America's Many Empires: U.S. Soft Power during the Early Cold War
My teaching of this course begins from one simple premise: that all of American History should be understood as the history of the US in the world. As someone who has taught widely on this topic, I’m committed to understanding the United States not as an exception but as a node in larger global entanglements, dynamics, and struggles. This vantage, I argue, unsettles exceptionalist narratives and allows students to explore new histories of movement, struggle, and connection across borders.
This was a course prepared for a 2025 interview, which I subsequently adapted to co-teach the module.
My chief goal was to teach students to understand the United States not as a benign global actor, but as a state whose influence was produced through diffuse, often invisible networks of cultural, technological, and economic power. By framing “empire” not only as territorial conquest but as relational, ideological, and consumptive force, the course destabilises any assumption that informal influence is less significant in our analysis. We explore how the circulation of films, jazz, household appliances, and corporate expertise became instruments of political persuasion, shaping the desires, imaginaries, and subjectivities of publics around the world.
My course design revolved around four core themes.
First, my sources will foreground how soft power was performed, reshaped, and subverted by actors at the cultural margins. My teaching will emphasise how unexpected actors “adopted, rejected and creatively repurposed” [Akiboh, 2023] US identities abroad, rejecting the dichotomy of official-unofficial diplomacy to showcase how power is negotiated, contested, and often destabilised in practice. Histories of US power, I suggest, are necessarily histories of resistance.
Second, I embrace polycentrism as a methodological imperative. Seminars will centre perspectives and scholarship from Accra and Algiers, Saigon and Suva, to trace how local actors navigated, resisted, and redefined Cold War order. Students will learn to interrogate the “Cold War paradigm” and instead foreground global processes like decolonisation that situate the US “of and in the world”, as both participant and reluctant respondent [Leakes 2025]. The periphery will refuse to stay peripheral, equipping students to provincialise the United States and learn both how and why we might rethink our definitions of empire, sovereignty, and power in a world defined more by relationality than formal sovereignty.
Third, I will spotlight the diverse discursive terrains where foreign publics appropriated, reinterpreted, and rejected messages sent their way. We will ask how power travels when it is felt more than seen; consumed more than conquered. We’ll interrogate America’s “irresistible empire” as a product of imagination as much as coercion, and trace how the hum of refrigerators and the flicker of films reels shaped the desires and imaginaries of global publics. Soft power emerges as an act of transnational negotiation; the Cold War as an interpretive struggle. Students will approach historical forms of persuasion and propaganda as contingent, contested, and mediated, enlivening that awareness of “the production and contestation of transnational inequalities called for by an ever-more integrated, divided world” [Kramer, 2016].
Finally, students will explore how soft power unfolded across seas, skies, and ecosystems. From nuclear testing to international development, we will explore diplomacy beyond the conference room, understanding the Cold War as an ecological and planetary phenomenon and encountering how alternative methodologies and spatial imaginaries conceive of US power “beyond the boundaries of the state” [Walkiewicz, 2023]. Students will thus be empowered to relate histories of influence to contemporary global challenges, preparing them to think critically about power’s transnational consequences in the present.
Course Structure
1 | Hidden Empire
The Price of Independence in the Philippines
My course is designed to showcase the full range and diversity of America’s hidden empire.
Each week will centre a distinct form and space of US influence to make learning accessible and tangible.
We begin with America’s long-standing hidden empire in the Philippines at the end of WWII, questioning theorisations of empire and settler colonialism in the US context. We’ll then turn to economic empire in postwar Europe, before exploring the intertwined cultural influences of music, dance, and baseball in the Caribbean.
Staying in the realm of ideas, we’ll examine how initiatives like Billy Graham’s “Safari for Souls” exported evangelicalism in Africa, before examing the price of development in South Asia. Finally, we’ll turn to environmental empire, exploring the results of nuclear ecologies and how polution is colonialism in Greenland and the Marshall Islands, two sites where local inhabitants continue to grapple with the legacies of Cold War empire.
Again, then, the diversity and range of empire are constant themes
2 | Economic Empire
Selling the "American Way" in Europe
3| Cultural Empire
Music, Sport, and Culture in Cuba and Puerto Rico
4 | Religious Empire
Exporting Evangelicalism in Kenya
5 | Technological Empire
Modernisation and Development in South Asia
6 | Environmental Empire
Nuclear Ecologies in the Pacific and Arctic Oceans
Example Reading Lists
Reflecting its decentralising ethos, my course's reading lists aimed to incorporate diverse perspectives and approaches, combining innovative and interdisciplinary deep dives with more traditional diplomatic history overviews as framing texts.
Week 1 | Hidden Empire in Hawai'i and the Philippines
Primary
Reconceptualizing the Cold War, “Oral Histories of Martial Law in the Philippines”
“Philippines Independence Regained” YouTube
Douglas MacArthur, “Radio Address Upon Returning to the Philippines”
Secondary
Margaret Jacobs, “Seeing Like a Settler Colonial State,” MAH (2018)
Daniel Immerwahr, “Philippine Independence in U.S. History: A Car, Not a Train,” Pacific Historical Review (2020)
Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (University of North Carolina Press, 2006), chp. 4.
Anne McClintock, “Imperial Ghosting and National Tragedy,” PMLA (2014).
Michael Menor Salgarolo, “Race-Making across Empires: The Racial Formation of Louisiana’s Filipino Communities,” JSH (2023).
Week 3 | Cultural Empire in the Caribbean
Primary
Amri Bakara “Cuba Libre” (1961).
The Second Declaration of Havana (1962).
DPLA, Puerto Rican Migration to the US.
César Andreu Iglesias, The Vanquished (1956).
Secondary
Jennifer L. Lambre, The Subject of Revolution: Between Political and Popular Culture in Cuba (UNCP, 2024), chp. 1.
Robert C. McGreevy, Borderline Citizens: The United States, Puerto Rico, and the Politics of Colonial Migration (Cornell University Press, 2022), esp. chp. 1. Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
Dennis Merrill, Negotiating Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Latin America (UNCP, 2009), esp. chp. 3 & 4.
Primary
National Security Archive, “The United States and Greenland, Part I: Episodes in Nuclear History, 1947—1968.”
J.D. Vance “Remarks at Pituffik Space Base” March 28, 2025.
U.S. Mission Geneva, “U.S. Explanation of Position on the Marshall Islands’ Nuclear Legacies” (2022).
Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner Iep Jāltok, Poems from a Marshallese Daughter (2017).
Secondary
Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Allegory of the Anthropocene (Duke, 2019), Intro. Jacob Hamblin, Arming Mother Nature: the Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (OUP, 2013).
Kristian Nielsen & Henry Nielsen, Camp Century: The Untold Story of America’ Secret Arctic Military Base Under the Greenland Ice (Columbia, 2022).
6 | Environmental Empire in the Marshall Islands and Greenland
Map: The World Today with Latest Boundaries, Stanley F. Turner, via Library of Congress Free to Use Image Sets.
Images: Philippines Independence, Author: Philippe Presidential Museum and Library; Aaron Bates Playing for Team Puerto Rico at the 2013 Caribbean Series, Author: TooMuchInfo 24; Runit Dome, Author: US Defense Special Weapons Agency, all via Wikimedia Commons.