Squatters who rushed over the mountains were impossible to govern, and the wars they inevitably started were expensive to fight. When it came to the nationalists of the colonized world, there is no evidence that Wilson even read their many petitions.

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. It shows the history of empire, but it also shows us that the concept of empire isn’t one that just exists in history – empire is something that continues today. The ensuing guerrilla warfare played to the insurgency's strengths: knowledge of the land and the popularity of the cause.The years of oppressio America has aspired toward a global hegemony built on technological prowess, linguistic supremacy, and increased military presence. How is it ‘hidden’ from history and the inevitable criticism that comes along with any discussion of the history of imperialism across the world? 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.

Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of colonies.

This land grab opened the way for the establishment of sugar plantations built and run by many of the grandsons of the missionaries. While I expect most know that Puerto Ricans are US citizens (even if they didn’t before Hurricane Maria) do they know that (or more importantly why) the independence movement activists shot at President Truman and later shot into the House of Representatives wounding 5 congressmen in 1954. 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.

Also, its length is part of what makes it awesome because it gives it the right amount of detail and scope. But there's also a lot on other non-tangible empire building, especially standardisation (genuinely fascinating chapter) and language. As a result, in that year only slightly more than half of the country’s land (55 percent) was covered by states. S. Army and the Philippine Army of Liberation— ended when Spain surrendered the city to the United States alone. 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.

Daniel Immerwahr is an associate professor of history at Northwestern University and the author of Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development , which won the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti Award. Were he alive to read this book he would probably endorse it, perhaps only regretting that he had not written it himself. 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. Immerwahr does not seem to fault teachers and his fellow professors who are including decreasing amounts of content relating to the United States’ own colonial roots in their courses without replacing it with information about the territories, let alone military bases abroad. I grew up in the shadow of the US empire so I've always understood that the US was an empire, but it did occur to me at some point after I immigrated that no one here saw it that way.