The time periods are delineated by the U.S. Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War II, and Reagan-Era neoliberalism, each of which marked major economic, political, and cultural shifts in the United States. Here is a simple guide to the key features in the timeline:
All of the logics are connected through the modern western drive for profit and domination. The timeline attempts to identify each event with the primary logic that was its driving force. However, we encourage you to question how other logics played a role in each event and to debate whether the logic connected to a given event was, in fact, central.
Collapsing history into timelines hides as much as it reveals. While this timeline strives to show how race and the development of global capitalism have shaped contests over land, labor, and empire, a different one could view history primarily through the lens of workers or gender-oppressed people. This timeline prioritizes the logics that have shaped racial stratification and group-differentiated access to power in the modern world.
Western and U.S. empire have relied on slavery, settler colonialism, Christian heteropatriarchy, and war to seize and maintain power for a wealthy few. Rather than accepting the division of the world into distinct categories of people with separate histories, we encourage users to locate the wellsprings of solidarity that exist among people of all races and nations to find common cause in the struggle for democracy. As Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, whether our roots lie in Guam, Hawai’i, the Philippines, China, Korea, Cambodia, Pakistan, or Yemen, our historical experiences are indelibly connected to people around the world who have been subjects of racism and colonization. We hope this tool will contribute to the kind of revolutionary thinking and action that philosopher and activist Grace Lee Boggs encouraged:
“This is what true revolutions are about. They are about redefining our relationships with one another, to the Earth and to the world; about creating a new society in the places and spaces left vacant by the disintegration of the old; about hope, not despair; about saying yes to life and no to war; about finding the courage to love and care for the peoples of the world as we love and care for our own families.â€