Daniel Immerwahr
Biographic Data
| ID | 152176 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Daniel Immerwahr |
| GIVEN NAMES | Daniel |
| FAMILY NAME | Immerwahr |
| SIGNATURE | IMMERWAHR D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 183 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
All That Is Solid Bursts into Flame: Capitalism and Fire in the Nineteenth-Century United States
Industrial capitalism arrived in Europe as great urban fires were already retreating. The United States, however, was generously timbered and far more reliant on wooden construction. As a result, its infernos continued, and even increased, well into its age of capital. They especially struck places of intense commodification: hastily built settler towns, slave cities, financial centres and sites of mineral extraction. Noting the connection betwee…
Burning Down the House: Slavery and Arson in America
Journal Article Burning Down the House: Slavery and Arson in America Get access Daniel Immerwahr Daniel Immerwahr Daniel Immerwahr, Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, teaches in the history department Readers may contact Immerwahr at [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 110, Issue 3, December 2023, Pages 449–…
The Quileute Dune: Frank Herbert, Indigeneity, and Empire
Frank Herbert's influential science fiction novel Dune (1965) is usually understood as a prescient work of environmentalism. Yet it is also concerned with empire, and not merely in an abstract way. Herbert worked in politics with the men who oversaw the United States’ overseas territories, and he took an unusually strong interest in Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest, particularly the Quileute Nation. Conversations with Quileute inte…
The Other Side of the Frontier: Metropolitan Fantasies of Racial Union
Journal Article The Other Side of the Frontier: Metropolitan Fantasies of Racial Union Get access Duncan Bell. Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. 488 pp. $39.95 (hardcover). Daniel Immerwahr Daniel Immerwahr Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Diplomatic History, Volume 46, Issue 4, Sept…
Philippine Independence in U.S. History
In 1946, the United States freed its largest colony, the Philippines. This article examines the decision-making behind that and argues that the road to freedom was not straight. The 1934 law scheduling independence was motivated mainly by protectionism, racism, and a sense that the Philippines was a military liability. Moreover, it contained many loopholes. Between its passage and the scheduled date for independence, Washington’s original reasons…
The Iron Hand of Power: US Architectural Imperialism in the Philippines
Architects and urban planners in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly those working in the City Beautiful style, held lofty ambitions yet struggled to carry them out. In cities such as Washington DC and Chicago, political resistance made executing their plans onerous. In the US colonies, however, they operated with greater liberty. This article follows the spatial vision of Daniel Burnham (1846–1912) from the mainl…
Ten-Cent Ideology: Donald Duck Comic Books and the U.S. Challenge to Modernization
The comic-book artist Carl Barks was one of the most-read writers during the years after the Second World War. Millions of children took in his tales of the Disney characters Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge. Often set in the Global South, Barks's stories offered pointed reflections on foreign relations. Surprisingly, Barks presented a thoroughgoing critique of the main thrust of U.S. foreign policy making: the notion that the United States should i…
Susan L. Smith, Toxic Exposures: Mustard Gas and the Health Consequences of World War II in the United States
The Second World War was, in lives taken, the bloodiest war in history. The belligerents showed little restraint as they bombed cities, attacked food supplies, and raced to develop ever-more devastating weapons. Yet surprisingly, there was one weapon that they largely refused to bring to the battlefield: poison gas. The world had already seen a horrifying gas war—the First World War—and a logic of mutually assured gassing mostly succeeded in prev…
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
Writing the History of the Greater United States: A Reply to Paul Kramer
Paul Kramer is a luminary in the field of U.S. foreign relations, known especially for his penetrating book on the colonial Philippines, The Blood of Government, and a series of influential and wide-ranging reflections on historiography. In “How Not to Write the History of U.S. Empire,” Kramer offers another historiographic intervention. This one, however, is focused on a single work, my 2016 Bernath Lecture, “The Greater United States,” given at…
Development Politics: Seeing Past Ideas
Of all the aspects of foreign relations, wrote political scientist Hans Morgenthau, “none has proven more baffling” than international aid (358). He had a point. It’s easy to get tangled in the thicket of agencies, countries, projects, and plans. Yet aid has nevertheless been a vital instrument of the post-1945 world order. It has been, following decolonization, the main tether connecting the emerging countries of the Global South to the rich one…
