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Howland Island was of special interest, as it was to be a stop in the aviator Amelia Earhart’s round-the-world journey (she died en route to it). But to tame it, the Hawaiians would have to deal with an out-of-control rat population—the same rats that had tormented the island’s guano miners some eighty years earlier. The settlers used red quill pow

The bill passed, and speculators scrambled to stake their claims. It was another land rush, this time in the Pacific and the Caribbean. The first batch of islands was added to the United States in 1857. By 1863, the government had annexed fifty-nine islands. By the time the last claim was filed, in 1902, the United States’ oceanic empire encompasse

After nearly five years he had returned from one of the great scientific odysseys of all time. It was a journey that would capture the imagination of the age, but that has been strangely forgotten in our own time.

Hunt was a Spanish-American War veteran and former lieutenant governor of Bontoc, where he had become a trusted friend of the Igorrotes. The United States took control of the Philippines from Spain as part of the terms of the 1898 Treaty of Paris ending the war between the two nations. The U.S. also received stewardship of Puerto Rico and Guam and