Greater America: Expansion in American History

There's no question America is a big country, and for most of our history we've only been getting bigger, sometimes in ways most of us don't even realize. In fact, for a few years after WWII America controlled so much territory that if you looked up and saw an American flag flying overhead, the odds were more likely you were currently somewhere outside the continental United States than inside it. Explore the history of American expansion with these four books!

Even now America is larger than most of us think. How often do you remember that America includes 16 other territories with a combined 3.5 million permanent residents. Why is that so easy to forget, and why have these territories never become states? How would American history look different if we included their experiences? Did you know the Philippines was one of these territories until they had a revolution (the Philippine-American War)? How to Hide an Empire, by Chicago‘s own Daniel Immerwahr provides a long-needed look in the mirror, one that recasts familiar episodes of American history in an essential new light.

High school history teaches us about Manifest Destiny, the idea that America was destined to extend from coast to coast, but there were some in the 19th century who thought it ought to apply to the entire hemisphere! If that mania could be distilled into a single man it might be William Walker, a Californian “adventurer” who attempted to make Nicaragua the next Texas! As Scott Martelle chronicles in William Walker's Wars, setting out in 1855 with an army of mercenaries at his back Walker actually succeeded in taking the Nicaraguan capitol, re-instituting slavery and being recognized by President Franklin Pierce. Though he hoped to be annexed into the U.S like Texas, he was shortly defeated and executed by a coalition of Central American nations.

Before it is anything else, expansion is an idea, and it's one that has obsessed and defined our nation since its founding. So argues author Greg Grandin in his Pulitzer Prize winning book The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. According to Grandin, Americans have been united by a national myth that we are a land of endless promise, that the relentless growth of our borders signaled a similar destiny to find new frontiers in everything else, from wealth, to technology, to foreign influence. One side effect of this persistent forward-focus has been to ignore internal contradictions at home, such as racism and inequality, which threaten to undercut the successful, optimistic vision we consistently project. With the Great Recession, the call for a border wall, and a turn away from global leadership, Grandin suspects our faith in our nation’s limitlessness may have finally run out.

If there were to be one value most traditionally associated with America it might be freedom, and self-determination. But what happens when one nation's “freedom” collides with another’s? The extraordinarily tragic consequences of such a clash are explored in Vincent Bevins's riveting 2020 book, The Jakarta Method. Though primarily focused on Indonesia, Bevins takes readers on a tour of various newly decolonized nations all profoundly inspired by the liberatory rhetoric of the United States, only to find their attempts at self-determination to be deemed contrary to American Interests. As these optimistic new nations fall one by one to C.I.A-backed coups and civil wars, The Jakarta Method offers an indispensable and sobering look at how the expansion of American Ideals is so often undercut by the expansion of American Power.