Bound by War: How the United States and the Philippines Built America’s First Pacific Century

Ever since US troops occupied the Philippines in 1898, generations of Filipinos have served in and alongside the US armed forces. In Bound by War, historian Christopher Capozzola reveals this forgotten history, showing how war and military service forged an enduring, yet fraught, alliance between Americans and Filipinos. As the US military expanded in Asia, American forces confronted their Pacific rivals from Philippine bases. And from the colonial-era Philippine Scouts to post-9/11 contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, Filipinos were crucial partners in the exercise of US power. Their service reshaped Philippine society and politics and brought thousands of Filipinos to America. Telling the epic story of a century of conflict and migration, Bound by War is a fresh, definitive portrait of this uneven partnership and the two nations it transformed.

Christopher Capozzola is a professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he teaches classes on political and legal history, war and the military, and the history of immigration. He is the author of Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (2008) and Bound by War: How the United States and the Philippines Built America's First Pacific Century. He is a co-curator of "The Volunteers: Americans Join World War I," a historical exhibition commemorating the centennial of the First World War, and Academic Adviser for the FilVetREP, the Filipino Veterans Recognition and Education Project. He served from 2014 to 2017 on the development committee for the Advanced Placement exam in U.S. History, and in 2018 was named a MacVicar Faculty Fellow, MIT's highest honor for undergraduate teaching.

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.