How to Hide an Empire

Manuel Quezon, the president of the Philippine Senate and the indispensable power broker in the colony. Quezon was a master politician, adept at playing all sides at once. He had served on Aguinaldo’s staff (at age twenty) during the war, but after Aguinaldo’s surrender, he’d spied for the colonial government and helped bring the holdouts to heel.

The Japanese Gojira was a protest film, hammering away at the dangers of the U.S. testing in the Pacific. The English-language Godzilla, by contrast, was just another monster flick.

Annexing territory was a way to secure both sea routes and the vital tropical materials that one could reach by them.

Before Sony, radios, tape recorders, and record players were furniture. They were large and expensive, and manufacturers competed to offer the purest sound—“hi-fidelity” was the buzzword. Sony changed that. Transistors allowed for tiny, cheap, battery-powered radios, which meant that music could be consumed by an individual rather than a household.

Alaska sent to the Senate Ernest Gruening, who had made a decades-long career of opposing racism and imperialism. In 1964 Gruening achieved national fame as one of only two congressmen—out of 506 voting—to oppose the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that led to the direct U.S. entry into the Vietnam War.

This was the new way. As the United States loosened its grip on large colonies, it grabbed bases and small islands more tightly. In the Philippines, it refused to leave entirely after independence. Instead, it insisted, as the price of reconstruction aid to the Philippines, on receiving ninety-nine-year leases on select base sites. It was the same

MacArthur understood the Philippines to be “an integral part of the United States,” as deserving of defense as New York. But he had to admit by 1940 that the military forces stationed there were “entirely inadequate for purposes of foreign defense and are little more than token symbols of the sovereignty of the United States.” In May 1941, a very f

Hawai‘i, well-known for its mixing of Native, Asian, and European strains, seemed particularly threatening. “We do not want those people to help govern the country,” a Massachusetts newspaper put it baldly. “When future issues arise in the United States Senate, we do not want a situation where vital decisions may depend upon two half-breed senators

The logo-map silhouette accurately captured the borders of the United States for only three years. Because in 1857, not long after the Gadsden Purchase was ratified (1854), the United States began annexing small islands throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific. By the end of the century, it would claim almost a hundred of them. The islands had no i