The Ugly American: Peeling the Onion of an Iconic Cold War Text”
The Ugly American , published in 1958, was a literary blockbuster that offered a powerful vision of how the United States should fight communism in Asia. Yet despite the textual simplicity of the novel, it had a complex and layered backstory. Its characters were not wholly fictional but were based on real-life models, whose work in Asia laid the backdrop for the novel’s vignettes. Adding an additional layer of complexity, two of those models live…
The Greater United States: Territory and Empire in U.S. History
is a month diplomatic historians know well. It was when the Viet Minh attacked the French air base at Dien Bien Phu, which ultimately pulled the United States into the Vietnam War. But we speak less of another anticolonial revolt that broke out in another part of the world. Two weeks before Dien Bien Phu, four nationalists entered the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C., made their way to the upstairs Ladies' Gallery, unfurled a Puerto R…
Legitimizing Empire: Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican Cultural Critique by Faye Caronan
Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development
Thinking Small
The Thirty Years’ Crisis: Anxiety and Fear in the Mid-Century United States
In 1952, Bill Gaines, the entrepreneurial comic book publisher, embarked on a new venture. He had already made a name for himself by introducing the “horror” comics ( Tales from the Crypt , The Vault of Terror ) that had rapidly acquired an eager readership. Those titles summoned up repressed aspects of postwar culture, reveling in sadism, sexual infidelity, and grisly torture. But the id knows many pathways, and in 1952 Gaines launched a humor m…
Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development
Thelonious Monk: The life and times of an American original
Polanyi in the United States: Peter Drucker, Karl Polanyi, and the Midcentury Critique of Economic Society
This essay explores the connections between Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation (1944) and midcentury social theory in the United States. It argues that Polanyi shared with his U.S. colleagues a critique of market society. In particular, Polanyi's work bears close resemblance to the early thought of management theorist Peter Drucker, with whom Polanyi lived while writing his celebrated book. By comparing Polanyi to his contemporaries who adva…
Caste or Colony? Indianizing Race in the United States
Since the 1830s thinkers in both the United States and India have sought to establish analogies between their respective countries. Although many have felt the US black experience to have obvious parallels in India, there has been a fundamental disagreement about whether being black is comparable to being colonized or to being untouchable. By examining these two competing visions, this essay introduces new topics to the study of black internation…
The politics of architecture and urbanism in postcolonial Lagos, 1960-1986
After independence, the Nigerian government faced a number of choices about how to manage its urban environment, particularly in Lagos, Nigeria's capital. By favouring a programme of tropical modernist architecture for its prestige buildings in Lagos and British New Town style for its housing estates there, the government sought to demonstrate both its independence from European culture and its ability to perform the functions of a modern state. …
Thinking Small
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
Caste or Colony? Indianizing Race in the United States
Since the 1830s thinkers in both the United States and India have sought to establish analogies between their respective countries. Although many have felt the US black experience to have obvious parallels in India, there has been a fundamental disagreement about whether being black is comparable to being colonized or to being untouchable. By examining these two competing visions, this essay introduces new topics to the study of black internation…
The politics of architecture and urbanism in postcolonial Lagos, 1960-1986
After independence, the Nigerian government faced a number of choices about how to manage its urban environment, particularly in Lagos, Nigeria's capital. By favouring a programme of tropical modernist architecture for its prestige buildings in Lagos and British New Town style for its housing estates there, the government sought to demonstrate both its independence from European culture and its ability to perform the functions of a modern state. …
Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development
Polanyi in the United States: Peter Drucker, Karl Polanyi, and the Midcentury Critique of Economic Society
This essay explores the connections between Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation (1944) and midcentury social theory in the United States. It argues that Polanyi shared with his U.S. colleagues a critique of market society. In particular, Polanyi's work bears close resemblance to the early thought of management theorist Peter Drucker, with whom Polanyi lived while writing his celebrated book. By comparing Polanyi to his contemporaries who adva…
