The forever war. The forever fonts. The forever jacket design.
Follow
Daniel Immerwahr
@dimmerwahr
Historian, Northwestern U. | Author: How to Hide an Empire. ON TWITTER BREAK
faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/daniel-immerwa…Joined January 2019
Daniel Immerwahr’s Tweets
Pub Day! Here's my book, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, in 9 words and 2 maps:
Still amazed that the USA gets away with having "America" as its nickname. That’s as if Germans called their country “Europe” and themselves “Europeans,” and then got everyone else to do that, too, no matter how much the “Franco-Europeans” or “Anglo-Europeans” complained. 1/
We're currently in year 18 of a global war against something, "terror," that kills fewer US civilians annually than bathtub drownings.
The Second World War warped how the United States mapped the world, and the artist Richard Edes Harrison was right at the center of it. 1/
While researching Jared Diamond’s new book, one thing I found startled me. Guns, Germs, and Steel starts when Diamond happening on man named Yali, who had “never been outside New Guinea,” on the beach. Yali’s question—why do whites have so much?—is what launches the book. 1/
For their final exam, I asked students in my U.S. Foreign Relations class to propose an alternative to this image on the cover of the course pack. Here are my favorite answers:
Quote Tweet
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
Comic books were extremely popular after WWII, and a bestselling title was Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. It sold 3 million copies per issue by the mid 1950s. That was more than any other comic, the NYer, NatGeo, Time, or Newsweek. 1/
On Jared Diamond’s Godawful Upheaval: A History Professor’s Indisputably Correct Views 1/x
Before the revolution, and during his Siberian exile, the Russian revolutionary Yakov "Yashka" Sverdlov was roommates with Josef Stalin. Two things:
1: “Roommates with Stalin” is the perfect sitcom, and I am personally offended that Netflix hasn’t yet made it.
PSA: If you write with MS Word, you can speed up your typing considerably by an off-label use of AutoCorrect. 1/5
So, presidential candidate Mike Gravel (1) has read my book and (2) has some deep-cut policy proposals concerning Guam.
Your move, Warren.
Hooded my first PhD students today. I'm so heart-stoppingly proud that I nearly smiled.
Doctor No. 1: Michael Falcone, whose impeccably turned dissertation on U.S. hegemony and technology has changed the way I think about tech.
People, can we talk about Lincoln University, a black school in Oxford, Pennsylvania, in the 1930s? A v. small school (class size < 100), but imagine you show up in 1930. You know that guy in your dorm who writes rhyme-y poems?
It's Langston Hughes
Replying to
To me, this illustrates the limits of Diamond’s worldview. It’s all nations in isolation. Meeting Yali, one of the most interesting figures in the country, he presents him as a random native. Yali the anti-imperialist just doesn’t fit. 7/
Replying to
2: Stalin refused to do dishes. And in what can now be recognized as an epic troll, he named his dog “Yashka,” his roommate’s name. “Yashka, you’re filthy, stop pooping on the floor. Oh, sorry Yashka, I was talking to the dog.”
That’s So Stalin!
65 years ago today, Puerto Rican nationalists, seeking to draw attention to their cause, shot up the House of Representatives, hitting five Congressmen. This was 4 years after they nearly killed Pres. Truman. I'm struck by how rarely this appears in surveys and textbooks.
Replying to
I talk about not only Yali, but how this pertain's to Diamond's larger project in Guns, Germs, and Steel and his latest book, Upheaval, in my review for .
In what I'm told is a first for the show, the whole episode of NPR's On the Media this week is from a single book . . . How to Hide an Empire!
My takeaway: passages from Mark Twain sound even better when you play old-timey music under them.
Quote Tweet
In a special hour this week, @onthemedia examines the history of U.S. imperialism — and why the familiar U.S. map hides the true story of our country. wnycstudios.org/story/on-the-m
The U.S. flag, by law, must change whenever a new state joins the union. That’s led to a delightful tradition of citizens sending unsolicited flag designs to the gov’t, especially during the 1950s when Hawai‘i and Alaska became states.
Today on Democracy Now: Talking Empire with a Historian Who Has Just Spilled Tea All Over His Pants
Quote Tweet
Replying to @democracynow
Then—In the groundbreaking new book, "How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States," historian Daniel Immerwahr (@dimmerwahr) examines the U.S.'s worldwide territories and the costs of erasing the empire's history. Watch 8-9AM ET: democracynow.org
Normal Historian: Slavery caused the Civil War
Me: Did you know that there's a woman who dated BOTH Pauly Shore AND John Legend?
