How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States Paperback – Illustrated, March 3, 2020

When delving deeper into a history of a region and its greater parts, it is those greater parts that open one’s eyes that the events of the past of a regions interconnects with other regions and their respective events of their past too. After reading Historian Daniel Immerwahr assessment of the history of the United States from its humble beginnings to its most shattering moments that made the nation during the American Revolution period, it was a nation that had always stayed connected with other entities. Whether it was with its former motherland of England or ally with France, or it as a nation of its own that kept interconnected with nations that it also became an ally through the ups and the downs through peace and war Japan and the Philippines. Immerwahr writes a thought-provoking book “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States” that spans the timeline of Early America at the cusps of 1776 and the Frontier. When beginning to read the book, keep those two elements of one’s understanding. And the retelling of the Frontier would not be without the mention of Daniel Boone. Questions arise, did one realize before reading the book and after first watching the television show with Fess Parker that Boone was originally from North Carolina and later settled in Kentucky and named his settlement Boonesborough?Boone’s story is only a piece of the so-called pie or puzzle of understanding the making of the United States as a nation and later an empire, which the book writes of. The book is three-fold, the beginnings, the effects of and more conflicts that rise by the nineteenth century, and the latter half involves parallels of recent history of the past 25-30 years as of the writing of the book. From the country’s separation from England and the series of wars that reshaped the territories of North America, land claimed west of the Appalachians and attempts to fortify relations between Native peoples – nations, tribes, confederacies, and policies that re-mapped forcefully possessions. No doubt, Native lands would be at a cost and by the late nineteenth century, populations dwindled after the Cherokee Removal of 1859, but the frontier grew and symbolized the epitome of westward expansion. Before the century closed, frontiersman and later diplomat and president Theodore Roosevelt claimed expansion in the modern era of the late nineteenth century; moved to Dakota territory and settled at the order of the Badlands and established a life with friends Buffalo Bill Cody and Seth Bullock, the elite of wealth. Roosevelt “TR” would expand beyond the continental U.S. when broke out in Cuba and later in the Philippines with the Spanish American War; the conflict breathed an era of Imperialism that had its advantages and disadvantages that resulted in the supply chain of resources and economy. Immerwahr continues to explain the aftermath of that event and the next that followed with the Philippine American War, the effects of that war and the previous led to annexation and territories that became a part of the greater whole of a growing empire.After reading "How to Hide an Empire”, one may have a better understanding of the United States as it grew as a nation and empire. The effects of its development continues to show but one must find understanding by learning about its past and its origins. The history is complex if the events that fell in between had not been fully understood from the start.

I'm a professor at the University of California San Diego and I'm assigning this for a graduate class. No other book out there has the level of breadth on the history of US imperialism that this work provides. Even though it packs 400 pages of text (which might seem like a turnoff for non-academic readers), "How to Hide an Empire" is highly readable given Immerwhar's skills as a writer. Also, its length is part of what makes it awesome because it gives it the right amount of detail and scope.I could not disagree more with the person who gave this book one star. Take it from me: I've taught hundreds of college students who graduate among the best in their high school classes and they know close to nothing about the history of US settler colonialism, overseas imperialism, or US interventionism around the world. If you give University of California college students a quiz on where the US' overseas territories are, most who take it will fail (trust me, I've done it). And this is not their fault. Instead, it's a product of the US education system that fails to give students a nuanced and geographically comprehensive understanding of the oversized effect that their country has around our planet.Alleging that US imperialism in its long evolution (which this book deciphers with poignancy) has had no bearing on the destinies of its once conquered populations is as fallacious as saying that the US is to blame for every single thing that happens in Native American communities, or in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, etc. Not everything that happens in these locations and among these populations is directly connected to US expansionism, but a great deal is.A case in point is Puerto Rico's current fiscal and economic crisis. The island's political class share part of the blame for Puerto Rico's present rut. A lot of it is also due to unnatural (i.e. "natural" but human-exacerbated) disasters such as Hurricane María. However, there is no denying that the evolution of Puerto Rico's territorial status has generated a host of adverse economic conditions that US states (including an island state such as Hawaii) do not have to contend with. An association with the US has undoubtedly raised the floor of material conditions in these places, but it has also imposed an unjust glass ceiling that most people around the US either do not know about or continue to ignore.To add to those unfair economic limitations, there are political injustices regarding the lack of representation in Congress, and in the case of Am. Samoa, their lack of US citizenship. The fact that the populations in the overseas territories can't make up their mind about what status they prefer is: a) understandable given the way they have been mistreated by the US government, and b) irrelevant because what really matters is what Congress decides to do with the US' far-flung colonies, and there is no indication that Congress wants to either fully annex them or let them go because neither would be convenient to the 50 states and the political parties that run them. Instead, the status quo of modern colonial indeterminacy is what works best for the most potent political and economic groups in the US mainland. WouldThis book is about much more than that though. It's also a history of how and why the United States got to control so much of what happens around the world without creating additional formal colonies like the "territories" that exist in this legal limbo. Part of its goal is to show how precisely how US imperialism has been made to be more cost-effective and also more invisible.Read Immerwhar's book, and don't listen to the apologists of US imperialism which is still an active force that contradicts the US' professed values and that needs to be actively dismantled. Their attempts at discrediting this important reflect a denialism of the US' imperial realities that has endured throughout the history that this book summarizes."How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States" is a great starting point for making the US public aware of the US' contradictions as an "empire of liberty" (a phrase once used by Thomas Jefferson to describe the US as it expanded westward beyond the original 13 colonies). It is also a necessary update to other books on this topic that are already out there, and it is likely to hold the reader's attention more given its crafty narrative prose and structure