Richard W. Maass, "The Picky Eagle: How Democracy and Xenophobia Limited U. S. Territorial Expansion" (Cornell UP, 2020)

New Books in American Studies · Sep 14, 2021 · 1h 10m

The Picky Eagle: How Democracy and Xenophobia Limited U. S. Territorial Expansion (Cornell UP, 2020) explains why the United States stopped annexing territory by focusing on annexation's domestic consequences, both political and normative. It describes how the U.S. rejection of further annexations, despite its rising power, set the stage for twentieth-century efforts to outlaw conquest. In contrast to conventional accounts of a nineteenth-century shift from territorial expansion to commercial expansion, Richard W. Maass argues that U.S. ambitions were selective from the start. By presenting…