How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

Borderland history is a genre of historical writing that focuses on the lives of marginalized people living along national borders.

Hegemony is a form of dominance over weaker states by using political, military, socioeconomic, and cultural means.

Guano is the nitrogen-rich excrement of sea birds and bats that is used as a naturally-occurring fertilizer. In the 19th century, it was imported on a mass scale into the US and led to the colonization of many uninhabited guano islands that, in the 20th century, were repurposed for military use.

Lend-Lease was an American World War II program to supply its Allies, such as Britain and the Soviet Union, with materiel.

The Malthusian theory is named after the British economist Thomas Robert Malthus, whose work focused on demographics. Malthus pointed out the importance of the food supply chain in population growth.

Neo-colonialism is a form of colonialism that does not rely on formal territorial control but instead focuses on economic and cultural means of dominating a foreign country.

The Philippine-American War (1899-1913) was the war between the Filipino independence movement and the US after the Spanish-American War (1898). Typically, the war’s end date is 1902, but the author extends it to 1913 to account for ongoing insurgency in the south, making it the second-longest war in American history.

The Platt Amendment (1901) allowed the US to intervene in Cuban affairs to protect its economic interests including using military means. The amendment was used during the second occupation of Cuba (1906-1909). President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy (1933) repealed the Platt Amendment.

The pointillist empire is the term the author uses to describe the informal American Empire after World War II, comprised of refurbished guano islands and approximately 800 military bases in foreign countries around the world.

The Roosevelt Corollary (1904) was an extension of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine to claim the Americas as the US sphere of influence and to justify economic and military interventionism to achieve US goals.

Soft power is an indirect way of influencing domestic and foreign politics and projecting one’s power abroad rather than via direct, coercive means. Soft power may, for instance, involve mass culture and sports to shape favorable public opinion.

Thalassocracy is the type of state whose power is primarily maritime—from trade to the navy. In classic geopolitical theory, its opposite is tellurocracy—a land-based power. 

The Trail of Tears is the ethnic cleansing of North America’s Indigenous population from present-day Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida, and Alabama and their forced relocation to “Indian Territory” in present-day Oklahoma. Thousands of people died from the elements, disease, and starvation.