Allison Powers Useche

Allison Powers Useche is a legal and political historian of modern North America.  Her research focuses on United States imperialism, the American West, US foreign relations, and international order. She is currently writing a book about how a forgotten tradition of international legal claims against the United States government transformed foreign policymaking as the nation was becoming a global power. Between 1900 and 1930, thousands of residents of US-annexed territories charged the federal government with promoting forms of racial violence that violated the international norms known as the “standard of civilization.” She has also begun research for two new book projects. The first considers how the discipline of comparative law emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States in tandem with imperial designs on the American West, Pacific, and Caribbean. The second is a synthetic history of International Law in American Politics and Society from the Founding to the Present.