Empire Underground: The Stakes of U.S. Claims to Vertical Power* (2024)

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Volume 48 Issue 4 September 2024
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Megan Black

Email: mablack@mit.edu

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Diplomatic History, Volume 48, Issue 4, September 2024, Pages 495–519, https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhae044

Published:

14 August 2024

Extract

The story of U.S. expansionism is often told from a mapped surface, between coordinates of x and y. But what happens when we think about how the United States deepened its authority beneath that surface, along a z-axis?1 While U.S. vertical power has encompassed many spheres reaching from deep oceans to outer space, I will today stay below ground and on the continent—the part of the continent that was forcibly, though never fully, converted from Indigenous land into the United States. I will invoke a particular history of U.S. foreign relations in which nineteenth-century officials and grassroots actors infiltrated lands belonging to Indigenous people, meeting resistance in their violent bids to establish and uphold colonial authority.2 The grassroots actors with lead roles in histories of continental expansion have often been settler farmers pursuing a Jeffersonian ideal. The Homestead Act of 1862 was the well-known dynamo urging the farming hopeful to expand across the semi-arid and arid lands that became the U.S. West.3 This act, however, was joined by others, including those angled to spaces below the surface. Other policies emboldened a different set of actors—miners and prospectors—to reach underground.

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