How to Hide an Empire

A provocative and absorbing history of the United States' New York Times

The United States denies having dreams of empire.

We know America has spread its money, language and culture across the world, but we still think of it as a contained territory, framed by Canada above, Mexico below, and oceans either side.

[A] smashing new book… fascinating

Lively and fascinating … [Immerwahr] is incapable of writing a dull page, and he has a real gift for making striking and unusual connections

To call this standout book a corrective would make it sound earnest and dutiful, when in fact it is wry, readable and often astonishing … It’s a testament to Immerwahr’s considerable storytelling skills that I found myself riveted by his sections on Hoover’s quest for standardized screw threads, wondering what might happen next. But beyond its collection of anecdotes and arcana, this humane book offers something bigger and more profound. How to Hide an Empire nimbly combines breadth and sweep with fine-grained attention to detail . The result is a provocative and absorbing history of the United States — ‘not as it appears in its fantasies, but as it actually is.’

There are many histories of American expansionism. How to Hide an Empire renders them all obsolete. It is brilliantly conceived, utterly original, and immensely entertaining - simultaneously vivid, sardonic and deadly serious.

An incredible book that not only changed how I understood America but changed how I understood the world

This book changes our understanding of the fundamental character of the United States as a presence in world history. By focusing on the processes by which Americans acquired, controlled, and were affected by territory, Daniel Immerwahr shows that the United States was not just another “empire,” but was a highly distinctive one the dimensions of which have been largely ignored.

How to Hide an Empire is a breakthrough, for both Daniel Immerwahr and our collective understanding of America’s role in the world. His narrative of the rise of our colonial empire outside North America, and then our surprising pivot from colonization to globalization after World War II, is enthralling in the telling -- and troubling for anyone pondering our nation’s past and future. The result is a book for citizens and scholars alike.

A deft disquisition on America, and America in the world, with a raconteur’s touch and keen sense of the absurd

[A] lively new book… Immerwahr peppers his account with colourful characters and enjoyable anecdotes… [ How to Hide an Empire ] throws light on the histories of everything from the Beatles to Godzilla, the birth-control pill to the transistor radio

This is an easily readable and vividly written book, filled with numerous fascinating tales, some well known, but many obscure… [How to Hide an Empire ] illuminate[s] the wider history of both the United States and its colonies

Daniel Immerwahr is Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, where he focuses on US and global history. He is the author of How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States , which won the Robert H. Ferrell Prize and was a New York Times’ critics best book of the year, and Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development , which won the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti Award. He has written for The New Yorker , Atlantic , n+1 , Slate , Dissent , and other publications.