The Global Interior

“Black’s extraordinary book…demonstrates the remarkable reach of the Interior Department… By zooming in on the work of this important but too easily forgotten agency, The Global Interior deftly rearranges the last century and a half of American history in fresh and useful ways… Most notably, her book allows us to see how settler colonialism served as the staging ground for the United States’s rise to its superpower status.”—Dexter Fergie, The Los Angeles Review of Books

“The Global Interior offers unprecedented insights into the depth and staying power of American exceptionalism. Black offers a lively rendering of the torturous obfuscation of the inside and outside, domestic and foreign, as generations of policymakers sought to extend the reach of U.S. power globally while emphatically denying that the United States was an empire.”—Penny M. Von Eschen, author of Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War

“A smart, original, and ambitious book. Black demonstrates that the Interior Department has had a far larger, more invasive, and more consequential role in the world than one would expect from its carefully cultivated image of domestic scientific benevolence.”—Brian DeLay, author of War of a Thousand Deserts

“In this stimulating book, Black succeeds in showing both the central importance of minerals in the development of American power and how the realities of empire could be obscured through a focus on modernization and the mantra of conservation.”—Ian Tyrrell, author of Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt’s America

“The Global Interior is a model of how to seamlessly combine distinct literatures—environmental and diplomatic histories, Native American studies and the American West—in a fresh and important contribution to our understanding of the United States in the world.”—Gretchen Heefner, author of The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland