As the ink dried on the Constitution in 1787, the Founding Fathers--having just ended Britain's colonial hegemony--would have likely been very surprised to know that a little more than a century later the United States would have colonies of its own. From this perspective, America's Gilded Age imperialism is quite a shock. It is therefore not surprising that many would later view the period as Samuel Flagg Bemis did: a "Great Aberration" (May 4). Was American imperialism really a Great Aberration? Or, is this view an anachronistic application of a modern, idealized image of America to events which are continuations of deeper trends? Upon closer inspection, the matter becomes quite murky. Two historians writing in the 1960s, Harvard's Ernest
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