Reflection on How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

               Here’s a cool book that covers all the places that have bee “kind-of” in the United States throughout history. They include territories that later became states, like Illinois, Oklahoma, Alaska, and Hawaii, those that became independent countries, like the Philippines, and those that became something else, like Puerto Rico. It also talks about US military bases abroad, from Saudi Arabia to Japan.

               After the Louisiana Purchase, the next most important legal maneuver of the United States to add territory was the Guano Islands Act, which gave Americans the ability to claim any island that had guano on it, a type of bird poop very good for fertilizing farms. It created a legal framework to bring new land into the US domain without making it a state and also had strategic benefits years later, as those islands would become ideal for air bases. However, the United States’ decision to become an empire came late. It wasn’t fully enacted until the Spanish-American War at the end of the 18^th century, when colonialism was already in decline, and soon the colonies the US took would be repudiated, not in any legal way, but in the minds of American citizens, who refused to see their country as a colonial oppressor.

               I’m not really feeling like writing this all out, but despite record numbers of men volunteering for the US Army from the territories, places like Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico were exploited and the people were treated like second-class citizens, which they literally are in Puerto Rico to this day. This book is also a good look at the history of American foreign policy and recommendable to those interested in that sort of thing.