While the west was being settled, the US was claiming 94 islands for their guano (fertilizer) deposits. Immerwahr poses that they became incorporated as states when white settlers came to predominate. The book begins with the westward expansion into “territories” and how they were managed like colonies.

Daniel Immerwahr brings this all into the light and explains why this “hidden” material is relevant for today. How many high school teachers in the US know how Guantanamo Bay came to be US territory? How many know that the Philippines was managed as a colony for 47 years? While I expect most know that Puerto Ricans are US citizens (even if they didn’t before Hurricane Maria) do they know that (or more importantly why) the independence movement activists shot at President Truman and later shot into the House of Representatives wounding 5 congressmen in 1954. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of space. In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century's most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. But what about the actual territories-the islands, atolls, and archipelagos-this country has governed and inhabited? And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an 'empire,' exercising power around the world. We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. A pathbreaking history of the United States' overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire

How to hide an empire daniel immerwahr