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9. Justin F. Jackson

Justin F. Jackson

Areas of Specialization

• United States and U.S. in the World
• Global history
• History of capitalism
• Labor history
• Military history
• Cuba
• Philippines

Fall 2024 Courses

• First Year Seminar I
• Freedom Struggles: Intro to U.S. History I, 1600 – 1877
• Power and the People: U.S. Political History

Biography

Justin is a historian of the United States, the United States in the world, and global history; he received his Ph.D. from Columbia University with distinction. Teaching previously at Empire State College, the Pratt Institute, and New York University, he offers courses introducing students to American and global history and historical thought and methods. His book, The Work of Empire: War, Occupation, and the Making of American Colonialisms in Cuba and the Philippines, is forthcoming with University of North Carolina Press in May 2025. His next research project is a history of the politics and economics of military occupation in U.S. history, from the nation’s founding to recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has presented papers at annual meetings of the American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Labor and Working Class History Association, and international conferences in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, and the Philippines.

Selected publications include:

“Class/War: Can Labor and Military History Work Together?” for the “Up for Debate” feature, Labor: Working-Class Histories of the Americas (forthcoming, 2025).

“Militarized Mobility: The U.S. Army and Chinese Exclusion in America’s Empire at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century,” in Global Labor Migration: New Directions, ed. Eileen Boris, Heidi Gottfried, Julie Greene, and Joo-Cheong Tham (Studies of World Migration series, ed. James Engelhardt and Madeline Hsu, University of Illinois Press, 2022), pp. 42-60.

“An Empire of Reconstructions: Cuba and the Transformation of American Military Occupation,” in Reconstruction and Empire: The Legacies of Abolition and Union Victory for an Imperial Age, ed. David Prior (Fordham University Press, 2021), pp. 297-315.

“Roads to Empire: American Military Public Works in Capitalist Transitions in U.S. and World History.” Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 33, no. 1 (March 2020): 116-133.

“Crossing Islands and Oceans in Labor Histories of American Empire: Capital, Commodities, Coolies, and Consumers.” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 91 (Spring 2017): 180-196.

“‘A military necessity which must be pressed’: The U.S. Army and Forced Road Labor in the Early American Colonial Philippines,” in Marcel van der Linden and Magaly Rodríguez, eds., On Coerced Labor: Work and Compulsion after Chattel Slavery (Brill, 2016), pp. 127–158.

“‘The Right Kind of Men’: Flexible Capacity, Chinese Exclusion, and the Imperial Politics of Maritime Labor Reform in the United States, 1898-1905.” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, vol. 10, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 39-60.