There is another aspect of the Second World War that deserves mention. Bouda Etemad, Possessing the World: Taking the Measurements of Colonisation from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century , trans. endobj Title from title sheet. Once again, the Greater United States is coming into view. But California was the extreme. In a series of cases from 1901 to 1922, known as the Insular Cases , the Supreme Court considered whether the territories were part of the United States as referred to in the Constitution, i.e., it asked whether the Constitution applied to them. sovereign, self-governing republic. uninhabited; National Wildlife Refuge, United Nations Trust Territory; in 1986 became a In that sense, the overseas colonies are the key to the Greater United States. To speak only of formal acquisitions, . Books appeared with intriguing titles: The Greater Republic (1899), The Greater United States (1904), and seven books whose titles contained the phrase Greater America published in the decade following the 1898 war. Or jump ahead to the 2008 presidential election, which pitted Barack Obama, a Hawaiian (born shortly after Hawaii became a state), against John McCain, a Zonian (i.e., born in the Panama Canal Zone), and Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska. The territorial governor of Alaska, Ernest Gruening, saw it that way, and drafted a book in 1954 entitled Alaska is a Colony (never published, but held in the Ernest Gruening Papers, box 754, folder 316, Alaska and Polar Regions Department, Archives and Manuscripts, University of AlaskaFairbanks). Surely its meaningful that the present editors of this journal, Nick Cullather and Anne Foster, are both historians of the Philippines. ch. Counting Negroes on the mainland, American Samoa, Hawai'i, U.S. Virgin Islands, and Alaska; nonwhites in Puerto Rico; Negro and Negro-mixed in the Panama Canal Zone; and no one in the Philippines and Guam (for which racial breakdowns were not incorporated into the U.S. census) places U.S. blacks at 8.85% of the population. 43. Most U.S. historians, especially when working on the zoomed-out, textbook level, implicitly take as their unit of analysis only a part of the United States, the contiguous part. A key enabling move made by Williams and the Wisconsin School that continued his ideas was to refuse to limit discussion of empire to a discussion of colonies. It is generally held to be an illegal act. In the Philippines, the United States abandoned its initial strategy of engaging Japanese forces on the ground for one of bombing and shelling suspected Japanese targets from afar. $.' On U.S. military calculations in the reconquest of the Philippines, see Richard Connaughton, John Pimlott, and Duncan Anderson, The Battle for Manila (London, 1995). Not in the sense of endorsing the Courts opinion, but in adhering to the Courts understanding about what parts of the United States are in the country and what parts arent. 3 0 obj United States--Colonial question, - Consider Williamss Empire as a Way of Life , a 226-page survey of U.S. imperial ambitions that engages in no substantive discussion of any overseas territory. and Germany, Leased from Panama Sectionalism map of the united states; Oregon Territory. 32 And it included the internment of Alaska Natives from the Aleutian Islands by the U.S. government. These were, it is important to state, not novelty maps. 36. The reason has not just to do with our conception of empire. 5 In my home city of Chicago, there is a public high school named after him (with an adjoining family learning center for teen parents named after Lolita Lebrn, the chief shooter in the 1954 House shootings). The most thorough discussion of anti-basing protests and their effects on the World War II basing network is Rebecca Herman Weber, In Defense of Sovereignty: Labor, Crime, Sex and Nation at U.S. Military Bases in Latin America, 19401947 (Ph.D. Palin herself twice attended Alaska Independence Party conventions. Who was Gregorio Cortez and what happened to him. diss., University of Michigan, 2011); Peter Bacon Hales on atomic testing on the Bikini atoll in Outside the Gates of Eden: The Dream of America from Hiroshima to Now (Chicago, IL, 2014), ch. David Rumsey Map Collection. Fish and Wildlife Service, Purchased from Spain for $20 millon following (Lincoln, NE, 1984), esp. Yet annexation did take place. Can we say the same about the overseas territories? If California was one end of the spectrum, Oklahoma was the other. Purchased from Mexico for $10 million. As the 1898 generation saw, a full history of the Greater United States is not just the story of overseas territories, but also of western ones. Interior, Leased from Panama for $10 million, plus $250,000 Congress officially annexed Alaska in 1884 America Acquires Alaska U. I prefer the term Greater United States, just so as to avoid confusion with Herbert E. Boltons influential notion of the Greater America, intended to encompass all of the Americas within a single analytical frame. ), 32 Sherman's march to the sea LC Civil War maps (2nd R. O. Evans and Company - Robertson, H. C. National expansion under the Constitution; or, Despotic power versus delegated authority. %PDF-1.5 The territorial acquisitions of the United States, -1904, an historical review. 34. Surely, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos died in the war. The premier biography of Albizu is Marisa Rosado, Pedro Albizu Campos: Las Llamas de la Aurora , 2nd ed. 28. Palins husband, an Alaska Native, was for years a registered member of the Alaska Independence Party. At its establishment in 1834, Indian Territory extended from the top of present-day Texas to the Canadian border and from the Mississippi to the Rockies. self-governing commonwealth of the United States, Annexed following Spanish-America War; in 1950 became United States Acquisitions and Annexations, 1857-1904. This can be most clearly seen in the realm of the law. In 1947, the Mariana Islands, Caroline Islands, and Marshall Islands became the most recent U.S. territorial acquisitions, as of August 2021. I calculated 135,341,000 persons in the colonies and occupation zones and 132,481,000 in the continental United States. United States Acquisitions and Annexations 1857-1904 Other Gains in the Pacific The United States government intervened in other parts of the Pacific at the same time that events played out in the Spanish-American War. self-governing U.S. commomwealth, United Nations Trust Territory; 1986 became a We have been so long used to regard the United States as an extent of country reaching from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, and bounded on the north by the British possessions and on the south by the Mexican Republic, remarked the Attorney General, that it requires almost a wrench to take us out of our old habits of thought and accustom us to the fact that our domain on the north reaches to within the Arctic Circle; that we have the Sandwich Islands [Hawaii]; that we have the vast Philippine Archipelago. 