All That Is Solid Bursts into Flame: Capitalism and Fire in the Nineteenth-Century United States
Industrial capitalism arrived in Europe as great urban fires were already retreating. The United States, however, was generously timbered and far more reliant on wooden construction. As a result, its infernos continued, and even increased, well into its age of capital. They especially struck places of intense commodification: hastily built settler towns, slave cities, financial centres and sites of mineral extraction. Noting the connection betwee…
The Iron Hand of Power: US Architectural Imperialism in the Philippines
Architects and urban planners in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly those working in the City Beautiful style, held lofty ambitions yet struggled to carry them out. In cities such as Washington DC and Chicago, political resistance made executing their plans onerous. In the US colonies, however, they operated with greater liberty. This article follows the spatial vision of Daniel Burnham (1846–1912) from the mainl…
The Ugly American: Peeling the Onion of an Iconic Cold War Text”
The Ugly American , published in 1958, was a literary blockbuster that offered a powerful vision of how the United States should fight communism in Asia. Yet despite the textual simplicity of the novel, it had a complex and layered backstory. Its characters were not wholly fictional but were based on real-life models, whose work in Asia laid the backdrop for the novel’s vignettes. Adding an additional layer of complexity, two of those models live…
Caste or Colony? Indianizing Race in the United States
Since the 1830s thinkers in both the United States and India have sought to establish analogies between their respective countries. Although many have felt the US black experience to have obvious parallels in India, there has been a fundamental disagreement about whether being black is comparable to being colonized or to being untouchable. By examining these two competing visions, this essay introduces new topics to the study of black internation…
The politics of architecture and urbanism in postcolonial Lagos, 1960-1986
After independence, the Nigerian government faced a number of choices about how to manage its urban environment, particularly in Lagos, Nigeria's capital. By favouring a programme of tropical modernist architecture for its prestige buildings in Lagos and British New Town style for its housing estates there, the government sought to demonstrate both its independence from European culture and its ability to perform the functions of a modern state. …
Polanyi in the United States: Peter Drucker, Karl Polanyi, and the Midcentury Critique of Economic Society
This essay explores the connections between Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation (1944) and midcentury social theory in the United States. It argues that Polanyi shared with his U.S. colleagues a critique of market society. In particular, Polanyi's work bears close resemblance to the early thought of management theorist Peter Drucker, with whom Polanyi lived while writing his celebrated book. By comparing Polanyi to his contemporaries who adva…
Thelonious Monk: The life and times of an American original
Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development
Thinking Small
The Thirty Years’ Crisis: Anxiety and Fear in the Mid-Century United States
In 1952, Bill Gaines, the entrepreneurial comic book publisher, embarked on a new venture. He had already made a name for himself by introducing the “horror” comics ( Tales from the Crypt , The Vault of Terror ) that had rapidly acquired an eager readership. Those titles summoned up repressed aspects of postwar culture, reveling in sadism, sexual infidelity, and grisly torture. But the id knows many pathways, and in 1952 Gaines launched a humor m…
Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development
The Greater United States: Territory and Empire in U.S. History
is a month diplomatic historians know well. It was when the Viet Minh attacked the French air base at Dien Bien Phu, which ultimately pulled the United States into the Vietnam War. But we speak less of another anticolonial revolt that broke out in another part of the world. Two weeks before Dien Bien Phu, four nationalists entered the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C., made their way to the upstairs Ladies' Gallery, unfurled a Puerto R…
Legitimizing Empire: Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican Cultural Critique by Faye Caronan
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
Writing the History of the Greater United States: A Reply to Paul Kramer
Paul Kramer is a luminary in the field of U.S. foreign relations, known especially for his penetrating book on the colonial Philippines, The Blood of Government, and a series of influential and wide-ranging reflections on historiography. In “How Not to Write the History of U.S. Empire,” Kramer offers another historiographic intervention. This one, however, is focused on a single work, my 2016 Bernath Lecture, “The Greater United States,” given at…
