ECHOES OF EMPIRE

Daniel Immerwahr, associate professor of history at Northwestern University, is author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019). His first book, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development, won the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti Award.

Often, when we talk about “American empire,” we talk about imperialism, from Manifest Destiny to military interventions in the Middle East. When I say the history of the United States is one of empire, I’m referring not to imperialism but to territory, not to the character of the country but to