliable than the other in terms of the viewpoint that it gives into the past? What do we learn when we consider all of these different types of documents together? I conclude with a brief overview of what we learned both in terms of the content and the historical source analysis.

¹ Thomas Bender, "LaPietra Report: A Report to the Profession" September 2000, http://www.oah.org/about/reports/reports-statements/the-lapietra-report-a-report-to-the-profession/ Bender edited an anthology of a selection of papers from the conference in: Thomas Bender, ed. Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

² Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present and Future (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)

³ These include: Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scrano, eds. The Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009); Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore, eds. Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998)

⁴ Trevor R. Getz, Candice Goucher, David Kinkela, Craig A. Lockard, and Patrick Maning, "World History: A View from North America" in Bibliography of Global History, Matthias Middell and Katja Naumann, eds. (Leipzig: NOGWHISTO, 2017), 56–78, 60.

⁵ Bender, "LaPietra Report."

⁶ This number does not include shorter articles (5 pages or less) that were part of special issues.

⁷ Getz, et. al., "World History: A View from North America," 81.

⁸ Colonial North America, Modern History Sourcebook, Fordham University. https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/modsbook07.asp

⁹ See also Margaret M. Caffrey, "Complementary Power: Men and Women of the Lenni Lenape" American Indian Quarterly, 24 no. 1 (Winter 2000), 44–63.

¹⁰ Sylvia Rodríguez has an excellent and readable review of Gutiérrez, and the controversy surrounding the book. See: Sylvia Rodríguez, "Review: Subaltern Historiography on the Rio Grande: On Gutiérrez's 'When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away,'" American Ethnologist, 21 (1994): 892–899.

¹¹ Although they do not explicitly address gender, Jace Weaver's The Red Atlantic and Coll Thrush's Indigenous London also provide good material on the presence of indigenous peoples in the Atlantic world. See Jace Weaver The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014) and Coll Thrush, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).

¹² There is a small group of excellent books that focus on slave women, however. See: Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1985); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (New York: Vintage Books, 1986); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Daina Berry, "Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe': Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Deirdre Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017). Two recent works focus on masculinity in the US antebellum: Sergio A. Lussana, My Brother Slaves: Friendship, Masculinity, and Resistance in the Antebellum South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016), and Kenneth E. Marshall, Manhood Enslaved: Bondmen in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century New Jersey (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2011).

¹³ Eltis, David. "Construction of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database: Sources and Methods" The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/understanding-db/methodology-17

¹⁴ See for example: Jessica Millward, Finding Charity's Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015); Emily Clark, The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013) which focuses on New Orleans; and David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds. Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).

¹⁵ Although she does not focus on gender, Mariana L. R. Dantas' book Black Townsmen compares free people of color in Sabrá and Baltimore. See: Mariana L. R. Dantas, Black Townsmen: Urban Slavery and Freedom in the Eighteenth Century Americas (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

¹⁶ See; Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: The University of north Carolina Press, 2004); Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999); Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

¹⁷ Bell, Danna, "Puerto Rico at the Dawn of the 20^th Century" Library of Congress, 2013 https://blogs.loc.gov/teachers/2013/12/puerto-rico-at-the-dawn-of-the-20th-century/

¹⁸ Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity (New York: Vintage Books, 2003).