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

The twin Pacific campaigns were long and brutal, and it’s telling that many veterans of the war who went on to political greatness earned their spurs in them. John F. Kennedy got shipwrecked in the Solomons (an island there is named after him). Lyndon Baines Johnson won a Silver Star, personally given by MacArthur, for “gallantry” as an observer in

The growth of the settler population was tied to another event in North America: the extraordinary depopulation of the land’s indigenous inhabitants. The size of that depopulation is up for debate. It’s hard to know how many Indians inhabited North America before Europeans arrived. Five million for the area now covered by the contiguous United Stat

Manuel Quezon complained, too. Even though few adult Filipinos spoke English fluently by the time the Philippines became a commonwealth and Quezon became its president, the looming presence of English in the schools and government had blocked local languages from taking root. The result was, after hundreds of years of colonial rule (counting Spain)

The causes of Puerto Rico’s woes were multiple and complex. Many involved arcane aspects of sugar tariffs and the lax enforcement of landholding laws. Mainlanders, however, tended to focus on a different explanation: overpopulation. It was the very thing that had troubled them about Puerto Rico back in 1898, when they worried that Spain’s colonies

The next month, Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico, taking out the island’s power grid, water system, and communications. It also exposed the parlous state of affairs in the United States’ largest remaining colony. Although Luis Muñoz Marín’s strategy of using tax loopholes to draw mainland corporations to the island had dramatically improved

Filipinos quickly saw that Japan had come not to liberate the Philippines, but to ransack it. Just as Germany was caged in by neighboring countries, Japan was hemmed in by empires: the British Empire (Malaya, Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong), the Dutch Empire (the Dutch East Indies, now known as Indonesia), the U.S. Empire (the Philippines, Alaska, Haw

The breakthrough came in 1909, when Fritz Haber, a German-Jewish chemist, developed a technique for synthesizing ammonia, a nitrogen compound. By 1914, the experimental technique had become industrially viable, and in that year Haber’s method, called the Haber–Bosch process, yielded as much reactive nitrogen as the entire Peruvian guano trade. The

The longer the war went on, the more bases the United States took. For some, as in Latin America, it negotiated deals: building roads and extending aid in exchange for leases. Others it claimed from its allies as a matter of wartime exigency.