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

Much more hilarious, however, is the plot of this play they're performing. Naturally, the kids are determined to poke around and find out the truth of the matter. There is a rumor that the play was performed seventy years ago, but the boy playing the Phantom disappeared without a trace and the play is supposedly cursed now. where the hell do they go to middle school?), and some mysterious agent is trying to sabotage them. The plot of the actual book isn't all that strange the kids are putting on a play entitled The Phantom at their middle school (dude, these kids did Guys and Dolls last year, too. This book's in the grand tradition of horror Phantoms starting with Lon Chaney's in 1925, and uses a lot of the same tropes and ideas, just rendered down for a younger audience. This series hits pretty much every major horror archetype out there, so it's no surprise that a version based on the Phantom story came along. Obviously, my adult wussiness when it comes to horror is not a new phenomenon these, and many other patently ridiculous horror stories for kids, scared the bejeezus out of me, even when their premises were beyond laughable (there was one where a sponge from under the kitchen sink was possessed and evil. My ten-year-old self found it absolutely terrifying, and often restricted herself to only reading one book at a time so as to keep from overloading herself with too much panic to handle.

Abundance a novel of marie antoinette