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

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Immerwahr knows that the material he presents is serious, laden with exploitation and violence, but he also knows how to tell a story, highlighting the often absurd space that opened up between expansionist ambitions and ingenuous self-regard . Enlightenment philosophes regarded him as man in his natural state, Romantics as a refugee from civilization. You learn how locals were overtly kept out of social clubs and kept from business and governing through less obvious means and how they were victims of a war between their American and later Japanese occupiers. That is why Lincoln, West Dakota, Deseret, Cimarron, and Montezuma—all of which sought admission to the union—did not become states. I suspect this little fact might come as something of a surprise most of the 95% of the world that are not citizens of the US.

However, what is more appalling is that this actual history of the United States is nowhere taught in its schools. The most dramatic of these is probably al-Qaeda’s “planes operation” in 2001, better known stateside as 9/11.When, for example, the US military prevailed in the Mexican-American War, in 1848, many in Congress wanted to annex all of Mexico. Immerwahr has said that the problem is not geographical, but if a study he cites that indicates that the people who are under thirty are less likely than older respondents to know that Puerto Ricans are American citizens is truly representative, the decline of map reading skills may well be associated with the rise of GPS devices and smart phones, coupled with the tendency to see distances in term of the time it takes to get somewhere rather than miles, may be a strong contributor to the problem.

A grandson of Congregationalist missionaries, Sanford Dole (also a relative of the pineapple baron-to-be, James Dole) became the first president of the territory.

Part of its goal is to show how precisely how US imperialism has been made to be more cost-effective and also more invisible. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.