If you imagine America as fifty states, historian Daniel Immerwahr is about to change that. In his highly praised second book, “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States,” Immerwahr provides an appropriate supplement to the everyday American’s colloquial knowledge of the US’ behavior overseas. Immerwahr is an associate professor of history at Northwestern University where he specializes in United States history of the twentieth-century. “How to Hide an Empire” takes the widespread lack of knowledge about America’s history of expansion, and swiftly fills that void. It was listed as one of the best books of 2019 by NPR, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Times.
Immerwahr’s focus is the lacking understanding most Americans have of U.S. territory. Much of this understanding derives from maps, a theme of the book. Early on, Immerwahr draws into question the validity, or even the integrity, of the map of the United States we are all used to seeing. Immerwahr believes this map — and our collective familiarity with it — is a fallacy of sorts, a decided misrepresentation. This theory is contextualized, like most of the book, with a thorough historical grounding; beginning just before 1900, it became commonplace for maps of “The Greater United States” to depict not only the mainland, Alaska, and Hawaii, but also Guam, Wake, American Samoa, the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico. Not only is this a solid cartographical factoid, but it works to call into question another of Immerwahr’s themes, the question of what is America, and more personally, who is American? The first part of the book, “The Colonial Empire,” might make these questions seem chronologically distant and therefore obsolete. But in the second half, “The Pointillist Empire,” Immerwahr proves that these questions are far more relevant than most of us would think.
Immerwahr explains how the United States actually gave up land after World War II, a surprising move given the brutal tactics of expansion they had previously demonstrated. This downsizing foreshadowed the intense changes of the late twentieth century: globalization. Immerwahr’s explanation of the phenomenon of globalization speaks to the impressive skill and grace with which he writes about history. For instance, Immerwahr premises the complex nature of the United States’ current global influence with historical anecdotes from the post-World War II era, before launching into describing things we all see and know to be true in our world today. He is able to tactfully ease us into understanding a very complicated reality in which we all live and participate.
“How to Hide an Empire” is a showcase of how to tell a factual story, of how to weave a narrative into the tapestry of world history. “How to Hide an Empire” carries great meaning, but not by hiding behind long words or complicated statistics.
Immerwahr wrote a seminal book. It feels as though “How to Hide an Empire” has immediately become not only a go-to text about the American empire, but also one of the best recent nonfiction texts — a perfect combination of research, relevance and readability.