This article examines the aftermaths of four murders: those of anti–Ferdinand Marcos activists Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes, and Kuomintang critics Chen Wen-Chen and Henry Liu. These murders all occurred during the Ronald Reagan presidential administration and relied upon the transnational reach of foreign governments into the United States. I explore how activists responded to these murders, focusing on the Committee for Justice for Domingo and Viernes, the Committee on Political Freedom, which was formed by Chen’s colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, and the Committee to Obtain Justice for Henry Liu. I argue that, in contrast to those radicals who saw oppression as flowing outward from the United States toward the Third World, these critics saw the transnational murders as symbolizing the growing convergence between domestic and foreign repression.

This article explores the connections between the violence that accompanied U.S. continental expansion in the nineteenth century and the Philippine-American War, which began in 1899 after Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States following the Spanish-American War. Perhaps geographic distance has served to mask the temporal proximity of these linked periods of U.S. expansion, because this is a connection that has remained largely unexplored in the historiography. Rather than viewing 1898 as a caesura marking the separation between the continental and global phases of American empire, this article explores continuities through an examination of the interaction between imperial culture and military violence. Some U.S. soldiers in the Philippines drew directly on their experiences in wars with Native people, while others narrated their time in the Philippines as an “Indian war” and validated their actions by discursively positioning themselves and their troops as “Indian fighters.” The Indian Wars were translated, through the actions, imaginations, and writing of U.S. soldiers, politicians, and journalists, into a flexible discourse able to travel across space and time. These frontier resonances became one of several structuring narratives that sought to racialize Filipinos in order to justify the war and occupation.

On November 13, 1945, Honolulu residents awoke to news of a mass riot the previous evening by over one thousand sailors in the Damon Tract area in Honolulu. Although it was one of the largest postwar military uprisings on American soil, the riot itself has not been carefully examined in the historical record due other events and interests locally and nationally, as the media continued to operate within a highly militarized state. Remembering and understanding the Damon Tract riot became secondary to America’s Cold War interests in the Pacific, the growth of tourism in the Islands, and efforts to garner statehood for Hawai‘i that depended on unifying these historically contentious identities at the expense of acknowledging conflict that existed in the past.

Between the early 1950s and 1970s, Palm Springs, California, a leisure and resort community in the Coachella Valley, entered into a dramatic era of growth driven by an unlikely factor: golf. Exclusive and elite country clubs employed new forms of environmental and social engineering as they transformed the arid landscape into lush, emerald fairways. The rapid rate of growth meant that courses were built without concern for significant social and ecological side effects. In particular, golf’s arrival brought new power dynamics to the valley that displaced and disenfranchised local communities of color, including the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians and a neighborhood of low-income African Americans and Mexican Americans who lived in the path of development. This expansion-oriented program of development is an example of what we might call the “leisure-industrial complex,” in which private enterprise, public policy, and cultural norms combined to create an economic machinery that soon commanded the Coachella Valley. As such, the history of Coachella golf is not just the history of a sport, but the history of how leisure came to dominate the landscape, the environment, and the people of the California desert.