Rather than dividing the frontier among the states, the republic’s leaders brokered deals by which none of the Atlantic states would extend to the Mississippi, which marked the western edge of the country. The country’s anguish, and American indifference to it, persisted into the mid-twentieth century: Immerwahr’s descriptions of how the Filipinos experienced World War II — caught between the Japanese occupiers and an American government much more focused on the war in Europe — are especially disturbing. The author has performed an excellent service in his accounts of the truth about the Philippines and Woodrow Wilson, as summarized above, that are routinely left out of Texas-approved textbooks that are used in numerous states. Simmering beneath all these stories is a powerful throughline: As classic colonialism was being fazed out in the 20th century, a new, more covert form of empire-building set in – with the U. How to Hide an Empire is a breakthrough, for both Daniel Immerwahr and our collective understanding of America’s role in the world.

Part Two of How to Hide an Empire covers the post-war empire that emerged as technical, logistical and economic developments allowed the US to concentrate its power into military bases and strategic locations rather than controlling large areas of land as it had done previously. Eighty Pokémon rattling around in my head before I realized Puerto Rico—the only territory-status-location I knew beforehand because of the NYC Diaspora—had a friend named Guam. This book changes our understanding of the fundamental character of the United States as a presence in world history.

Expecting independence after the Spanish were vanquished, this archipelago of more than seven thousand islands instead endured an American takeover that led to fourteen years of warfare, with more deaths than the Civil War, including the worst massacre by Americans in recorded history (the Battle of Bud Dajo, in which nearly one thousand Filipino Muslims were slaughtered). I hadn’t realised that there is a law requiring the flag to change if a new state is incorporated into the union. The Japanese delegation asked to at least insert language about racial equality into the League of Nations covenant.

There are many important chapters of history that the author decides to talk about, but the two which get most page time are Philippines and Puerto Rico.And each time they would say things like "those people aren't capable of self-governance" to justify it. An obscure biographical account of Boone, originally published as an appendix to a history of Kentucky, made the rounds in Europe, where it was republished and speedily translated into French and German. By the end of the war the USA held ‘two thousand overseas base sites’ and ‘thirty thousand other installations’ (19). There’s a nice bit in this where the US decided to claim a series of islands in the Pacific, only to learn that they had claimed them as part of their territory a hundred odd years before – ‘oh, that old thing… I’d completely forgotten I ever even owned it’.

The British had set the ridge of the Appalachians as the boundary to white settlement, making Boone’s journey west a crime.You see the difference democracy makes through the top down story of Daniel Burnham in Manila/Baguio and the bottom up planning for Chicago.

This was exactly the sort of business that put Washington in favor of enforcing a British-style settlement boundary. Under Lund’s less than entirely watchful eye, squatters took up residence on Washington’s western holdings (not the Kentucky claims, but others farther north). S. government has convinced countries to allow it to station its troops on their soil might also have been helpful in understanding the large United States footprint on the world. George Washington warned, after the revolution, of the “settling, or rather overspreading the Western Country … by a parcel of banditti, who will bid defiance to all authority. Where I found this book particularly interesting was in its discussion of the part played by restrictions upon the US in terms of access to natural products (rubber in particular) and how these restrictions encouraged production of synthetic versions of these that often ended up being better than the originals.

Never mind that the map snubs Alaska and Hawaii; what it never even hints at are the many overseas territories that, at their high-water mark (the end of World War II), were home to a staggering 135 million people and constituted a land mass equal to almost one-fifth that of the United States. Not only does the image we have of the US in our minds only really include the mainland ‘from sea to shining sea’ (even if those seas are oceans), we also know that it should probably include Hawaii and Alaska too, as well as Puerto Rico, and American Samoa, and… which is the point of this book, if you see what I mean.