This panel explores both through explorations of Liberia, the first settler colony established by the United States beyond the North American continent. In the first half of the nineteenth century thousands of Black Americans expatriated from the United States to West Africa. Most were born free in the border states, but thousands of others came to Liberia as a condition of their emancipation. For all, emigration was a means of social and legal liberation, offering access into a political and commercial class almost wholly denied them in the United States. The men and women who colonized Liberia were refugees, migrants and asylum-seekers escaping one of history’s most violent systems of oppression. Yet they were also invaders and colonizers, bringing with them American values including Christianity, capitalism and the violent, settler-colonial belief that those values gave them the right to conquer and convert the Indigenous people they encountered.

Of course, the history of gender does more than chronicle the experiences of women in the past. Shifting understandings of both femininity and masculinity have shaped and been shaped by American empire. Colonists developed and deployed imperial imaginations through conceptions of manhood and womanhood defined against indigenous cultural practices. Both femininity and masculinity became contested imperial battlegrounds in Liberia, spawning violent regimes of control that took lives, shattered communities, and established new systems of inequality that endured for generations.

* Scholars of Europe and European colonialism have led the charge, with notable work from Philippa Levine, Clare Midgley, Catherine Hall, Chaudhuri Nupur, Margaret Strobel, Ruth Roach Pierson, and more. Americanists have lagged a bit behind with notable exceptions from Amy Greenberg, Joanne Meyerowitz, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Amy Kaplan, and more.