Daniel Immerwahr's How to Hide an Empire, recently published to much fanfare, takes as its starting point what Immerwahr calls a “conceptual filing error.” Born from his surprise at visiting the Philippines and encountering streets “named after US colleges” and university students speaking “virtually unaccented English,” the book contends that while most people have heard of the “big wars” the United States has waged, “the actual territory” of US empire “often slips from view.” In response to this alleged invisibility, Immerwahr has produced a new popular history of US empire, one focussed on officially annexed US colonies and military bases, as well as the states that lie beyond the “logo map” whose outlines are the continental United States (14–15). The book's first section quickly sketches the story of US westward expansion, mostly through the story of Daniel Boone, then moves on to more satisfying chapters detailing the annexation of the uninhabited Guano Islands, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, as well as the resistance to annexation in the latter two cases; the section ends by recounting World War II battles over Pacific islands. The second half of the book examines the postwar period, contending that the United States “gave up territory” in this period because it “honed an extraordinary suite of technologies,” from screw threads to synthetic rubber, that allowed it to construct a “pointillist empire” of communication and infrastructural networks (17).

Despite its worthy aim of thinking beyond the logo map, the book's approach to US empire raises some conceptual problems. Beyond the issue of its extremely curtailed discussion of Native North Americans, who all but vanish after chapter 2 (Native Alaskans and Hawai‘ians are barely discussed), the book's focus on formally annexed territory, sharply differentiated from the many other places where the United States has violently imposed itself, is justified only by the assertion that this territory has heretofore been “hidden.” However, as Paul Kramer enumerates in an early excoriation of the book's premise, copious scholarship on US territories exists. Immerwahr's broad claim that histories of US empire are on “the wrong shelves” allows him not to go to those shelves, and thus to refrain from engaging with other scholars theorizing US empire, many of whom are writing from the regions he discusses, and some of whom have lately uncovered new connections between “big wars” and “actual territory” (15).Footnote ¹ While Immerwahr's defenders have argued that the general audience his book targets justifies his inattention to this scholarship, it does seem that his platform as the author of an aggressively promoted popular history would have allowed him to popularize the works whose marginality he bemoans.Footnote ² Immerwahr also fails to acknowledge, much less engage with, the tradition of popular (in both senses) histories in which leftist authors from Howard Zinn to Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz have chronicled these same territorial conquests.Footnote ³

The book's revival of the “Greater United States” frame, and its attendant disregard for much recent scholarship, leads to an account that often seems old-fashioned. Of the War of 1898, Immerwahr claims that “McKinley succumbed to popular sentiment and agreed to war,” repeating a once commonsense causal link historians have long challenged (67).Footnote ⁴ In the same chapter, he writes of Theodore Roosevelt, “This was a man who was in turn a Harvard student, cowboy, policeman, war hero, president, and African explorer – virtually the entire list of boyhood fantasies, minus astronaut” (68). Ignoring the scholarship demonstrating that boyhood fantasies, like imperial ones, are historically contingent. The book's refusal to examine gender and empire together, along with its sympathetic and lighthearted treatment of male imperialists, means it often reads like an empire book for boys. Boys and boyish things dominate the book, from classroom maps and guano to the leisure activities of its male characters (only a few women are named and discussed, one of whom has a tenuous relation to US empire but turns out to be Immerwahr's relative). Lines such as “Perhaps the only thing you need to know about Herbert Hoover is that he wore a jacket and tie to fish” feel like clubby in-jokes, but also have the effect of minimizing other facts, like Hoover's 1932 deployment of troops to disperse destitute veterans (301).Footnote ⁵ This focus on boys is most apparent in the chapter on military bases, in which the two “products” of US basing Immerwahr identifies have nothing to do with the violence that is the reason for the bases’ existence. Instead, he argues for bases’ influence on neighboring “enterprising young men,” specifically the ones who ended up forming the Beatles and the Sony corporation: the former, he claims in a new interpretation, “owed its very existence to the US military,” while the latter was named for “Sonny boy,” the “affectionate term” US GIs used in the 1950s to refer to Japanese men (359, 367–68).

As these examples indicate, Immerwahr's admiring treatment of the “products” of US empire in the sections after World War II has the serious effect of making that empire appear to grow increasingly benign over time. His contention that the United States “gave up territory” because of its impressive “empire-killing technologies” erases the tremendous military force it applied to maintain its global dominance in that period. Early chapters acknowledge imperial violence, but in the later ones Immerwahr breaks his own rules, departing from “actual territory” in a way that makes postwar US empire seem like a story of men inventing gadgets rather than men killing and pillaging, MacGyver rather than My Lai. Why single out the Beatles and Sony as products of postwar empire, as opposed to Ngo Dinh Diem and Augusto Pinochet? Why focus on screw threads and stop signs rather than daisy cutters and Agent Orange? The effect of neglecting the violence of the Cold War (and, later, devoting very little space to the violence of the War on Terror) is a sense that US empire is not an ongoing catastrophe, an interpretation Immerwahr supports when he blandly concludes that “empire is a way of describing a country that, for good or bad, has outposts and colonies” (400). It is hard to tell whether he is undecided about whether US empire has been “for good or bad” or is affecting neutrality for an imagined reader who enjoys hearing about Hoover's fishing attire.

