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A panoramic, two-hundred-year history of the American overseas experience and how it redefined the United States and its place in the world

American citizens have lived abroad for a host of reasons-to spread their religion, to flee persecution, to make money, or simply to seek new experiences. Making the World Their Own tells the stories of these individuals, describing what motivated them to go abroad, the risks they faced, and the complicated relationship they shared with their government back home.

Taking readers from the nineteenth century to today, Sarah Snyder reconstructs the richly varied worlds of Americans living abroad, from missionaries and educators to journalists, entrepreneurs, artists, and adventurers. She shows how the imperial footprint of American schools, businesses, and clubs predated the formal expansion of America's influence beyond its borders and has endured as an element of the country's soft power. Yet Snyder also documents how overseas citizens complicated U.S. diplomacy when they were taken hostage, murdered, imprisoned, or caused embarrassment to the government. We meet Black Americans who moved to Liberia as part of the American Colonization Society; citizens who went to Paris, Moscow, and Shanghai in search of utopia; dissidents who fled anticommunism and racial discrimination; and many others.

Drawing on original archival research in seven countries, Making the World Their Own casts the history of U.S. foreign relations in an entirely new light, revealing the outsized role of ordinary citizens in extending the influence of the United States around the globe.