"Jessen’s book provides an essential correction to years of misinformed scholarship about the populists’ views on imperialism."—Pacific Northwest Quarterly
"This study will help us further rethink the evasive Populists and how they responded to modern life and contributed to American politics."—The Historian
"Jessen traces the ways in which Populists within the United States addressed the potential and reality of U.S. foreign intervention during the 1890s and then the immediate aftermath. Overall, Populism and Imperialism is a valuable contribution to the field of U.S. politics."—Kansas History
"Jessen’s account is meticulously precise and stupendously well researched, perhaps the first political history of the imperial foray in two generations to let fact rather than preconception and theory define its narrative."—Journal of Arizona History
"Jessen has written a very useful book . . . timely, helping to restore “populism” to its original American meaning, the agrarian protests of the 1890s."—Pacific Historical Review
"A valuable, detailed, and well-researched account of the interaction of populism and the United States’ new internationalism at the turn of the twentieth century. [Jessen] offers us a thorough and clear account of the evolution of and divergences within the populist movement at a critical period in American and international history."—Diplomatic History
"This is a solid book that inform research and teaching on both the western Populists and the debate over imperialism."—Great Plains Quarterly
“Nathan Jessen makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the role Western state reformers played in nineteenth-century foreign policy debates, and, how their views on war and imperialism were used against them. Populism and Imperialism also well illustrates the interrelation between domestic and foreign policies.”—David R. Berman, author of Politics, Labor, and the War On Big Business: The Path of Reform in Arizona, 1890–1920
“Jessen presents a bold and compelling treatment of folks whom historians have shunted aside—Populists who survived the supposed political massacre of 1896 and went on to become powerful and thoughtful critics of American empire. Jessen’s mastery of historiography, both old and new, is especially impressive. In our turbulent age, where “populism” has come to many to seem the antithesis of democracy, Jessen’s work calls our attention to the most noble achievements of the American populist tradition.”—Robert D. Johnston, author of The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon
“Nathan Jessen’s thorough and exhaustively researched interrogation of the relationship between Populism and American empire provides a roadmap to understanding the troubled politics that reformers pursue in the face of opponents who follow the less complicated path of patriotism and nationalism. While the Populists fought for justice and equality at home, their adversaries, defending domestic corporate interests and markets abroad, were ruthless in stifling dissent, accusing reform politicians of being un-American and traitors to the nation-state. Featuring the two leading politicians of their age—William Jennings Bryan and William McKinley—the author concludes that McKinley’s view of a benign empire would carry forward into the next century. With an eye to our current politics, Jessen provides a clear-eyed view about the passions of those seeking substantive structural changes and restraints on large institutions, with the perils they face from ultranationalists and those calling for “100 percent Americanism.” This riveting story of American Populism and empire offers intriguing parallels with our present age.”—William G. Robbins, author of Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West
“Scholars often associate support for the Spanish-American War with commitment to the American imperialism that followed. Nathan Jessen masterfully explains why western reformers—Populists, Bryan Democrats, and Silver Republicans—supported US intervention in Cuba, but opposed the colonial expansion that followed as un-American. Western reformers remained true to America’s republican values in wishing to deliver abused Cubans from autocratic Spanish rule. They likewise rejected American imperialism in Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii because it denied the self rule that all people deserve and turned the newly acquired colonial subjects into victims of American capitalist exploitation. Because war tends to kill reform by allowing the establishment to label critics traitors, the anti-imperialist campaign of 1900 marked the last gasp of the Populist Revolt.”—Worth Robert Miller is the author of Populist Cartoons: An Illustrated History of the Third Party Movement of the 1890s
