How to Hide an Empire:  Telling the Story of the Greater United States

Program Description:  Look at a map of the United States and you'll see the familiar cluster of states in North America, plus Hawai'i and Alaska in boxes off to the side. But what about Puerto Rico? What about American Samoa? The country has held overseas territory--lands containing millions of U.S. nationals--for the bulk of its history. They don't appear often in textbooks, but the outposts and colonies of the United States have been central to its history. This talk explores what U.S. history would look like if it weren't just the history of the continental states but of all U.S. land: the Greater United States.

Bio: Daniel Immerwahr (pronounced IM-mer-var, he/him pronouns) is a professor of history at Northwestern University, where he teaches global history and U.S. foreign relations His first book, Thinking Small (Harvard 2015), a history of U.S. grassroots antipoverty strategies, won the Organization of American Historians' Merle Curti Award for best work of U.S. intellectual history. His second, How to Hide an Empire, a retelling of U.S. history with the overseas parts of the country included in the story, was a national bestseller and won the Robert Ferrell book prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Immerwahr is currently working on two research projects, one focusing on the pop culture of U.S. global hegemony, the other a book about nineteenth-century urban catastrophes. Immerwahr's writings have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Slate, The Nation, and The New Republic.