Thread by @onthemedia

THREAD: TONS of history to learn in this conversation with @dimmerwahr about the history of US empire. Here’s a little taste: 1/
wnycstudios.org/story/on-the-m…

Up until the Spanish-American War in 1898, America...wasn’t called America. It was the United States; it was Columbia. But once the country acquired major swaths of overseas territory, it needed a new name to fit its new status. 2/

It also needed to be *represented* differently. We’re used to seeing the United States represented via what political scientist Benedict Anderson called the “logo map”: 3/

But for a very short period in history, the US was proud of its new territorial holding, and in schools and atlases, you’d see maps like this one, representing the “Greater” United States. 4/

But empire proved thorny, and put three competing American values into conflict: republicanism, empire...and white supremacy. 5/

Anti-imperialists took to the papers to express their critiques of the US’s territorial feeding frenzy — like in this 1898 Boston Globe cartoon: 6/

We might like to imagine that anti-imperialists of the day held the high moral ground. But for many, it was a desire not to bring more non-white people into the union. 7/

How was the trilemma resolved? By disappearing empire from view. No more maps of the Greater United States. No more debates about overseas territory in the papers. 8/

The US didn’t change its territorial holdings. But it changed how it represented itself — and that representation still holds today. And so: back to the logo map. 9/

Out in the territories, it was very clear what was going on — and it wasn’t pretty. 10/

wnycstudios.org/story/on-the-m…

For instance, this letter, written by Cornelius P. Rhoads, a doctor sent to Puerto Rico by the Rockefeller Foundation to help fight anemia. Rhoads...took a different path: 11/14

When his letter was discovered, Rhoads quickly left Puerto Rico — and went on to oversee medical experiments during WWII, and later to become head of the Sloan Kettering Institute in Manhattan — never punished for his mistreatment of Puerto Ricans. 12/

And of course, there’s the Philippines, where people lived under US colonial rule until WWII. And WWII in the Philippines was the single bloodiest event to ever happen on US soil — around 1.6 million people died. 13/

There’s so much more in the interview and in @dimmerwahr’s brilliant “How to Hide an Empire.” Check out the full episode here: wnycstudios.org/story/on-the-m… END/