Christian G. Appy, “Empire Lite,” Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy 3:3 (Fall 2019): 133-53. ( https://catalyst-journal.com/vol3/no3/empire-lite) The book is structured into two main sections. The first, titled "The Colonial Empire," delves into the history of the United States from colonial times up to World War II. The second, "The Pointillist Empire," explores American history from 1945 to the present day.

How to Hide an Empire is a breakthrough, for both Daniel Immerwahr and our collective understanding Kramer argues that the Bernath Lecture homogenized “radically different political spaces and modes of empire-building” into a “unified exception to reified, “regular” U.S. space,” thus “flattening … a spectrum of sovereignties into a polarized dichotomy.” [20] But neither he nor any other reviewer, whether delivering praise or criticism, uses or defines the terms non-incorporation or non-incorporated territory. Bender comes closest: “There was no conception of exterior American space in the constitution, and certainly nothing about colonies,” he writes, before noting HTH’s connection of the Guano Island Act to the later Insular Cases. [21] The Bernath Lecture and HTH hide non-incorporation in four ways. First, they devote a miniscule amount of time and space explaining it. Second, they pervasively lump non-incorporated territories together with incorporated territories and leased military areas and refer to all of them as “territories.” Third, they collapse the distinct relationship of non-incorporation via the concept of “the Greater United States”. Fourth, they gloss over the ongoing existence of non-incorporated territories after World War Two. Bizarrely for a book about U.S. territorial empire, non-incorporation is simply not an organizing principle of HTH. Below I explain how little HTH tells the reader about the history or historiography of Puerto Rican women and gender, party politics and versions of nationalism, and racism and racial identities. Many parallel commentaries could be made, for example about economic transformations within capitalism, labor conditions and organizing, and the diaspora.How to Hide an Empire takes you on a whirlwind tour of the islands and territories the U.S. has governed from the 19th century on. It draws you in with smartly weaved, gripping stories and constructs an impressively expansive tale of America’s global conquests. Manifest destiny takes on a whole new meaning. 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.S. at the forefront. It’s not a stretch to say that this book will make you think about American history in a new way." —Ramtin Arablouei, NPR

Daniel Immerwahr". Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Department of History - Northwestern University . Retrieved August 16, 2019. Hidden by Rand McNally, the Department of the Interior, and HTH is that the federal government does not want Americans to notice the non-incorporated territories or what their existence means about the character of the United States. The federal government and elements of the Puerto Rican political elite have invested a great deal in the illusion of decolonization via Commonwealth status. State governments, even in my home state of New York, have not included this history in K-12 social studies curricula. If most Americans learn nothing about this in school, how can they be ready to hear the truth if they somehow come across it in a bookstore, or on TV or a podcast? [39] i125385900 |b32104000122778 |dpran |g- |m |h7 |x2 |t0 |i4 |j2 |k190514 |n12-21-2022 21:44 |o- |aHISTORY / US Boone showed up in European literature, too. The British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft had an affair with one of Boone’s acquaintances and, with him, published a fictionalized account of Boone’s life. The French Romantic François-René de Chateaubriand lifted passages from Boone’s biography for his influential epic, Les Natchez, about a Frenchman living among the North American Indians. Lord Byron, the leading poet of the age, devoted seven stanzas to Boone (the “happiest amongst mortals anywhere”) in his poem Don Juan.

About this book

Consistently both startling and absorbing . . . Immerwahr vividly retells the early formation of the [United States], the consolidation of its overseas territory, and the postwar perfection of its 'pointillist' global empire, which extends influence through a vast constellation of tiny footprints." — Harper's The chapter showcases the disillusionment of Puerto Rican nationalists. But it also highlights a main source of their disillusionment: Wilson’s hypocritical pursuit of international freedom while failing to aid independence movements across the world. 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.

He is a professor of history at Northwestern University. [3] His work has appeared in n+1, Slate, Jacobin, [4] and Dissent. [5] Works [ edit ] American Samoans do not yet have statutory birthright citizenship. A late 2019 court decision that would pave the way for this has been put on hold by the very judge who issued it pending the federal government’s appeal. See: https://www.npr.org/2019/12/13/787978353/american-samoans-citizenship-status-still-in-limbo-after-judge-issues-stay Not all American Samoans want U.S. citizenship: https://www.civilbeat.org/2020/02/not-everyone-born-in-samoa-wants-u-s-citizenship/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). Stuart Schwartz, Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina (Princeton 2015), xiv-xv. In the long years that followed, Campos soon realized that America's imperial dreams did not align with his own. They had no intention of granting Puerto Rico freedom, nor did they intend to help it rebuild. Over time, his once-hopeful attitude grew bitter, concluding that the U.S. had reneged on its commitment to bestow autonomy on Puerto Rico. My book manuscript is titled “Fight for an Impossible Progress: Workers, New Deal Labor Reform, and Populism in Puerto Rico, 1937-1941.” My work on U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico and on colonialism and decolonization in the Caribbean more broadly includes: “Birth of the U.S. Colonial Minimum Wage: The Struggle over the Fair Labor Standards Act in Puerto Rico, 1938-1941,” Journal of American History 104:3 (December 2017), 656-680; “Towards Decolonization: Impulses, Processes, and Consequences,” 475-489 in Stephan Palmié and Francisco Scarano, eds., The Caribbean: An Illustrated History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); From Colony to Nation: Women Activists and the Gendering of Politics in Belize, 1912-1982 (Lincoln: Nebraska, 2007); “Citizens vs. Clients: Workingwomen and Colonial Reform in Puerto Rico and Belize, 1932-1945,” Journal of Latin American Studies 35:2 (May 2003): 279-310. Kramer sharply criticized Immerwahr’s narrative deployment of Albizu in his Bernath Lecture. “At first glance, his choice to begin the essay with a Puerto Rican nationalist seems to suggest that he takes Puerto Rican history, culture, and agency seriously,” but Kramer argues that Immerwahr then told a very U.S.-centric story about Albizu. [64] This pattern continues in HTH, which makes no mention of his pre-1898 childhood, when his Afro-descended maternal aunt was raising him, or of his crucial 1927-30 trip to the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru to build Greater Caribbean and pan-American support for Puerto Rican independence. HTH weaves Albizu’s biography across several chapters, focusing on his time at Harvard and in the U.S. Army, as well as his reactions to medical abuse and his advocacy of Nationalist armed rebellion. But it ignores the painful final incarcerated decade of Albizu’s life from 1955-65, which would work against arguments of post-World War Two U.S. decolonization broadly and in Puerto Rico. To hide his last years and the incarceration of Nationalists in Puerto Rico and federal prisons is to hide not only ongoing U.S. “formal” imperialism, but its most brutal face. Whatever critique one might have of Albizu—and serious critiques exist—he is not a man to be reduced to a narrative prop. Albizu would have objected to being called a “domestic” anti-imperialist, an adjective made possible by HTH’s “Greater United States” conceptual domestication of the non-incorporated territories. He would also have disagreed profoundly with HTH’s concluding argument that “ empire is not only a pejorative. It’s also a way of describing a country that for good or bad, has outposts and colonies. In this sense, empire is not about a country’s character, but its shape.” [65] For Albizu empire was always a pejorative, always morally indefensible, because it violated republican principles and denied national self-determination to peoples who had seen the United States as a post-colonial pioneer. U.S. imperial rule in the five remaining non-incorporated territories continues to effect such violation and denial. Anger about the federal government’s treatment of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria gets us nowhere if it is not linked to an accurate analysis of the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States from 1898 to today.