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At the turn of the twentieth century, when many were acquired (Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, American Samoa, Hawai‘i, Wake), their status was clear. They were, as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson unabashedly called them, colonies. Yet that spirit of forthright imperialism didn’t last.
What getting the Greater United States in view reveals is that race has been even more central to U.S. history than is usually supposed. It hasn’t just been about black and white, but about Filipino, Hawaiian, Samoan, and Chamoru (from Guam), too, among other identities. Race has not only shaped lives, it’s shaped the country itself—where the borders went, who has counted as “American.” Once you look beyond the logo map, you see a whole new set of struggles over what it means to inhabit the United States.
black people in the United States looked more like colonized subjects than like citizens.
Since 1945, U.S. armed forces have been deployed abroad for conflicts or potential conflicts 211 times in 67 countries. Call it peacekeeping if you want, or call it imperialism. But clearly this is not a country that has kept its hands to itself.
They replaced colonization with globalization.
At various times, the inhabitants of the U.S. Empire have been shot, shelled, starved, interned, dispossessed, tortured, and experimented on. What they haven’t been, by and large, is seen.
violently expansive empire of settlers, feeding on land and displacing everything in its path.
What is not in dispute is this: European contact triggered a profound demographic crisis. Old World diseases such as smallpox, typhus, and measles burned through the land like firestorms, moving farther and faster than the Europeans themselves.
The Supreme Court declared Georgia’s actions unconstitutional. But high-court rulings meant little in the face of the squatter onslaught. Cherokee landowners watched with alarm as Georgia divided the Cherokee Nation into parcels and started distributing it to whites by lottery. In 1835 John Ross returned home to find a white man living in his house—Ross had to abandon his large estate for a one-room log cabin. Later that year, he was arrested on the trumped-up charge of inciting a slave rebellion. Other Cherokees faced similar harassment.
The incarcerated Cherokees were then forcibly relocated to present-day Oklahoma. The Cherokees called this journey Nunna daul Isunyi, the “trail where we cried.” The Trail of Tears, as it is known in English,
For the first few decades of the country’s history, this continental-scale apartheid had remained informal and incomplete.
had driven them out by stealing their food, killing their livestock, burning their houses, robbing their graves, and murdering them outright. “The question will suggest itself,” wrote an aghast federal agent who witnessed it all: “Which of these people are the savages?”
“It is beyond the power of words to express the character of such men—dead to all human feeling and knowing no law.”
the United States began annexing small islands throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific. By the end of the century, it would claim almost a hundred of them. The islands had no indigenous populations and, at the time, no strategic value.
Peruvian guano lords, unable to recruit their compatriots, relied mainly on Chinese laborers, whom they lured onto eastbound ships with false promises or sometimes simply kidnapped
Such necessities as shirts, shoes, mattresses, and pillows could be got only from the company store at wildly inflated prices. Workers who fell ill were fined.
In a single stroke, Haber had opened the floodgates for the virtually unlimited growth of human life.
In a delicious historical irony, the man who saved the world from starvation was also the father of weapons of mass destruction.
After the war, Fritz continued his work, and his institute developed a promising insecticide called Zyklon A. In slightly modified form, under the name Zyklon B, it would be deployed on Fritz and Clara’s fellow Jews, though
There are two ways to respond to rebellion: with reforms or force.
The United States was, in other words, a latecomer, supplying a burst of force at the end of a long, bloody conflict that had already nearly destroyed the Spanish Empire.
As the Spanish governor-general explained, he was “willing to surrender to white people but never to Niggers.”
But it could occupy it, placing the country under military control until a suitable government could be installed—a government suitable to Washington, that is.
economics, geostrategy, and the prevailing racial ideologies of the late nineteenth century.
The United States annexed the thinly populated northern part of Mexico (including present-day California, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona)
Exactly how many Alaska Natives there were is hard to say. The U.S. census did not count them. This was the flip side to the careful annexations, another way to control who was part of the country and who wasn’t. From the start, the census had declined to count most indigenous people. Thus, for more than a century, a government that
Excluding Natives from the census was symbolically significant, sustaining the fantasy that settlers were taming an uninhabited wilderness.
acquire Hawai‘i, an island kingdom whose economy U.S. planters had gradually taken control of. The usual reluctance to incorporate nonwhite peoples
Manifest Destiny, the next outlet for the Daniel Boones of the country. “God has given us this Pacific empire for civilization,” said Senator Albert Beveridge. “A hundred wildernesses are to be subdued.
they were subjects, not citizens.
Those drastic measures were by now standard fare: interrupting trade, burning crops, resettling civilians, and conducting “hikes” against guerrillas. Yet here, the civilians resisted. A group of five hundred townspeople in Balangiga
On July 4, 1902, Roosevelt proclaimed the Philippine War over. If De Bevoise’s calculations are right, it had claimed more lives than the Civil War.
Massacres like this weren’t unknown in the United States. Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Bloody Island—the Indian wars had painted the West red. Yet Bud Dajo dwarfed them all. “We
the Philippines, Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and Guam went one way; Cuba went another.
colonies were “no longer to be selfishly exploited” and that “the familiar rights and privileges” of citizens should be extended to territorial inhabitants.
That the world’s richest country should at the same time be so squalid was hard to countenance.
They functioned as laboratories, spaces for bold experimentation where ideas could be tried with practically no resistance, oversight, or consequences.
a place to try out ideas while facing few consequences.
I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off 8 and transplanting cancer into several more. The latter has not resulted in any fatalities so far. The matter of consideration for the patients’ welfare plays no role here—in fact, all physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of the unfortunate subjects. Do let me know if you hear any more news.
“Where tyranny is law, revolution is order,” Albizu declared.
During the war, the military tested its gases and gear on more than sixty thousand of its own men.
On the mainland, however, he’s been remembered differently: as a pioneer of chemotherapy.
It was an organization, in other words, concerned not with Puerto Rico, Hawai‘i, or the Philippines, but with Cuba, Haiti, and Mexico.
American Birth Control League, the organization that would become Planned Parenthood.
The colonies had their uses: as naval bases and zones of experimentation for men such as Daniel Burnham and Cornelius Rhoads. But colonial products weren’t integral to the U.S. economy.
Rather than absorbing the Philippines’ trade and migrants and defending it against Japan, the new thinking went, why not just get rid of it?
select group of industrial and agricultural interests,”
Trials were often held on the day of arrest and lasted minutes.
They were tried for failing to show up to work, for breaking curfew, and for committing traffic violations, mainly. Perhaps a few, I like to imagine, were charged with making the aforementioned disrespectful gesture to a member of the armed forces at a place of amusement.
Japanese internment during World War II is one of the most regretted episodes in U.S. history. In May 1942 some 112,000 residents of western states, some Japanese