14, Cartographers, eager to showcase the new dimensions of the country, rushed to publish new maps. 11 Nearly thirteen percent of its populace lived in its overseas colonies. - Shattuc, W. B. That is because they dramatically expose the gap between the logo map conception of the United States and the larger conception for which I am arguing. 46, The War on Terror has drawn our attention to how crucial small overseas sites can be to the projection of power. Takeover, the purchase of one company by another; Mergers and acquisitions, transactions in which the ownership of companies or their operating units are transferred or consolidated with other entities; Procurement, finding, agreeing terms and acquiring goods, services or works from an external source; Library acquisitions, department of a library responsible for . 23. In 1857, the United States began annexing guano islandsuninhabited islands possessing valuable fertilizer. Certainly, in terms of size, current overseas holdings dont add up to muchall U.S. overseas territory today, including military bases, comprises an area smaller than Connecticut. silhouette was completed in 1853, with the Gadsden Purchase. Paul V. McNutt, address at Beta Theta Pi Fraternity, November 27, 1946; McNutt, P.V., Correspondence and Speeches, 194546 folder, box 7, Office of the High Commissioner of the Philippine Islands, Records of the Washington, DC, Office, 194246, Records of the Office of Territories, Record Group 126, National Archives and Records Administration. Despite his extraordinary career, Albizu doesnt have much of a place in U.S. historiography. Imperial maps are discussed in Susan Schulten, The Geographical Imagination in America, 18801950 (Chicago, IL, 2001), 3844, 17680. jurisdiction of Office of Insular Affairs of the Department of the Available also through the Library of Congress Web site as a raster image. Nevertheless, 8.85% is probably slightly high because, although it does not count black Filipinos and Guamanians (presumably very low numbers in 1940), it classes all non-white Puerto Ricans as black, whereas many were non-black. As one of the justices summarized the logic, the Constitution was the supreme law of the land, but the territories were not part of the land. 20, The result of all thisthe erasure of the colonies from the map, the references to the Greater United States growing scarce, the Courts expulsion of the territories from the landwas the reassertion of an understanding of the United States as a nation-state. The Library of Congress has accepted an estimate of one million Filipino fatalities, which also circulates in the Philippines. can i please get some help with this :) Between 1857 and 1903, the United States acquired many new territorial possessions around the globe. 29,670. We can see, better than we could before, how the territorial extensions of the United States matter today, and how they have mattered in the past. ed. Available also Peabody, M. M. (Moody Morse) - Peabody, M. M. Wall map. Annexation is an unilateral act where territory is seized and held by one state, is distinct from conquest and differs from cession, in which territory is given or sold through treaty. Gadsden Purchase. endstream Puerto Rican scholars have written a great deal about Albizu, who is a towering figure in Puerto Rican culture. Besides the above, see especially Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley, CA, 1990); Katharine H. S. Moon, Sex among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.Korea Relations (New York, 1997); McCaffrey, Military Power and Popular Protest ; Maria Hhn, GIs and Frauleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002); Ji-Yeon Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America (New York, 2002); Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations, 19451959 (New Haven, CT, 2003); Mark L. Gillem, America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire (Minneapolis, MN, 2007); Masumichi S. Inoue, Okinawa and the U.S. Military: Identity Making in the Age of Globalization (New York, 2007); Harvey Neptune, Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United States Occupation (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007); Steven High, Base Colonies in the Western Hemisphere, 19401967 (New York, 2009); Lipman, Guantnamo ; Lutz, ed., The Bases of Empire ; David Vine, Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton, NJ, 2009); Maria Hhn and Seungsook Moon, eds., Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present (Durham, NC, 2010); Amy Austin Holmes, Social Unrest and American Military Bases in Turkey and Germany since 1945 (Cambridge, 2014); Sasha Davis, The Empires Edge: Militarization, Resistance, and Transcending Hegemony in the Pacific (Athens, GA, 2015); and Vine, Base Nation . The country claimed 94 such islands . 16. Reasoning with a racist logicthe initial cases were decided by the same court that decided Plessy v. Ferguson it concluded that the bulk of the territories were unincorporated into the political body of the United States. Acquisitions Incorporated was an adventuring company from the Sword Coast. If you count Puerto Rico as part of the United States (more about which below), it was the largest police massacre in U.S. history. That was undoubtedly less than lived in the world-straddling British Empire, where there were roughly ten colonial subjects for every inhabitant of the British Isles. (New York, 2006), 179. 3 (1933): 44874. 19. Expansion . 30. Our narratives register not only the black experience but, moreover, the ways in which the changing position of African Americans drove key episodes in national history. 9; Lauren B. Hirshbergs dissertation about Kwajalein island and neighboring Ebeye, Targeting Kwajalein: U.S. But what isnt important to the argument is the formal empire. chemical weapon disposal site, Purchased from Russia It also shows the Philippines, Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, Wake Island, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, and the Panama Canal Zone in boxes. ",#(7),01444'9=82. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev.