Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Aboard, 1876-1917. Hill and Wang, 2001.

Summary
Jacobson’s book examines American conceptions of '''peoplehood, citizenship and national identity against the backdrop of growing economic and military involvement abroad and massive population influxes''' at home. Between 1876 and the beginning of World War I, when America became fully integrated into the world economic system and rapidly reorganized labor migration and export, Americans (at an accelerating rate) came into contact with foreign peoples, both inside and outside U.S. borders. This contact led to two extremes (barbarian virtues): ''' extraordinary self-certainty and contempt for national outsiders''', combined with a sense of self-doubt. “It was the combined imperatives of production (the need for reliable workers and markets) and governance (the need for citizens deemed reliable) that gave the notions of barbarism and virtue their powerful, if multivalent, currency.” (5) The scale of encounter – as a result of industrialization and the growth of the American empire (from the ‘victory’ at Wounded Knee to the conquering of Hawaii, Cuba, and Puerto Rico) – “served up images of the world and its people that at once naturalized ‘large policies’ and gave voice to the anxieties engendered by these grand designs.” (6) American nationalism was thus born in the '''context of immigration and imperialism'''; it drew upon charged encounters with disparaged peoples whose presence was reviled in the political sphere as it was inevitable in the economic.

Example: 1870-1920 - Half the years were depresison years. "Overproduction thesis" argued that economic engines of capitalism moving too fast. Further market expansion abroad (and imperialism), led to influx of immigrants: 26 Million in the same years. Immigration and imperialism two sides of the same coin.

See also: Vivek Bald, Lara Putnam, and Thomas Guglielmo