E xamining an original dataset of more than 8,500 antislavery petitions sent to Congress (1833Congress ( -1845, we argue that American women's petition canvassing conferred skills and contacts that empowered their later activism. We find that women canvassers gathered 50% or more signatures (absolute and per capita) than men while circulating the same petition requests in the same locales. Supplementary evidence (mainly qualitative) points to women's persuasive capacity and network building as the most plausible mechanisms for this increased efficacy. We then present evidence that leaders in the women's rights and reform campaigns of the nineteenth century were previously active in antislavery canvassing. Pivotal signers of the Seneca Falls Declaration were antislavery petition canvassers, and in an independent sample of post-Civil War activists, women were four times more likely than men to have served as identifiable antislavery canvassers. For American women, petition canvassing-with its patterns of persuasion and networking-shaped legacies in political argument, network formation, and organizing.

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In the first decades of the twentieth century, the United States transformed itself from a commercial republic into a major international actor and acquired its first overseas colonies and dependencies. This article investigates the role of public-private partnerships between American state officials and American financiers in the management and expansion of American empire. Confronted with tepid support from Congress for further imperial expansion and development, colonial bureaucrats looked to investment bankers to accomplish goals for which they lacked the financial capacity and political support to achieve independently. These partnerships were soon formalized as "Dollar Diplomacy," an arrangement that would govern America's imperial strategy in the Caribbean. This article highlights two theoretical processes: (1) the downstream effects of congressional delegation decisions and their role in motivating institutional adaptations, and (2) the formation of public-private partnerships as an alternative means of state development, and the unique pitfalls of this approach. To illustrate these mechanisms, this article presents historical narratives, based largely on archival research, on the emergence of this Dollar Diplomacy partnership in the formal American colonies, the spread of this system of imperialism to the Caribbean, and its partial collapse during the early Wilson administration.

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How did the acquisition of overseas colonies affect the development of the American state? How did the constitutional system shape the expansion and governance of American empire? American Imperialism and the State offers a new perspective on these questions by recasting American imperial governance as an episode of state building. Colin D. Moore argues that the empire was decisively shaped by the efforts of colonial state officials to achieve greater autonomy in the face of congressional obstruction, public indifference and limitations on administrative capacity. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book focuses principally upon four cases of imperial governance - Hawai'i, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic and Haiti - to highlight the essential tension between American mass democracy and imperial expansion.