Placing Civilization is about revealing the significant connections of progressive reform within the context of health and education as American assimilators constructed spatial boundaries to achieve social order. The Era of Bacteriology coincided with progressive age ideas to socially and bio-medically transform America's dependents, ergo American Indians, immigrants, and eventually colonial subjects. Health officials targeted potentially "assimiable" peoples by isolating them before gaining entry into America. Of particular interest, the Indian Office required the extraction of Indian children into off-reservation boarding schools to inculcate American ideas about hygiene, the English language, and democratic ideals. Moreover, hygienic reformers like visiting nurses successfully penetrated immigrant enclaves with the intent to instruct mothers of "proper" parental care and methods of sanitation. Such examples stood as hallmark principles of progressive health management which this dissertation reveals as the spatial dynamics of "domestic containment." During this period, public health officials expanded the tactics of isolation, hygienic reform, and education to better control domestic and colonial dependents.

American officials utilized progressive containment policies through the Bureau of Insular Affairs and the Public Health Service, controlling dependent populations outside America. From Hawai'i to Puerto Rico and the Philippines, American's set forth strong quarantine policies evaluating the health of emigrants and vaccinating travelers between American territories. Moreover, in places like Puerto Rico and the Philippines, colonizers strove to transform their colonial subjects into acceptable healthy models. In this way, progressive colonizers situated territorial possessions as protected, self-functioning, and efficient outposts in the American empire.

U.S. policy intended to "invent" civilization in the Philippines through a framework of "progressive colonialism." American policymakers affirmed their progressive ideology and authority over Filipinos through a utopian machination of what the Philippines could become as a culture and nation: the imagined state of a sanitized America. The American endeavor to transform dependent peoples was, however, only partially successful. Colonizers educated a portion of the population and partially regulated the insalubrious habits of Filipinos in marketplaces and homes. However, American colonizers found the process of "placing" civilization in areas as vast and dispersed as America's new empire, were similar to the fragmentary successes in America.