THE SIGNIFICANCE OF EMPIRE IN 19th CENTURY AMERICAN HISTORY with UCONN Professor Jerry Phillips
Presented by Charter Oak Cultural Center on August 6, 2026 via Zoom
In his famous essay on “the significance of the frontier in US history,” the historian Frederick Jackson Turner identified nineteenth=century frontier expansionism as the key motive force of the American character. However, the frontier was politically understood by Americans as the living principle of American Empire. The nation was framed as a republic, and the republic was framed as an empire. In other words, nation, republic and empire form a single complex of ideas in the American experience. The concept of a republican empire affected all facets of American life, including the realities of war and colonization, freedom and slavery, citizenship and race. In this lecture I will discuss how the notion of empire informed the major political debates of the day, and I will also pay mind to its lasting impact on the fraught question of American nationhood.
About our Speaker
Jerry Phillips is an Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Connecticut. He teaches courses on 19th century US literature, American Studies, Nature Writing and the Rhetoric of Political discourse. He is the author (with Andrew Ladd) of Background to American Literature: Romanticism and Transcendentalism (2005).
This talk is part of CHARTER OAK IN CONTEXT: The World in Which the First Synagogue Built in Connecticut Came to Be, a lecture series honoring the 150th anniversary of our historic home.