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

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Territorial policy was set, instead, by a series of laws, most famously the Jefferson-inspired Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which covered a large part of the present-day Midwest (similar laws covered other regions). This land grab opened the way for the establishment of sugar plantations built and run by many of the grandsons of the missionaries.

But the episode remains, as the historian Joseph Ellis has observed, the “first and only time a sitting American president led troops in the field. There would be “no joint occupation with the insurgents,” and the Filipinos “must recognize the military occupation and authority of the United States. As those who are familiar with work from authors like Tim Marshall will know, power and influence are inextricably linked with land holdings and Immerwahr’s analysis of these examples help to cement this knowledge. I’m not someone who knows much of American history - we obviously didn’t need to study it in school and whatever I’ve gleaned through in the past few years has been by watching documentaries, tv shows or reading fiction inspired by true historical events. This work has the potential to be an important book, but many potential readers will find its length daunting (501 pages; 399 pages of text).It draws you in with smartly weaved, gripping stories and constructs an impressively expansive tale of America’s global conquests. Territorial legislators in Missouri wore black armbands in Boone’s honor, but the eastern papers took well over a month to even acknowledge his death, which they generally did with short notices. Even in those cases, I have probably read more about WWII because the Holocaust is one of the most horrific events that I’ve come to know perpetrated by design by one evil man. S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.

I consider myself well read in American history, but this book opened my eyes to a surprising amount of unknown material on almost every chapter. And I literally had no clue that Philippines, a country in Asia was colonized by the US for around 47 years.He details shockingly that many ‘inhabitants of the US Empire have been shot, shelled, starved, interned, dispossessed and tortured’ (19) but due to the well-known logo map skewing public perception, and the focus on the US mainland by US politicians and history-makers what the territories ‘haven’t been, by and large, is seen’ (19). After WWII, these territories were literally treated as social, medical and architectural testing grounds with the fraction of the oversight if they occurred on the mainland. The territories merely had to cross a series of population thresholds: five thousand free men, and they could have a legislature; sixty thousand free inhabitants (or sooner, if Congress allowed), and they could be states.

The urge to expand, of course, goes back to the country’s founding, although Immerwahr — a professor of history at Northwestern — points out that racism may have acted as a check on early expansionism.In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. The result is a provocative and absorbing history of the United States — ‘not as it appears in its fantasies, but as it actually is. Moreover, Congress’s discretionary authority meant that until territories became states, the federal government held absolute power over them. The result is a whimsical-serious work: a deft disquisition on America, and America in the world, with a raconteur’s touch and keen sense of the absurd.