It won a war and gave up territory. The Philippines, its largest colony, got independence. The occupations wrapped up speedily, and only one—of a set of lightly populated islands in Micronesia—led to annexation. Other territories, though they weren’t granted independence, received new statuses. Puerto Rico became a “commonwealth,” which ostensibly replaced a coercive relationship with a consenting one. Hawai‘i and Alaska, after some delay, became states, overcoming decades of racist determination to keep them out of the union.
