The foreign locales that crop up in US literature show that only rarely could a history of “the American novel” claim to be a story, to borrow a title from Mark Twain, of “innocents abroad. ” For what invocations of Havana, Constantinople, Cuba, and Peking – just to mention a few of the geographically far-flung sites that reappear throughout the literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – make clear is that white Americans were hardly guiltless when it came to imperial adventures. For quite a long time, however, accepted historical narratives cast the USA as a nation without an imperial tradition, one whose hands were unsullied by the sort of history that bloodied traditional European powers. In early examples of imperial romances from the first half of the nineteenth century, dashing heroes and sentimental heroines embody this uncomplicated history, their sexual innocence and purity expressive of a fantasy that white subjectivity could remain untainted by the stain of moral, political, and cultural complications that US culture inevitably confronted as white men and women courted one another on the slave-trading African coast, the exotic climes of the Levant, or other presumably romantic backdrops. Examples from later in the nineteenth century and continuing into the first decades of the twentieth lend a scientific hue to this fantasy, rooting the quest for cultural purity in biology as part of an effort to control the linkages among race, sexuality, and empire that empowered but also potentially jeopardized white subjects.