As Susan K. Harris points out in her new book, God's Arbiters, the Philippine-American War has not “filtered into the public consciousness” (6). Signs that popular ignorance of the conflict might soon abate include John Sayles's well-received novel A Moment in the Sun (San Francisco: McSweeny's, 2011), partially set in the Philippines during the war, and Gregg Jones's Honor in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and the Rise and Fall of America's Imperial Dream (New York: New American Library, 2012), which met with a positive review in the New York Times. It is a good thing the public ignorance might be coming to an end, too, because the parallels between the Philippine-American War and recent American military interventions—from the humanitarian rhetoric fueling the conflict to the racial stereotypes bandied about by imperialists and anti-imperialists alike—command attention. In Harris's hands, careful analysis of such parallels reveals the way narratives of American identity contribute to a drive toward imperialism. Even if she does not quite tell us how we might avoid such missteps in the future, Harris's exposition of how concepts of American identity work in tandem with imperialism is an important, nationally-self-correcting step.

Much of the ground that Harris covers will be familiar to American Studies scholars with an interest in the Philippine-American War. Like others in the field (such as Gretchen Murphy, Vicente Rafael, and Eric Love, to name a few), Harris probes the intersections among political debates, cultural artifacts, narratives of American identity, and military action taken in the name of American obligation. In the first section of her book she examines the rhetorical overlap between discussions about race, Protestantism, and American citizenship at the turn of the twentieth century. She devotes the second to the way literature and textbooks of the time shaped those ideas of race, religion, and citizenship, and the third to an examination of the foreign response to the United States' foray into imperialism.

Harris's unique contribution to this tale of American exceptionalism is to highlight the way that Protestantism provided both a divine mandate and a cultural imperative for intervention in and annexation of the Philippines. To be American at the turn of the century, Harris explains, meant not only being Anglo-Saxon—something that previous studies have homed in on—but also being Protestant. This understanding of “Americanness” raised doubts about whether Filipinos (largely Catholic) could ever become true American citizens, even as Protestant evangelicalism demanded that Americans export their way of life for the enlightenment of “[their] little brown brother,” to quote memoirist Mary Fee (115). Readers of Church History will find much to admire in the way Harris exposes the contradictory impulses, premises, and imperatives that characterized turn-of-the-century Protestantism. She ably demonstrates that even in secular contexts, and in the mouths of figures who were decidedly not Protestant (Samuel Gompers, for instance), Protestant rhetoric blended with Enlightenment values to circumscribe who could lay claim to the descriptor “American.” The United States, Harris argues, “incorporated an evangelical mission to broadcast its formula [fusions of Enlightenment and Protestant thought] to the rest of the world” while at the same time “its own racial ideologies rejected the possibility that non-Anglo-Saxon Protestants could ever emulate the American story” (81). Harris is at her most incisive when examining the contradictions inhering at the heart of American narratives of identity.

Consistent with the New Historicist and cultural studies methodologies she employs, one of Harris's basic premises is that the relationship between history and cultural production is not one-sided, but reciprocal. As such, she analyzes cultural and political artifacts side by side. Harris's capacious archive includes the Congressional record; textbooks and spellers; memoirs; sermons; and numerous poems, short stories, and novels, including Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, often overlooked in favor of his essays in cultural studies accounts of this period. In addition to analyzing literature by stalwarts such as Twain and Rudyard Kipling, Harris offers insightful readings of fiction by lesser-known writers who were widely read at the time, such as Charles Sheldon (whose 1896 novel In His Steps was the first to ask, “what would Jesus do?”), Frank Steward, and Ernest Crosby. And, in an important move toward a more transnational rendering of American cultural history, Harris analyzes the way Filipino, European, and Latin American writers responded to the events of 1898–1902.

This final section provides a crucial counterpoint to the story Harris is telling because it allows us to see the United States' actions through the eyes of those affected by them. For that reason, one wishes Harris had stressed the inconsistencies and contradictions in the writing by, for instance, the elite Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó as much as she did in works by U.S.-Americans. Harris does not dwell on Rodó's “reject[ion of] the idea that inferior minds can be uplifted,” an unusual position for a champion of the oppressed to hold, emphasizing instead his critique of American materialism (174). In contrast, she discusses Fee's incorporation of Filipino dialect at length, arguing that the fact that “Filipino speech is represented as foreign” suggests that Fee's memoir emblematizes an American fear of “penetration of the form [of standard English] by linguistic difference” that resembles the fear of racial contamination accompanying much anti-imperialist rhetoric (117). Yet could not whitewashing Filipino pronunciation in print, failing to distinguish it from standard American English, also be read as a symptom of the same fear?

The nuanced analysis here is bestowed on American writing, but perhaps that is as it should be. God's Arbiters is, after all, an American story about American stories. Above all, the book helps us to notice how the stories we tell about ourselves influence the actions we take—no insignificant lesson to internalize.