In the final years of the nineteenth century, as a large-scale movement of farmers and laborers swept much the country, the United States engaged in an ostensibly anti-colonial war against Spain and a colonial war of its own in the Philippines. How one related to the other--the nature of the activists' involvement in foreign policy debates and the influence of these wars upon the prospects for domestic reform--is what Nathan Jessen explores in Populism and Imperialism.

American reformers at the turn of the twentieth century have long been misrepresented as accomplices of empire....