How to Hide an Empire

Yet Boone’s path was strewn with obstacles. The British had set the ridge of the Appalachians as the boundary to white settlement, making Boone’s journey west a crime. The end of British rule did little to improve Boone’s standing. The founders viewed frontiersmen like him with open suspicion. They were the nation’s “refuse” (wrote Ben Franklin), “

The army’s official history of the war judges the Philippine bombing to have been just as disastrous as the Hawaiian one. At Pearl Harbor, the Japanese hobbled the United States’ Pacific fleet, sinking four battleships and damaging four others. In the Philippines, the attackers laid waste to the largest concentration of U.S. warplanes outside North

The political scientist Benedict Anderson called it the “logo map.” Meaning that if the country had a logo, this shape would be it. The logo map The problem with the logo map, however, is that it isn’t right. Its shape doesn’t match the country’s legal borders. Most obviously, the logo map excludes Hawai‘i and Alaska, which became states in 1959 an

The logo map excludes all that—large colonies and pinprick islands alike. And there is something else misleading about it. It suggests that the United States is a politically uniform space: a union, voluntarily entered into, of states standing on equal footing with one another. But that’s not true, and it’s never been true. From the day the treaty

Old World diseases such as smallpox, typhus, and measles burned through the land like firestorms, moving farther and faster than the Europeans themselves.

Thomas Jefferson wasn’t against expansion any more than George Washington was. It’s just that, like Washington, he envisioned it as a controlled process.

Even when usable numbers on the overseas territories were available, they weren’t used. The decennial census report duly noted the territorial populations up front, but then quietly dropped them from nearly all calculations that followed. As the 1910 report explained, those statistics covered “the United States proper” only. The United States prope

This is, it’s worth emphasizing, unique. The British weren’t confused as to whether there was a British Empire. They had a holiday, Empire Day, to celebrate it. France didn’t forget that Algeria was French. It is only the United States that has suffered from chronic confusion about its own borders. The reason isn’t hard to guess. The country percei

Not only does the United States continue to hold part of its colonial empire (containing millions), it also claims numerous small dots on the map. Besides Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and a handful of minor outlying islands, the United States maintains roughly eight hundred overseas milit

Collectively, these technologies weaned the United States off the familiar model of formal empire. They replaced colonization with globalization.