“For the Prosperity of the Nation”

This dissertation examines the 1916 US occupation of the Dominican Republic to analyze how US and Dominican stakeholders used public schools to disseminate their notions of Dominican citizenship. Drawing on correspondence and memos from the Department of Public Instruction in the Dominican Republic and US military government, as well as periodicals and newspapers from both countries, this dissertation examines how US officials, education administrators, and guardians engaged in these efforts. Although the US military government used schools to exert state control, Dominicans individually and collectively redirected these state institutions to serve their needs and to negotiate their relationship to the state. Schools were central to how both Americans and Dominicans of all classes articulated, circulated, and practiced ideas about membership to and within the Dominican nation. From plans to create US allies in an expanding US empire to the formation of an economically productive “mulatto” rural peasantry and a cultured and informed citizenry, US officers in the military government as well as Dominican education administrators and guardians, used public schools to realize their imaginings for the Dominican nation.