How to Hide an Empire

Despite its origin among Clinton-supporting Democrats, the birther conspiracy theory hopped party lines in the general election. The Fox News host Sean Hannity picked up the issue, as did the CNN host Lou Dobbs. Seventeen Republicans in Congress either suggested that Obama wasn’t born in the United States or voiced a strategic uncertainty.

It was as if the oceans had been turned into puddles. Men who’d never left their home states zipped busily around the planet, with two thousand “little Americas” rolling out like a red carpet underfoot.

rather than trying to forcibly retain its colony, as its European counterparts had done, the United States rushed it out the door. “This is the first instance in history where a colony of a sovereign nation has been voluntarily given complete independence,” Truman bragged (somewhat stretching the facts). “Its significance will have world-wide effec

After U.S. troops entered the city, locking out their comrades in arms, McKinley issued his declaration. There would be “no joint occupation with the insurgents,” and the Filipinos “must recognize the military occupation and authority of the United States.” Thus began a standoff. The United States held Manila and ruled the waves. Aguinaldo’s govern

In the end, Basic never truly went in the air by jumping. Speakers didn’t take to it, and its advocates lost interest.

Senator Millard Tydings surveyed the colony after the war. He estimated that 10 to 15 percent of its buildings had been destroyed, and another 10 percent damaged. After the war, Filipinos submitted claims to the government on behalf of 1,111,938 war deaths. Add Japanese (518,000) and mainlander fatalities (the army counted slightly more than 10,000

When economic forces carry sojourners from a poorer area to a richer one, the fortune seekers are usually men. But the Puerto Rican Great Migration was strikingly female—in the half decade after World War II it was 59 percent so. That was partly because foreign women had a harder time crossing U.S. borders, which left an opening for Puerto Rican wo

Few leading politicians, in other words, actually participated in the settlement boom. Few, that is, except for Theodore Roosevelt.

In the Philippines, a low rumble of rural insurgency erupted in the “Sakdal rebellion” in 1935. Thousands of partially armed peasants and workers, impatient with Quezon’s temporizing, seized municipal buildings and demanded immediate independence. Their leader wanted them to kidnap the governor-general, raid armories, and storm the capital. Filipin