Brown Bag Biography with Colin Moore (1898 Project)

March 7, 12:00pm - 1:15pm
Mānoa Campus, KUY 410 Add to Calendar

The Center for Biographical Research presents: /“Seeing Like an Empire: A Biography of the Bureau of Insular Affairs” / Colin Moore, Director, Matsunaga Institute for Peace, and Associate Professor, UH Economic Research Organization (UHERO) / With responses by Mary Therese Perez Hattori, Director of the Pacific Islands Development Program, East-West Center; Roderick Labrador, Professor of Ethnic Studies at UH Mānoa; and Tom Coffman, author of Nation Within: The History of the American Occupation of Hawai'i / The Bureau of Insular Affairs was an obscure yet essential bureaucracy that played a major role in the creation and extension of the American empire. This presentation will provide a “biography” of the Bureau that illustrates its inception as the linchpin of US colonial administration and explores how it facilitated imperial rule while minimizing interference from Congress and the American public. Drawing on new archival research, the presentation will consider the Bureau’s early impact on the Philippines and the Dominican Republic and its later role in Guam and the US Virgin Islands. / Colin Moore is the Director of the Matsunaga Institute for Peace at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and an Associate Professor at the University of Hawai‘i Economic Research Organization (UHERO). His past work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, and Studies in American Political Development, among other venues. His recent book American Imperialism and the State: 1893–1921 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) examines how the US constitutional system shaped the governance of the American empire and highlights the essential tension between mass democracy and imperial expansion. / Cosponsored by Hamilton Library, the Center for Oral History, Conflict and Peace Specialist, and the Departments of American Studies, English, Ethnic Studies, History, and Political Science / Thursday, March 7 / Kuykendall 410 / 12PM to 1:15PM HST


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