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

Product Information

HTH and the Bernath Lecture thus hide non-incorporation by insufficiently defining it, by grouping incorporated territories, non-incorporated territories and leased military areas together, by including that homogenized group as part of the nation and its history via the “Greater United States” concept, and by almost excluding post-World War Two histories of the remaining non-incorporated territories.

Then you see a set of questions about what this means for the country. Once they have agreed to [controlling the guano islands], legislators and Supreme Court justices then have to contemplate what this means for the United States, which in an ad hoc way has already expanded overseas. What does it mean for it to be the kind of place that does that, or is it indeed the kind of place that does that? What makes this first step easy is that the guano islands are uninhabited, so when Congress is debating whether or not the US should have a blanket law saying that anyone who sees an uninhabited guano island can annex it for the country, the key issue in that debate is that this can only happen for uninhabited islands. So it’s a way for the US to ease itself into the logic of empire. But legally those guano islands laid the foundation for a much larger empire, and an empire that is populated not just with some people but with tens of millions of people. Territorial policy was set, instead, by a series of laws, most famously the Jefferson-inspired Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which covered a large part of the present-day Midwest (similar laws covered other regions). The Northwest Ordinance has become part of the national mythology, celebrated in textbooks for its remarkable offer of statehood on “an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever.” The territories merely had to cross a series of population thresholds: five thousand free men, and they could have a legislature; sixty thousand free inhabitants (or sooner, if Congress allowed), and they could be states. The chapter showcases the disillusionment of Puerto Rican nationalists. But it also highlights a main source of their disillusionment: Wilson’s hypocritical pursuit of international freedom while failing to aid independence movements across the world. Immerwahr originates from a Jewish family and is the great-grandson of a cousin of Clara Immerwahr, pioneering chemist and first wife of Fritz Haber. [1] He completed an undergraduate degree at Columbia University, and a second undergraduate degree at King's College, Cambridge, where he was a Marshall Scholar, [2] and a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. Iber defended HTH from Kramer’s critique immediately upon its publication, on the grounds that the book is aimed at a popular audience that does not know existing historiographies of Puerto Rico and other formal U.S. colonies, a point that Conroy-Krutz has echoed. [3] But Iber agrees with what he takes to be Kramer’s view that by defining U.S. empire narrowly as formal territorial empire, HTH left out both economic and military aspects of U.S. informal empire. Like Westad, Iber wants more added. He states early on that Puerto Rico’s colonial status is “widely recognized if not deeply considered,” and then proceeds to give it minimal, factually incorrect consideration, despite his Latin Americanist graduate training. [4]Michael, you write that this is a “condescending” approach to readers, one that “looks down on them from on high, not believing those readers can handle the actual complexities of the stories at hand.” I don’t see it that way. I think it is a reasonable accommodation, designed to ease the entry of a non-initiated reader into a world of important ideas. Frankly, I wish we wrote with more openness to non-experts in our monographs. Burnham’s White City was astonishing. But the impressive thing wasn’t any single building. Rather, it was all the buildings together—more than two hundred of them—designed in a single style, rendered in a single color, and laid out according to a master plan. Yet, oddly, Boone saw almost none of this. Though celebrated abroad, he wasn’t much revered at home during his lifetime. He died at the old age of eighty-five in 1820. That was the same decade Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died, both, as it happened by near-inconceivable coincidence, on the same day—the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The country went understandably crazy when Jefferson and Adams died. “Had the horses and the chariot of fire descended to take up the patriarchs,” a New York paper wrote, “it might have been more wonderful, but not more glorious.” What you do you think the future of this relationship looks like, between the United States and these territories?

i12458374x |b1060006803225 |deve |g- |m |h10 |x3 |t0 |i2 |j70 |k190220 |n08-30-2022 21:14 |o- |a973 |rIMMThe National Guano Act of 1856 authorized citizens of the United States to take possession of and exploit unclaimed islands, reefs, and atolls containing guano deposits. The islands had to be uninhabited and not within the jurisdiction of another government. The act specifically referred to such islands as possessions of the United States. Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, “The Historiography of Luisa Capetillo,” in Luisa Capetillo, A Nation of Women: An Early Feminist Speaks Out/Mi opinion: sobre las libertades, derechos, y deberes de la mujer, ed. Félix V. Matos Rodríguez FVMR (Arte Público, 2004). My book manuscript is titled “Fight for an Impossible Progress: Workers, New Deal Labor Reform, and Populism in Puerto Rico, 1937-1941.” My work on U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico and on colonialism and decolonization in the Caribbean more broadly includes: “Birth of the U.S. Colonial Minimum Wage: The Struggle over the Fair Labor Standards Act in Puerto Rico, 1938-1941,” Journal of American History 104:3 (December 2017), 656-680; “Towards Decolonization: Impulses, Processes, and Consequences,” 475-489 in Stephan Palmié and Francisco Scarano, eds., The Caribbean: An Illustrated History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); From Colony to Nation: Women Activists and the Gendering of Politics in Belize, 1912-1982 (Lincoln: Nebraska, 2007); “Citizens vs. Clients: Workingwomen and Colonial Reform in Puerto Rico and Belize, 1932-1945,” Journal of Latin American Studies 35:2 (May 2003): 279-310. i12469858x |b1160002872283 |dvlnf |g- |m |h1 |x0 |t0 |i3 |j70 |k190227 |n09-12-2020 16:32 |o- |a973 |rIMM