Adapted from Google Books:
For a country that has always denied imperial ambitions; the United States owns a lot of overseas territory. America prides itself on being a champion of sovereignty and independence. We know it has spread its money; language and culture across the world, but we still think of it as a contained territory; framed by Canada above; Mexico below; and oceans either side.
According to Immerwahr, nothing could be further from the truth. How to Hide an Empire tells the story of the persistently invisible United States outside the United States - from nineteenth-century conquests like Alaska; Hawai`i; the Philippines and Puerto Rico; to the catalog of islands, archipelagos and military bases dotted around the globe, over which the Stars and Stripes has flown or continues to fly, regardless of the sentiments of the native inhabitants. Although most are thousands of miles from the mainland, all are central to its history.
But the populations of these territories, despite being subject to America's governance, cannot vote and have no voice in that governance. Although they have often fought America's wars; they do not enjoy the rights and benefits of full citizens. Most Americans are not even aware of their existence.
Yet when their experiences are revealed, these forgotten episodes cast a revealing new light not just on America's past but America's present. The birth control pill, chemotherapy, plastic, Godzilla, the Beatles, the very name America itself - you can't understand the histories of any of these without taking into account the history of America's territorial empire. 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.
Daniel Immerwahr is an Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University. He is also the author of Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development, which won the Organization of American Historians' Merle Curti Intellectual History Award.
In her review for the New York Times, Jennifer Szalai comments:
"It’s a testament to Immerwahr’s considerable storytelling skills that I found myself riveted by his sections on Herbert Hoover’s quest for standardized screw threads, wondering what might happen next. But beyond its collection of anecdotes and arcana, this humane book offers something bigger and more profound. “How to Hide an Empire” nimbly combines breadth and sweep with fine-grained attention to detail. The result is a provocative and absorbing history of the United States — “not as it appears in its fantasies, but as it actually is.”
Click HERE to read the full review from the New York Times
Click HERE to read the review from the Columbia University Magazine.
Click HERE to read the review from the Wall Street Journal.
Click HERE to read the review from the Asian Review of Books.
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