Imperial Material: National Symbols in the U.S. Colonial Empire

Join Dr. Alvita Akiboh as she reveals how U.S. national identity has been created, challenged, and transformed through embodiments of empire found in U.S. territories, from the US dollar bill to the fifty-star flag. These symbolic objects encode the relationships between territories—including the Philippines, the Hawaiian Islands, Puerto Rico, and Guam—and the empire with which they have been entangled. How do such items became objects of local power? Even if imperial territories were not always front and center for federal lawmakers and administrators, their inhabitants remained continuously aware of the imperial United States, whose presence announced itself on every bit of currency, every stamp, and the local flag.

Alvita Akiboh is a US historian specializing in the history of US overseas colonies in the Caribbean and Pacific. She earned her PhD in History from Northwestern University and BA in History from Indiana University. Before coming to Yale, Akiboh was a postdoctoral fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows. She has conducted research throughout the continental United States and the overseas territories, including American Samoa, Guam, Hawai‘i, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. She has published in Diplomatic History and Modern American History, and her work has been supported by a variety of organizations, including the American Historical Association, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Smithsonian National Postal Museum and National Museum of American History.

She is currently Assistant Professor of History at Yale University, where she teaches courses on U.S. history, national identity, colonialism, and empire.