Despite all this, How to Hide an Empire undoubtedly springs from an ethical impulse. It is dedicated “to the uncounted,” and Immerwahr does a lot of counting in the book, seemingly to impress upon readers the value of the inhabitants of US colonial empire. Along with the redrawing of the US map to include its territorial possessions, this is Immerwahr's advocacy project: he writes that “the inhabitants of the US empire have been shot, shelled, starved, interned, dispossessed, tortured, and experimented on. What they haven't been, by and large, is seen” (19). While his attempt to see and count “the uncounted” is understandable at a historical moment when a presidential aide refers on national television to Puerto Rico as “that country,” it relies on two faulty assumptions: first, that US imperial subjects have up to now been hidden, and second, that if they were seen and counted, they would be less likely to experience violence.Footnote ⁶ Considering a country founded on the sadistic three-fifths compromise, we might already dispute the proposition that counting leads to the recognition of humanity, but Immerwahr also writes these words after describing how the British and the French acknowledged and celebrated their empires. What we learn from those empires, as well as from the archetypal case of Nazi Germany, is that “seeing” and “counting” victims does not prevent states and empires from shooting, shelling, starving, interning, dispossessing, torturing or experimenting on them. Another way of saying this is that recognition is not decolonization.

Might those who have benefited from empire owe colonized people something more than an acknowledgement of their existence? If so, what would reckoning or even decolonization look like, and what role can historians play in the process? Christine DeLucia, in Memory Lands, has written an exemplary book that grapples with these questions and even proposes some answers. The book delves into the history of the sites on which King Philip's War was waged, encompassing not only the late-seventeenth-century war in which settlers devastated the Algonquian people, but also subsequent battles over memory, commemoration, Indigenous rights, and land use on those same sites in the intervening centuries. Organized geographically, Memory Lands begins on Deer Island in Boston Harbour, an internment camp during the war that later became a sewage treatment plant. The next section moves to the Great Swamp around Narragansett Bay, the site of a 1675 massacre and of efforts in subsequent centuries to “detribalize” the Narragansetts; it then takes us west to Turners Falls, the site of a horrific 1676 “dawn massacre” of an encampment of people from various Indigenous groups, many fleeing from and weakened by the ongoing war. The final chapter opens out onto the wider Atlantic world, weighing evidence that Native New Englanders were sold into Caribbean slavery. Each section examines the places alongside inhabitants’ memories and commemorative practices; DeLucia contends that “the production of landscape and memory has been dialectical,” and traces that dialectic through the centuries, as lands and memories shape each other (15). One memorable point in this relationship occurred in 1999, when vandals dumped red paint on the stone monument celebrating William Turner's heroism for his “dawn massacre” and stenciled “FREE LEONARD PELTIER” over the red background, demonstrating “that not even granite could hold meaning fast in such a contested place” (203).

In order to reconstruct these “memoryscapes” and “placemaking” practices, DeLucia completed remarkable research, combing through artifacts and documents in local archives to reconstruct ephemeral commemorations, land-use conflicts, and natural and agricultural histories. She also went on “place visits” to the swamps and rivers and gravestones and harbours she describes in the book, taking “upwards of 13,000 photographs” and staying “long enough in a given area to sense how the salt-marsh grass appears in the midday sun and the falling dusk-light then the tide starts to change and the wind picks up,” and this sense of the natural features of these places makes for indelible storytelling. Along with archival reconstructions and place visits, DeLucia built relationships with local historians, in particular Tribal historians and activist groups. These interactions help her chart ongoing conflicts over space and autonomy (as Narragansett chief sachem Matthew Thomas wrote in 2004, “in a sense we are still fighting King Philip's War”) but also enable her to reconstruct the rare moments in which Native and non-Native community members have come together to revise triumphalist narratives and preserve sacred spaces (187).

DeLucia's familiarity with the terrain, as well as her connections with Indigenous activists and historians, allows her to write a history that conveys both a sense of preconquest life in what would become New England and the drawn-out, ongoing catastrophe of colonialism and dispossession. When she writes of the “small contingent of English migrants who arrived on the floating island they called Mayflower,” it feels revelatory in its difference from the many accounts of this encounter, even those sympathetic to Native Americans, that reflexively take on the epistemological perspective of the colonizers (35). Through its careful examination not only of Native New Englanders’ ongoing political struggle for territory and restitution, but also of their placemaking practices, DeLucia challenges non-Indigenous readers to participate in the “reopening” of history, to see and experience familiar places differently, and to join with Indigenous people to fight both for justice in land use and preservation in the present and for an adequate accounting with the past. Rather than adding dots to the map, DeLucia argues, reckoning with history would entail the collaborative and contentious work of transforming places.

This comparison between Immerwahr's mapping and DeLucia's collaborative placemaking is not meant to be a call for local studies over synoptic reinterpretations. However, I do want to insist, following DeLucia, that empire is not something that can be heroically uncovered by a lone historian. DeLucia's careful research demonstrates that it is not exactly empire that was ever hidden in the first place, but rather two aspects of it: the extreme violence it took to colonize Indigenous people, and the struggles for sovereignty in which those people continue to engage. Immerwahr's narrative is easy to digest because it perpetuates two persistent myths of American liberalism: that the United States has grown less violent and imperialist over time, and that recognition of oppressed and dispossessed people leads to, or even consists of, justice. However, DeLucia demonstrates that if history is to be a decolonizing practice (and it should be), a more dramatic, consequential and collaborative reckoning with empire and its many crimes is necessary. At the very least, let's tear down the statues rather than expanding the maps.