As the United States’ role in world affairs grew more prominent during the early twentieth century, the presence of Americans in foreign countries increased rapidly. During the years immediately following World War I, many Americans began to leave the United States to live abroad as “expatriates”. The 1920 US Census recorded 117,000 Americans living overseas, more than double the number from ten years earlier (Mills, 7). The traditional definition of an “expatriate” is a person who legally and formally abandons his birth country and takes a new country as his homeland (Hansen, xx). During this period of world history, however, the word was redefined more broadly in the popular imagination to describe the men and women who left their home countries to live abroad for extended periods of time.
