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

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This was the raw nerve Daniel Boone had touched. By hauling white settlers west, he was invading Indian lands. That meant fighting, fighting of the sort that might easily draw the United States government in. It also meant a discomfiting blurring of the lines between European and Native. Boone had killed Indians, been captured by them many times, and seen a brother and two sons die by Indian hands. But he had also, during one of his stints in captivity, been adopted into a Shawnee family, receiving the name Sheltowee (meaning “Big Turtle”) and becoming “exceedingly familiar and friendly,” as he put it, with his “new parents, brothers, sisters, and friends.” That was an apt characterization. The first governor of the Northwest Territory, Arthur St. Clair, a conservative Scotsman who’d been Washington’s aide-de-camp, had little patience for the rambunctious frontier. He saw himself as a “poor devil banished to another planet.” The territory, in his eyes, was a “dependent colony,” inhabited not by “citizens of the United States” but by its “subjects” (“white Indians” is how one of the territorial judges described them). Feeling the territorial inhabitants too “ignorant” and “ill qualified” to govern themselves, St. Clair used his wide discretionary powers to impede the formation of states.

aDLC |beng |erda |cDLC |dOCLCF |dTOH |dGK8 |dWLU |dOCLCQ |dZVR |dOCLCQ |dZQP |dOCO |dGL4 |dUAP |dTFW |dCLU |dQQ3 |dWSD |dFCS |dPAU |dKLP |dJTH |dBUR |dXFF |dOCLCQ |dCO2 |dMYL |dCEF |dLOA |dDYJ |dZCU |dCG4 |dIPL |dUPM |dNJB |dTJC |dEYM |dCLZ There are many histories of American expansionism. How to Hide an Empire renders them all obsolete. It is brilliantly conceived, utterly original, and immensely entertaining — simultaneously vivid, sardonic and deadly serious." —Andrew J. Bacevich, author of Twilight of the American Century Efrén Rivera Ramos, The Legal Construction of Identity: The Judicial and Social Legacy of American Colonialism in Puerto Rico (Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 2001); José Cabranes, Citizenship and the American Empire: Notes on the Legislative History of the United States Citizenship of Puerto Ricans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Juan R. Torruella, The Supreme Court and Puerto Rico: The Doctrine of Separate and Unequal (UPR 1988) and Judge Torruella’s many excellent articles.

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You end an early chapter on medicine in Puerto Rico and the fact that potentially awful things that were done there were virtually unknown outside of Puerto Rico by saying that that is how you hide an empire. The book opens as Immerwahr introduces the concept of the "logo map" of the United States—a familiar representation of the mainland U.S. that excludes the country's imperial possessions. He argues that this conventional map is symbolic and fails to account for the numerous overseas territories and military bases that have significantly influenced America's economic and political power around the world. What’s frustrating to me is that this story isn’t new, and it shouldn’t feel to anyone like it’s new. It’s not like no one knew how devastating World War II was to the Philippines — Filipinos knew and have been saying it very loudly … But folks on the mainland don’t always get to see that. Antonio Sotomayor, The Sovereign Colony: Olympic Sport, National Identity, and International Politics in Puerto Rico (Lincoln: Nebraska, 2016).

i124568221 |b3482600218778 |dsrnf |g- |m231208 |h14 |x2 |t2 |i7 |j18 |k190219 |n10-07-2023 20:58 |o- |a973 IMM The government accepted control of its first territory in 1784, when Virginia gave up its claims to a large swath of land north of the Ohio River. This cession came not two months before the United States formally received its independence when Britain ratified the Treaty of Paris. This meant that, from day one, the United States of America was more than just a union of states. It was an amalgam of states and territory. Juan Arellano, a Filipino architect, also designed several prominent buildings and structures in the Philippines. His work highlighted Filipino talents, but it also bowed to the Americans’ neoclassical architectural style that was dominating the country. Arellano's achievements demonstrated the joy of empire for men like Daniel Burnham, where they could carry out their visions without hindrance, while Filipinos were left on the sidelines, paying the cost of their colonizers' projects.i12797636x |b1110011800360 |dmrlat |g- |m |h17 |x2 |t1 |i9 |j300 |k191014 |n08-24-2023 19:40 |o- |a973 Imm Ernesto Bassi, An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World (Duke 2016) ; Pablo Sierra Silva, Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico: Puebla de los Ángeles, 1531-1706 (Cambridge 2019) ; Rebecca Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2005). This review certainly convinces me that HTH (which I haven’t read) should have paid more careful attention to the concept of non-incorporated territories, to Puerto Rico’s status as a non-incorporated territory (even after being re-labeled a Commonwealth), and, probably, to the frame of the Greater Caribbean. Virginia Sanchez Korrol, From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City (California 1994)