African American Imperialism 1915-1940 Summary

Mary Renda is foremost a professor and historian/academic, as well as author and activist. Renda’s received her B.A. at Brown University and at Yale University she received her Ph.D., M.Phil., and M.A. She primarily studies and focuses her work on United States history and is more specifically interested in American women’s history and African American women’s history; as well as United States imperialism. Renda is currently a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College where she teaches courses in World War II at Home and Abroad, U.S. Women’s History since 1890, interdisciplinary women’s studies courses, and Race, Gender, and Empire. Her teaching focuses on the cross-sections of women and gender, multicultural nature of U.S. history, and international contexts in which history take place. In addition to what was mentioned above Renda is also an author. She wrote Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940 (2001) which I will review in this paper. Renda is currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled The Uses of Imperialism, 1920–1940, inspired by writing Taking Haiti. Both focus in on a similar time period and deal with U.S imperialism. The layout of Talking Haiti is that it is broken up into a prologue, introduction, two major “parts,”

occupation of Haiti change their culture and therefore their history. Renda is very careful in dealing distinctions in the conclusions she is making. This can be seen as early as the prologue where she makes sure the reader understands the terminology in the text and their implications. Renda does a great job of letting an experience a new historical topic without it being too dense. The reading is very easy to follow and shows many aspects to what shaped the culture, so it lends itself to being minimal in bias. Taking Haiti is really informative gives the reader new perspective on an interesting chapter in American