Romances of the White Man's Burden

"Take up the white man''s burden!" So wrote the English writer Rudyard Kipling in 1899, in a poem aimed at Americans at a time when colonial ambitions were particularly high. The poem proved especially popular among white southern men, who saw in its vision of America''s imperial future an image that appeared to reflect and even redeem the South''s plantation past.

Romances of the White Man''s Bu...