How to Hide an Empire

For more than thirty years the Cuban constitution contained an astonishing clause granting the United States the right to invade Cuba (which it did, four times). Cuba also agreed, as part of the price of getting Wood to leave, to lease a forty-five-square-mile port to the United States for military use. Guantánamo Bay, as the leased land was called

“Moroland”—the islands of Mindanao, Palawan, and Basilan plus the Sulu Archipelago—comprised the less-populated bottom third of the Philippines. It was like a different country. Inhabited mainly by Muslims (called “Moros”) rather than Catholics and governed by a system of sultans and datus, it adhered to Islamic law and practiced both polygamy and

In 1905 the Puerto Rican legislature funded a national program, again under the supervision of Ashford and Gutiérrez. By 1910, they estimated that nearly 30 percent of the population had been treated, for less than a dollar per patient.

Alaska, which Andrew Johnson’s administration sought to purchase from Russia in 1867, encountered the same resistance. “We do not want … Exquimaux fellow citizens,” griped The Nation. The deal went through only because, in the end, there weren’t that many “Exquimaux,” and there was quite a lot of Alaska.

Juan Arellano was from one of the most extraordinary families in the Philippines. One brother, Arcadio, was the first Filipino architectural adviser hired by the United States. Another, Manuel, would become one of the colony’s most noted photographers. Juan’s cousin Jose Palma wrote the national anthem used by Aguinaldo’s Philippine Republic (which

Burtonwood’s significance would be hard to overstate. Whole neighborhoods of Liverpool had been bombed during the war, especially around the Penny Lane area, and its economy was still in shambles. The thousands of U.S. servicemen who came through were like millionaires. Teenage girls charged at them at the train station (The Daily Mirror, suspectin

Still, the United States has refused to relinquish its inches, pounds, and gallons. It stands with Myanmar, Liberia, the Independent State of Samoa, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands as the sole holdouts against the metric system.

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

Clinton and Giuliani marched in a parade for Albizu, but did they know who he was? Very likely not. The epic battle between Muñoz Marín and Albizu in the fifties transformed Puerto Rican society, but it barely registered elsewhere. If mainlanders think about Puerto Rican history in that period at all, the image that comes to their mind is an entire

“We levelled entire cities with our bombs and shell fire,” admitted the high commissioner. “We destroyed roads, public buildings, and bridges. We razed sugar mills and factories.” In the end, he concluded, “there was nothing left.”