Development Politics: Seeing Past Ideas
Of all the aspects of foreign relations, wrote political scientist Hans Morgenthau, “none has proven more baffling” than international aid (358). He had a point. It’s easy to get tangled in the thicket of agencies, countries, projects, and plans. Yet aid has nevertheless been a vital instrument of the post-1945 world order. It has been, following decolonization, the main tether connecting the emerging countries of the Global South to the rich one…
The Ugly American: Peeling the Onion of an Iconic Cold War Text”
The Ugly American , published in 1958, was a literary blockbuster that offered a powerful vision of how the United States should fight communism in Asia. Yet despite the textual simplicity of the novel, it had a complex and layered backstory. Its characters were not wholly fictional but were based on real-life models, whose work in Asia laid the backdrop for the novel’s vignettes. Adding an additional layer of complexity, two of those models live…
Ten-Cent Ideology: Donald Duck Comic Books and the U.S. Challenge to Modernization
The comic-book artist Carl Barks was one of the most-read writers during the years after the Second World War. Millions of children took in his tales of the Disney characters Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge. Often set in the Global South, Barks's stories offered pointed reflections on foreign relations. Surprisingly, Barks presented a thoroughgoing critique of the main thrust of U.S. foreign policy making: the notion that the United States should i…
Susan L. Smith, Toxic Exposures: Mustard Gas and the Health Consequences of World War II in the United States
The Second World War was, in lives taken, the bloodiest war in history. The belligerents showed little restraint as they bombed cities, attacked food supplies, and raced to develop ever-more devastating weapons. Yet surprisingly, there was one weapon that they largely refused to bring to the battlefield: poison gas. The world had already seen a horrifying gas war—the First World War—and a logic of mutually assured gassing mostly succeeded in prev…
The Iron Hand of Power: US Architectural Imperialism in the Philippines
Architects and urban planners in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly those working in the City Beautiful style, held lofty ambitions yet struggled to carry them out. In cities such as Washington DC and Chicago, political resistance made executing their plans onerous. In the US colonies, however, they operated with greater liberty. This article follows the spatial vision of Daniel Burnham (1846–1912) from the mainl…
The Quileute Dune: Frank Herbert, Indigeneity, and Empire
Frank Herbert's influential science fiction novel Dune (1965) is usually understood as a prescient work of environmentalism. Yet it is also concerned with empire, and not merely in an abstract way. Herbert worked in politics with the men who oversaw the United States’ overseas territories, and he took an unusually strong interest in Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest, particularly the Quileute Nation. Conversations with Quileute inte…
The Other Side of the Frontier: Metropolitan Fantasies of Racial Union
Journal Article The Other Side of the Frontier: Metropolitan Fantasies of Racial Union Get access Duncan Bell. Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. 488 pp. $39.95 (hardcover). Daniel Immerwahr Daniel Immerwahr Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Diplomatic History, Volume 46, Issue 4, Sept…
Philippine Independence in U.S. History
In 1946, the United States freed its largest colony, the Philippines. This article examines the decision-making behind that and argues that the road to freedom was not straight. The 1934 law scheduling independence was motivated mainly by protectionism, racism, and a sense that the Philippines was a military liability. Moreover, it contained many loopholes. Between its passage and the scheduled date for independence, Washington’s original reasons…
Burning Down the House: Slavery and Arson in America
Journal Article Burning Down the House: Slavery and Arson in America Get access Daniel Immerwahr Daniel Immerwahr Daniel Immerwahr, Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, teaches in the history department Readers may contact Immerwahr at [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 110, Issue 3, December 2023, Pages 449–…
All That Is Solid Bursts into Flame: Capitalism and Fire in the Nineteenth-Century United States
Industrial capitalism arrived in Europe as great urban fires were already retreating. The United States, however, was generously timbered and far more reliant on wooden construction. As a result, its infernos continued, and even increased, well into its age of capital. They especially struck places of intense commodification: hastily built settler towns, slave cities, financial centres and sites of mineral extraction. Noting the connection betwee…
Political science (17 works) · History (15 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (9 works) · Archaeology (7 works) · Economic history (7 works) · History (6 works) · Empire (5 works) · Law (5 works)