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Dean Worcester’s Fantasy Islands brings to life one of the most significant (but under examined) figures in the history of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines. Upon the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Worcester, a scientist who had traveled twice to the Philippines on zoological expeditions, established himself as one of America’s leading experts on the Philippines. Over a fourteen-year career as a member of the U.S. colonial regime, Worcester devoted much of his time and energy to traveling among and photographing non-Christian minority groups in the Philippines. He amassed an archive of several thousand photographs taken by him or by government photographers. Worcester deployed those photographs in books, magazine articles, and lectures to promote his belief that the United States should maintain control of the Philippines for decades to come. While many historians have examined American colonial photography in the Philippines, this book is the first lengthy treatment of Worcester’s role in shaping American perceptions of the Philippines in the early twentieth century.

Early Andean historiography reveals a subaltern history of indigenous gender and sexuality that saw masculinity and femininity not as essential absolutes. Third-gender ritualists, Ipas, mediated between the masculine and feminine spheres of culture in important ceremonies and were recorded in fragments of myths and transcribed oral accounts. Ritual performance by cross-dressed men symbolically created a third space of mediation that invoked the mythic androgyne of the pre-Hispanic Andes. The missionaries and civil authorities colonizing the Andes deemed these performances transgressive and sodomitical.

In this book, Michael J. Horswell examines alternative gender and sexuality in the colonial Andean world, and uses the concept of the third gender to reconsider some fundamental paradigms of Andean culture. By deconstructing what literary tropes of sexuality reveal about Andean pre-Hispanic and colonial indigenous culture, he provides an alternative history and interpretation of the much-maligned aboriginal subjects the Spanish often referred to as "sodomites." Horswell traces the origin of the dominant tropes of masculinist sexuality from canonical medieval texts to early modern Spanish secular and moralist literature produced in the context of material persecution of effeminates and sodomites in Spain. These values traveled to the Andes and were used as powerful rhetorical weapons in the struggle to justify the conquest of the Incas.

A major reformer and intellectual, Alexander Crummell (1819–1898) was the first black American to graduate from Cambridge University. From 1858 to 1872, he lived in Liberia, where he worked as a farmer, educator, and Episcopal missionary. Returning to America, he established St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Washington D.C., serving as its pastor until 1894. In 1897 he founded the American Negro Academy, which he intended as a challenge to the accommodationist philosophy of Booker T. Washington. 

A prolific writer, Crummell produced pioneering works on black nationalism, black self-determination, and Pan Africanism that influenced W.E.B. Du Bois and other African-American leaders of the time. His surviving papers include over four hundred sermons and political essays and a voluminous correspondence. 

Yet despite his importance to American and African-American history, Crummell is little known today, and there have been virtually no modern printings of his writing. This volume is intended to restore Crummell’s voice and to prompt a reevaluation of his work.