The anecdote encapsulates Immerwahr’s aim, which is to restore the US territories-totaling, in the mid-1940s, about an eighth of the population and a fifth of the land mass of the so-called greater United States-to their proper place in history and consciousness. All this time, Immerwahr wryly concludes, he “thought he was invading a foreign country.” When he asks, “How’d ya learn American?” the answer-all schools in the US-colonized Philippines teach in English-doesn’t help much, since it seems that no one bothered to tell the soldier he’s serving on US soil. Handing out candy and cigarettes, the man, a GI, patiently enunciates his words, before finding, astonished, that the kid speaks perfect English. An adult and a child encounter each other on the streets of Manila near the end of World War II. (Germany was “a hideous, mud-colored brown.”) Take, by contrast, the following tidbit from the Northwestern University historian Daniel Immerwahr’s fascinating new book, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $35).

How might an imperial power see itself? In Hons and Rebels, Jessica Mitford recalls the geography lessons she and her sisters received in the 1920s from their formidable matriarch, known as Muv: “See, England and all our Empire possessions are a lovely pink on the map,” she would trill. Courtesy Farrar, Straus and Giroux/The Library of Congress Philippine Islands ten-peso silver certificate, 1903, from How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Book how to hide an empire