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Street musicians, Guanajuato, Mexico, Chicago: The Globe Stereograph Co., c1906; Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-104249
To state it succinctly, I am interested in American
empire, how and why
it was created, and how it worked and continues to work.
My research focuses on U.S. foreign relations, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and on Southern history. I study the regional impact of foreign affairs, particularly in the South in the late nineteenth century. Recently I have begun focusing on foreign relations law and the development of modern globalization.
My book titled Henry Watterson and the New South: The Politics of Empire, Free Trade, and Globalization was published by the University Press of Kentucky in Fall, 2006.
My book explores the ways the great
Louisville Courier-Journal editor Henry Watterson sought to use empire
and globalization as a development program for the South. Watterson
viewed an imperial foreign policy and free trade as the key to southern
prosperity. He argued that
globalization in the form of free trade in an ever-expanding American empire
promised to usher in the final resolution of sectional inequality and economic
instability. He saw the opportunities of expansion and globalization as
"God's promise redeemed" to the nation and to the South--final proof
that the bonds of union forged in the Civil War were eternal.
These opportunities offered answers to the sovereignty, development, and
racial questions that had persisted in the South since Reconstruction, and to
the crisis of social disorder and overproduction that developed nationally
during the depression of the 1890s. Empire and free trade could neatly solve
both the regions and nation’s problems. "We shall go on in religion
preaching the Gospel of Christ, and Him crucified, and in politics, the
doctrines of Honest Money, Home Rule and Free Trade," he wrote in 1897, in
a characteristic statement of his view.
I
will soon have up on this page a visual archive of Watterson images and items
from his manuscript collection in the Library of Congress.
I
have two new projects dealing with globalization, although they approach it in radically
different ways.
I am interested in the politics of empire in United States history and especially in the legal mechanisms and constitutional justifications Americans adopted over time to govern and maintain their imperial system. I am studying the role of the Constitution in American expansionism and the relationship between foreign relations law, systems of distributed power and jurisdiction, and empire.
My research demonstrates how, at the onset of empire, the United States discovered that the Constitution was naturally limited in its jurisdictional application but that power was not limited in the realm of foreign affairs. I am particularly concentrating on the application of an interesting legal fiction known as extraterritoriality.
Extraterritoriality is the unilateral expansion of United States jurisdiction beyond national territorial boundaries. It is one of the most unusual and fascinating topics in the history of American foreign relations. Studying extraterritoriality opens a window into the operation and structure of American empire. Extraterritoriality as a defining tool of policy evolved in conjunction with the United States' changing sense of its place in the world and the accompanying desire to reshape the protocols of global markets on American terms. The central focus of my project is the transformation of individual rights and business interests in the formation of empire as reflected in the case law of extraterritoriality in American foreign relations from 1850-1960. In significant ways, territorial limits to jurisdiction did not prevent constitutional innovations in imperial governance; it may even have invited them.
In 1906, Secretary of State Elihu Root explained extraterritoriality in 1906 as the creation of “an imperium in imperio,” an artful phrase meaning “sovereignty within sovereignty” which indicates sharp divisions of jurisdiction and power. How during this time could the U.S. firmly defend territoriality and still claim sovereignty within other sovereignties in order to unilaterally govern transnational, global concerns? A particular understanding of the Constitution provided one answer and empire provided another.
I have been studying the legal agreements and decisions that shape the administration of American interests in global trade and criminal law enforcement. I think it could be argued that through extraterritoriality there has been a recurrent pattern of establishing specifically American decentralized networks of legal and judicial authority, and state and military power, in the interests of trade. These networks reinforced certain protocols and legal relationships, rewarded certain sectors, and supported a globalized American-style competitive environment based on open access. Divided jurisdictions enshrined a core belief in the utility of distributed and competitive authority coupled with promotion of economic interests. The balancing of territoriality and extraterritoriality cleared a space in the law for unilateral, interventionist, and imperialist action abroad.
In this project I am tracing the role of extraterritoriality in globalization from the guano trade of the antebellum period through the extraterritorial Supreme Court cases of the mid-twentieth century. In a series of historical case studies spanning more than a century, I am exploring how American objectives were pursued through a global system in which authority and power were distributed and decentralized in novel ways.
