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How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States

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Immerwahr knows that the material he presents is serious, laden with exploitation and violence, but he also knows how to tell a story, highlighting the often absurd space that opened up between expansionist ambitions and ingenuous self-regard . Immerwahr said in an interview that the colonies “are not usually emphasised when we talk about US history” (Democracy Now! a useful and informative work, since many of these overseas territories remain under our governance. Eastern politicians fretted about the newly annexed land’s inhabitants: Anglo settlers, Catholics, free blacks, Indians, and mixed-race folk. It is brilliantly conceived, utterly original, and immensely entertaining - simultaneously vivid, sardonic and deadly serious.

Moreover, Congress’s discretionary authority meant that until territories became states, the federal government held absolute power over them.Oases in the desert often vanish upon inspection, and it didn’t take long for Boone’s followers to reconsider their rapture. We commemorate the Peal Harbor bombings but all seem to forget that this was a coordinated attack on other American territories that day, namely the Philippines and other territories.

Immerwahr’s most shocking accounts concern the territories the US acquired in 1898 — the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam — after defeating Spain in what was dubbed the Spanish-American War, but which in fact began as a war of independence from Spain by those colonies. With decolonization sweeping Africa and Asia, the optics of the world’s triumphant democracy holding on to its possessions would have been abysmal.The Northwest Ordinance has become part of the national mythology, celebrated in textbooks for its remarkable offer of statehood on “an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever. That was the same decade Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died, both, as it happened by near-inconceivable coincidence, on the same day—the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Had the horses and the chariot of fire descended to take up the patriarchs,” a New York paper wrote, “it might have been more wonderful, but not more glorious.When, for example, the US military prevailed in the Mexican-American War, in 1848, many in Congress wanted to annex all of Mexico. His narrative of the rise of our colonial empire outside North America, and then our surprising pivot from colonization to globalization after World War II, is enthralling in the telling -- and troubling for anyone pondering our nation’s past and future. By taking the reader to the moon (an American conquest) and to the current era of brawl politics (we have consensus, Barack Obama was born in Hawaii), the author puts history in the context of contemporary sociology - there is no better purpose for a history book. The synthetic materials developed are now part of our daily lives from synthetic rubber in tyres and rubber seals to the plastics of milk bottles and crucially in plastic packaging which revolutionised food preservation and hygiene. The American empire was interested in the land of these territories but not the people of these territories.

But as the author says, even his less extreme version is reminiscent of the more modern ‘cure’ of water boarding. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century’s most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U. Americans might very well proclaim (and even believe in their hearts) that they are a nation built out of anti-imperialist notions, and by virtue of literally erasing all this history from their textbooks ensure that this image stays intact, but the fact is, US has been an empire and colonized millions of people since the late 19th century and continues to do so till this day. Just a year earlier, the hunter Daniel Boone and thirty or so followers asserted an independence of a different sort. This book changes our understanding of the fundamental character of the United States as a presence in world history.It's also a history of how and why the United States got to control so much of what happens around the world without creating additional formal colonies like the "territories" that exist in this legal limbo.

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