How to Hide an Empire

Was it important that the United States possessed, to take one example, Howland Island, a bare plot of land in the middle of the Pacific, only slightly larger than Central Park? Yes, it was. Howland wasn’t large or populous, but in the age of aviation, it was useful. At considerable expense, the government hauled construction equipment out to Howla

Another way to consider those nineteen million territorial inhabitants is as a fraction of the U.S. population. Again taking 1940 as our year, slightly more than one in eight (12.6 percent) of the people in the United States lived outside of the states. For perspective, consider that only about one in twelve was African American. If you lived in th

Despite his seeming satisfaction with the country’s original dimensions, Jefferson came to be known as an expansionist for his acquisition of Louisiana, which extended the country far west of the Mississippi. Yet that was more of an impulse buy than a considered purchase.

Since 1945, U.S. armed forces have been deployed abroad for conflicts or potential conflicts 211 times in 67 countries. Call it peacekeeping if you want, or call it imperialism. But clearly this is not a country that has kept its hands to itself.

Indians regarded these squatters with horror. “No matter how little is left the red man, such heartless wretches will never rest content or let the Government rest until the Indians are made landless and homeless,” warned The Cherokee Advocate. “It is beyond the power of words to express the character of such men—dead to all human feeling and knowi

Oklahoma was admitted as a state in 1907, with a population less than one-quarter Indian.

It wasn’t much different in the Philippines. There, Aguinaldo’s forces had liberated most major cities and were laying siege to Manila. Aguinaldo understood all this to be part of the independence war of the Philippines, and in fact had already issued a declaration of independence, raised a flag, and played the Philippine national anthem. Yet, as i

The war may have begun as an empire-wide revolt by Spain’s colonial subjects, but it ended as the “Spanish-American War.” The peace treaty, negotiated in Paris, was between Spain and the United States alone. Spain sold the Philippines to the United States for $20 million. Puerto Rico and Guam (a Micronesian island, valuable as a Mahan-style base) c

Nationalism was seizing the country, all the more so as the First World War approached. And as the idea of the nation—a union of states sharing a culture, language, and history—grew in prominence, the colonies seemed more distant and nebulous, literally vanishing from maps and atlases. For the guano islands, the disappearance was more than cartogra

Those were not empty words. In 1852 Fillmore’s secretary of state, Daniel Webster, gave speculators carte blanche to sail to the guano-laden Lobos Islands off the coast of northern Peru and scrape them clean, promising naval protection and dispatching a warship for that purpose. It was a bold yet dangerous plan, as Peru claimed sovereignty over the