How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States

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Dixon wrote his own work on this theme, a novel entitled The Clansman, which was quickly adapted into a stage play.

We know America 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.

These developments, reliance on US technology and leftover bases across the world allowed the USA to assert influence and power without needing direct territorial control (279). By focusing on the processes by which Americans acquired, controlled, and were affected by territory, Daniel Immerwahr shows that the United States was not just another “empire,” but was a highly distinctive one the dimensions of which have been largely ignored. Not only does the image we have of the US in our minds only really include the mainland ‘from sea to shining sea’ (even if those seas are oceans), we also know that it should probably include Hawaii and Alaska too, as well as Puerto Rico, and American Samoa, and… which is the point of this book, if you see what I mean.

But what about the actual territories—the islands, atolls, and archipelagos—this country has governed and inhabited? With the background of the first 2/3 of the book Immerwahr concludes with an interpretive overview which he documents with more historical facts. It is very clear and makes connections to the developments of science, technology and communications that fundamentally changed both the nature of war while also changing the nature of ‘empire’ building throughout the twentieth century.In the 1940’s big landowners were paid and citizens removed from Vieques Island for military purposes. 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. His fears were confirmed in the 1790s, when backcountry men in Pennsylvania refused to pay a federal tax on alcohol and threatened armed secession.