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

by Daniel Immerwahr

These places are part of the United States, right? I thought. Why haven’t I been thinking of them as part of its history?

A ten-peso note. Throughout the territories, colonized subjects were obliged to use bills with the faces of U.S. leaders on them. Extraordinarily, this Philippine bill was the basis for the design of the familiar U.S. dollar, not the other way around.

by the end of 1945 the Greater United States included some 135 million people living outside the mainland.

It’s hard to know how many Indians inhabited North America before Europeans arrived. Five million for the area now covered by the contiguous United States, calculated by the anthropologist Russell Thornton, is a medium estimate, though other researchers have suggested numbers from 720,000 to 15 million.

population was closer to half a million, having endured what may have been a 90 percent decline.

But by doubling down on Europeanization, the Cherokees were calling the government’s bluff. They were “civilized” by every rule of white society. So shouldn’t their land claims be respected?

Yet in the Philippines the question of loyalty was posed in a much more acute way, as Japan had actually conquered the territory. Would the Japanese in the Philippines side with Japan or the United States? Nearly unanimously, they chose Japan. The former internees, bearing guns provided by the Japanese army, took swift and brutal revenge on those who had locked them up.