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

by Daniel Immerwahr

it wasn’t the whites who had been pushed off the land, but the Osages. Pa’s neighbors, and perhaps Pa himself, 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?”

That’s one reason why it’s hard to remember the U.S. founders’ hesitations about westward expansion. Surely, we think, they must have seen how stunted, how unfinished their little stub of a country was. There’s something satisfying about following the story to its end, like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. The Louisiana Purchase, click, East and West Florida, click click, Texas, click, Oregon, click, the war with Mexico, click, and the Gadsden Purchase, a sliver of land on the Mexican border that filled out the familiar logo-map profile of the United States. Click. Picture complete, destiny manifested.

In a delicious historical irony, the man who saved the world from starvation was also the father of weapons of mass destruction.

Voters delighted in imagining their leaders as cider-swilling men of the people, dwelling in rude houses, swinging axes, and fighting bears on the frontier. Candidates were only too happy to oblige, hyping their backcountry roots in their stump speeches. It was largely show, though. Powerful men usually come from powerful places.