How to Hide an Empire

The Bahamas took a distinctly different course in relationship to the history of money-making than much of the region. African Americans who fought for the British in the Revolutionary War settled there to be free. Many of them came from the Low Country. In 1818, Great Britain declared that all enslaved Africans who set foot in the Bahamas would be

American power should be used to protect and spread American principles. At the root of this position is the view that the United States has an obligation to itself and the world to advocate and defend the moral principles on which it was founded, and the belief that behaving like any other country and defending its economic and strategic interests

An escalating sequence of judicial and legislative challenges to polygamy ensued, culminating in the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887, which disincorporated the LDS Church and forfeited to the federal government all church property worth more than $50,000.

The concentration of political and economic power among high-status, politically conservative, and white-skinned Cuban Americans and others of Latin American origin was a factor in what transpired. These were the days of an intense national backlash against the civil rights movement. But it was also in the midst of Cold War politics. The US gave pr