Daniel Immerwahr says studying the history of the Greater United States opens our eyes to how “racism has shaped the actual country itself. The legal borders of the country, but also the borders of the heart.”
Bridey Heing | Longreads | March 2019 | 13 minutes (3,528 words)
What do we think of when we think about the United States and the country’s history? This seemingly simple question rests at the heart of Northwestern University Professor Daniel Immerwahr’s new book, How To Hide An Empire. Immerwahr posits that, for the vast majority of people living in the contiguous United States, our understanding of our own country is fundamentally flawed. This is for one central reason: We omit the millions of people and large territorial holdings outside of the mainland that have, since the founding of the country, also had a claim to the flag.
In his book, Immerwahr traces US expansion from the days of Daniel Boone to our modern network of military bases, showing how the United States has always and in a variety of ways been an empire. As early as the 1830s, the United States was taking control of uninhabited islands; by 1898, the United States was having public debates about the merits of imperial power; by the end of World War II, the United States held jurisdiction over more people overseas — 135 million — than on the mainland — 132 million. While the exact overseas holdings and the standing of territories have shifted with time, what has not changed is the troubling way the mainland has ignored, obscured, or dismissed the rights of, atrocities committed against, and the humanity of the people living in these territories. When we see US history through the lens of these territories and peoples, the story looks markedly and often upsettingly different from what many people are told.
I spoke to Immerwahr recently to learn more about the shifts in how the mainland has thought about the greater United States, the widespread and at times deliberate ignorance that continues to obscure the US empire, and how climate change could force a crisis in the United States’ relationship with its overseas holdings.
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How did this book come about?
The initial impetus was a research trip I’d taken to Manila. I’d known the Philippines had been a colony of the United States, but somehow being in the city made it click in a new way for me. It was like the difference between reading the lyrics and hearing the music. I saw streets named after US cities, states, presidents, and colleges, and I would take a transit system called JEEPNEY, which was originally based on US surplus army jeeps. I’d spend time in the archives at Ateneo de Manila University, where I’d see Filipino students walking around, speaking English with what sounded to my ears like barely an accent.
When I got back to California, which is where I was living, I started thinking a little differently about US history. I’m trained as a US historian and I’d been teaching survey classes, and I realized that when I’d been talking about the United States, I hadn’t been including the Philippines as part of the story. So I started poking around and asking what would US history look like, what would the Progressive era, what would the Depression look like, what would World War II look like if when I taught that or told that story, I was talking about the whole United States. What happens if you include the territories of Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, up to what happens if you include the hundreds of military bases the US has laid claim to? Ultimately I had the idea that I should write a history of the United States, but not just the mainland; I’d mean the entire area where the flag flies.
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