The second act takes place off the continent, and it’s striking how quickly it begins. Just three years after filling out the shape of the logo map, the United States started annexing new territory overseas. First it claimed dozens of uninhabited islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Then Alaska in 1867. From 1898 to 1900 it absorbed the bulk of Spain’s overseas empire (the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam) and annexed the non-Spanish lands of Hawai‘i, Wake Island, and American Samoa. In 1917 it bought the U.S. Virgin Islands. By the Second World War, the territories made up nearly a
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