I have presented papers on
this topic at the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Annual
Meeting in 2006 and 2007 and at the Organization of American Historians
conference in 2007. I am currently writing a book on this topic for the University
of Georgia Press which will be completed on my upcoming sabbatical.
II. Mexican Regional Music in the Nuevo South
Mariachis
in North Carolina
I am also working on a survey of the Latinization of the South by exploring one critical and untapped aspect of this transformation: the music and related folk culture of the new Mexican immigration to the South.
I am investigating the varieties and cultural context of different styles of Mexican regional music being transplanted to the southeast and to the southern Appalachians, the areas that have long been the seedbed of traditional Southern music. While borderlands culture has long been a topic of interest in cultural histories of the southwest, this analytical frame has never been utilized in the southeast. This aspect of Southern folklife and history is new and little studied even as it grows in significance.
The southeast has experienced a massive influx of immigrants (one of the largest in the country) which is unprecedented in Southern history. This diverse, growing, and vital immigrant Mexican population is transforming the existing, living Southern folk culture by introducing new homemade music to areas already rich with long established cultural traditions.
I have been particularly fascinated by not only by the resilience of traditional music in the new migrant populations (which is to be expected) but by the significant and unexpected rise of hybridization in the music being produced. I am also studying specific folk cultural activities associated with the migrant music, such as cockfighting, drinking, dancing, and the rodeo.
This project is interesting and important for a wide variety of reasons, not least of which is its timeliness given the new transformations in the region, and the ways it cuts across disciplines as it illuminates a vital aspect of what Raymond A. Mohl has called "the Nuevo New South."
I am writing up my current research for publication at this time. I have presented my research in Mexican music at the Southwest Texas Popular Culture Association conference and at the Appalachian Studies Association conference in spring 2007 and will be presenting additional research and new recordings at the American Studies Institute "U.S. Immigration in the Global Context" conference at Seoul National University in Fall, 2007.
Taqueria in Haw River, North Carolina, June 2007
Los Tigres del Norte playing to thousands in Manassas, VA, June 2007
Future Projects:
When these studies are complete, I am
going to return to a longstanding project of mine which examines the establishment of civil aviation routes in the Pacific after
World War II.
Other Projects & My Film
In addition to my academic research, I enjoy working on topics in old time, country, and bluegrass music. Along with the study of history, the great passions in my life are old time Southern banjo and fiddle music. I play clawhammer banjo and old time fiddle. I particularly like the fiddling of the Cumberland Plateau and Eastern Kentucky, and the banjo style of southwestern Virginia. In the summer I frequent old time fiddlers conventions throughout the South as much as possible. (For related information on the web, see my page of Old Time Music, Bluegrass, Blues, Cajun, Mexican-American Music links)
Of late I have become very interested in the music of the Texas-Mexico borderlands: norteño y conjunto. I have begun studying conjunto button accordion and bajo quinto in the traditional style. In Spring 2006 I started teaching myself to play the Cajun accordion.
With my wife Skye Ochsner Margolies I am currently completing a documentary we filmed about bluegrass, gospel, and country music in Tidewater Virginia centering on the musicians at Wayne's Body Shop in Portsmouth. The webpage for our film, "Saturday Night at Wayne's," is here. We have finished filming and are editing and hoping to have it ready for submission to festivals soon.
Some links to my recent articles and reviews that are available online:
Review of John Coski's The Confederate Battle Flag in the Journal of American Culture (June, 2007)
Review of a book on international law and the war on terrorism (H-Diplo)
Review on two new books on the Globalization and the South (H-South):
My article about the music and religious community at Wayne's ("Saturday Night at Wayne's Body Shop") was published in the Spring 2004 issue of the Old Time Herald.
In Winter, 2005 the Old Time Herald published my article "Ladder-braced Guitars and the Enduring Mysteries of the Old-Time Sound."
My article, "The Sandia Hots: Spicing Up Old Time Music with the Flavors of the Southwest" was the cover story for the June-July 2006 Old Time Herald.
Here is my online
guide to the John Donald Robb Field Recordings Collection.