The claim that the United States is an elect nation chosen by God to dominate and redeem the world has deep roots in the Puritan traditions of the seventeenth century. These ideas of U.S. America's messianic role have been continually retooled to justify new imperial adventures. But the connections between visions of America as a people with a mission to the world and American imperial power have always existed in some contradiction with each other. Many Americans have rejected the idea of empire as ‘un-American,’ and imperialists have gone about their expansionist activities by constantly denying that they were engaged in building an empire.

Thus there had developed early on, from the time of the Indian wars to the Mexican American War to the Spanish American War to today a deep disconnect between what Americans think they have been about in their history and how other people, especially those on the underside of American imperial power, have actually experienced America. This also means that most Americans do not know their own history, particularly this ‘underside’ of American history. American ideologies justify military and economic expansion by speaking in an idealistic language of promoting ‘freedom’ that conceals what they are actually doing from the perspective of conquered and colonized peoples.

But this self-deception has always had its critics. In every generation there have risen up prophetic witnesses, sometimes loners, sometimes speaking for major movements, who seek to unmask this self-deception.