God's Arbiters

Reviews / Votes

In God's Arbiters, Susan K. Harris deftly evokes the potent intermingling of nationalism, war, and culture at the end of the nineteenth century as the United States conquered the Philippines and took the first, halting steps toward empire. * David Silbey, author of A War of Frontier and Empire * Susan Harris has produced a smart, readable, and timely book-timely in its view of the Christian narrative by which the United States undertakes imperialist ventures, and timely in its investigation of the relationship between religion and American foreign policy. * Jean Pfaelzer, author of Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans * God's Arbiters makes an important contribution to ongoing debates over the role of religion in American life. This is a book that clearly resonates with contemporary debates about race, religion, and America's place in the world. * Amy S. Greenberg, author of Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire * Harris's meticulously researched study provides fresh insight into a chapter of the past that has key implications for debates that are as current as the evening news. This well-written and ambitious book is an impressive and welcome contribution to transnational American Studies and to Twain studies. * Shelley Fisher Fishkin, editor of The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Work * An intriguing study of America's rise as an imperial power...Harris, author of two books and many articles on Mark Twain, is in top form. In her able telling, Twain was a man on a mission. He had become a critic of the very ideology to which he had long been captive: the grand narrative of American supremacy and conquest...For a very long time, Americans have resisted recognizing and confronting their imperial impulses and admitting to the massive footprints they've left here and there around the globe. Harris's timely study reveals that these footprints have deep historical and ideological roots. * Christian Century *