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. How to Hide an Empire takes you on a whirlwind tour of the islands and territories the U.S. has governed from the 19th century on. It draws you in with smartly weaved, gripping stories and constructs an impressively expansive tale of America’s global conquests. Manifest destiny takes on a whole new meaning. Simmering beneath all these stories is a powerful throughline: As classic colonialism was being fazed out in the 20th century, a new, more covert form of empire-building set in – with the U.S. at the forefront. It’s not a stretch to say that this book will make you think about American history in a new way." —Ramtin Arablouei, NPR Iber claims that Puerto Rico got civilian rule after World War Two; in fact several pre-1945 governors were civilians and the last one who came from the military left office in 1939. He also implies that Puerto Rico was not a colony by the 1960s; in fact, being labeled a Commonwealth ( Estado Libre Asociado) since 1952 has not ended Puerto Rico’s non-incorporated territory status. The settlers' relentless push westward, transforming from squatters to pioneers, reshaped the nation. But it also turned it into a violent empire that displaced Native peoples. Boone's journey and that of his followers embodied the idea of "manifest destiny," claiming a divine mission to overspread the continent. The chapter explores how the dynamic interplay between population growth, westward migration, and territorial governance shaped the United States into a rapidly expanding empire. Chapter 2: Indian Country What Happens: In effect,” wrote James Monroe, who drafted the ordinance, it was “a colonial government similar to that which prevail’d in these States previous to the revolution.” Jefferson conceded that the first stage resembled a “despotic oligarchy.”

In a lot of ways, early expansion into the guano islands and into populated areas reads as very piecemeal and messy. Like the mainland identified a need and very thoughtlessly found ways to meet those needs. How would you describe that dynamic during the 1800s, and how did it evolve through WWII when we saw a more planned expansion?What was this non-state territory? The Constitution was notably close-lipped, discussing the matter only in a single sentence. It granted Congress the power “to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States.” Thus the founding document, which went into extravagant detail about amendments, elections, and the division of power, left wide open the question of how much of the land was to be governed. The government accepted control of its first territory in 1784, when Virginia gave up its claims to a large swath of land north of the Ohio River. This cession came not two months before the United States formally received its independence when Britain ratified the Treaty of Paris. This meant that, from day one, the United States of America was more than just a union of states. It was an amalgam of states and territory. Ultimately Kramer wants historians of U.S. empire—both those rooted in Caribbean, Latin American, Pacific island or Asian history and those rooted in varieties of U.S. history—to practice post-nationalist transnationalism, in which the questions asked and concepts employed come from a community of inquiry that is truly global. To study the non-incorporated territory end of the “spectrum of sovereignties” within the practices of U.S. empire in this way means several things. First, it means paying close attention to how historians and legal scholars across unequally powerful sectors of the academy have conceptualized the relation of non-incorporation between the United States as a nation state/imperial metropole and those places that became non-incorporated territories, and what lines of inquiry they have pursued. It means understanding the histories of places that became non-incorporated territories before U.S. invasion, not least to better understand the reactions of all social sectors and political actors to non-incorporation, including non-elites. It means seeing formal legal/constitutional colonization rooted in the power of the metropolitan state, a state that also facilitates flows of U.S. capital and labor around the world, as well as in and out of the metropole, by military means if necessary. And it means analyzing the U.S. imperial nation-state’s practices of non-incorporation in comparative perspective without any assumptions of U.S. exceptionalism. Finally, it means understanding non-incorporated territories as embedded in their own geographic regions, connected to their neighbors as well as the imperial metropole, and as part of those regions’ historiographies. A pathbreaking history of the United States’ overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire

It’s going to be a time of crisis, and the reason is that climate change is posing serious threats to the US territories. i126339983 |b1230003388603 |dtlwnf |g- |m |h7 |x2 |t1 |i3 |j7 |k190910 |n09-10-2023 20:22 |o- |a973 |rIMMERWAHRThe 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. One of the central ideas of the book isn’t just that this is history we should know, but history that fundamentally shifts the way we think about our country. What do those shifts add to the our understanding of our own history? i12797636x |b1110011800360 |dmrlat |g- |m |h17 |x2 |t1 |i9 |j300 |k191014 |n08-24-2023 19:40 |o- |a973 Imm

The book is structured into two main sections. The first, titled "The Colonial Empire," delves into the history of the United States from colonial times up to World War II. The second, "The Pointillist Empire," explores American history from 1945 to the present day. Louisianians protested their disenfranchisement. “Do political axioms on the Atlantic become problems when transferred to the shores of the Mississippi?” they asked on a trip to the capital. Jefferson shrugged his shoulders and did nothing. The book opens as Immerwahr introduces the concept of the "logo map" of the United States—a familiar representation of the mainland U.S. that excludes the country's imperial possessions. He argues that this conventional map is symbolic and fails to account for the numerous overseas territories and military bases that have significantly influenced America's economic and political power around the world. Lara Putnam, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (UNC 2013).

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Consistently both startling and absorbing . . . Immerwahr vividly retells the early formation of the [United States], the consolidation of its overseas territory, and the postwar perfection of its 'pointillist' global empire, which extends influence through a vast constellation of tiny footprints." — Harper's Paul A. Kramer, “How Not to Write the History of U.S. Empire,” Diplomatic History 42: 5 (2018): 911-31. Ernesto Bassi, An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World (Duke 2016) ; Pablo Sierra Silva, Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico: Puebla de los Ángeles, 1531-1706 (Cambridge 2019) ; Rebecca Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2005). i124675657 |b1130003762386 |dpc |g- |m231128 |h9 |x0 |t2 |i3 |j2 |k190224 |n07-12-2023 20:29 |o- |a973 |rI33 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.