NH: Seriously, Daniel--
Me: AND SHE IS OSAMA BIN LADEN'S NIECE???
My favorite example of this: Tisquantum, a.k.a. Squanto. When the Pilgrims encountered him, he already spoke English. That's because he'd lived in London. He'd crossed the Atlantic four times, which is three times more than they had.
He was also the reason they didn't die.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @dimmerwahr
a very familiar story in anthropology; there are _tons_ of Yalis, in a sense, because so many researchers have only been able to make what they played up as first contact because an "exceptional native" already knew how to communicate with them on the researcher's terms.
After extensive historical research, I can conclusively state this: Of all U.S. presidents, Dwight Eisenhower is uniquely horrifying with the colors inverted.
Replying to
Doctor No. 2: Alvita Akiboh, who did archival work in every US overseas territory for a stunning diss. about the material culture of imperialism. This ten-peso bill from the Philippines, she showed, was the basis for the US dollar.
Replying to
Update: @Grahambrose has alerted to to ANOTHER example! One of Diamond's photos is of an unnamed "Aboriginal Tasmanian woman." Oh, but she has a name, Truganini, and a painful history. There were songs and ships named for her, all before Diamond's book. And plays and novels.
This is a 1939 diary entry by Dwight Eisenhower explaining why he bought a typewriter in Manila. Plainly put, he bought it so he could write racist letters without having to dictate them to Filipino stenographers.
"Islands and ice, mostly": the reliably great Bill Rankin's map of the lands *actually* discovered by Europeans.
radicalcartography.net/index.html?dis
Shorthand: a widely taught script for real-time transcription. Not much shorthand survives in US archives; it was used *before* the letters got typed (and then it was thrown out). But shorthand, written mainly by women, was the backbone of mid-20thC communications.
Replying to
"No, no, more washed out. And can we get an oil flare or explosion in the background?"
Taking a twitter hiatus to do some writing. Be excellent to each other.
How WWII is commemorated in the US versus how it is commemorated in what was then the largest US territory, the Philippines.
Replying to
Maps, from 1940, explained in this excerpt from The Guardian
This Built-Rite children's map from 1953 is all kinds of wrong, but you have to respect the inclusion of the Panama Canal Zone and Howland Island.
Replying to
Final sentence: “Familiarity with changes that did or didn’t work in the past can serve us as a guide.”
Are you even trying, sir? My undergrads consistently end their papers with more grace. And, I’m proud to say, with more substance, too.
B-. Harrumph. 16/16
Replying to
Benny Goodman and King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand having a jam session. This captures, my student wrote, how global power plays out in intimate and sometimes surprising ways.
The 1958 novel The Ugly American, written in six days by a naval officer and a political scientist, didn’t seem promising at first. But it outsold Lolita, was made into a movie, was one of JFK’s favorite books, and inspired the Peace Corps. 1/5
Replying to
Guns, Germs was fun. Upheaval isn’t. It’s a well-paid writer lazily shoehorning some stories his rich friends told him into an implausible framework, resulting in unconvincing explanations for the “success” of societies, some of which are dictatorships. 14/
Replying to
Translation: Maybe that psychology thing I heard about once is . . . actually really good sociology?
People, I cannot stress enough the dorm-room level of this thinking. 6/
The WaPo selects How to Hide an Empire as one of its three best audiobooks this month. Boundless thanks to Luis Moreno for giving it his all: 17.5 hours of what can only be described as "mellifluous gravitas."
washingtonpost.com/entertainment/
Replying to
Heft sent it to his Congressman, who sent it to the flag design committee, and Eisenhower picked it. After Heft’s design was adopted, his teacher changed the grade to an A.
Replying to
Good scholarly considerations of Diamond are Errington and Gewertz, Yali’s Question and McAnany and Yoffee, Questioning Collapse. Both showcase work of social scientists taking themselves and their subjects far more seriously than Diamond does in his latest.
Replying to
Actually, Yali was famous. The scholar Peter Lawrence remarked (years before Diamond met Yali) that Yali was always winning the hearts of Europeans as that “exceptional native” who was “well spoken” and “scrupulously clean” without “ever being impertinent.” 3/
I'm going to be feeling this blurb all day.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @dimmerwahr
It's a great book!
Replying to
Diamond’s last paragraph: “Crisis have often challenged nations in the past. They are continuing to do so today.”
Forget the comically bland sentiment, it’s the baggy writing that kills me. An edit: “Crises challenged nations in the past. They still do today.” 15/
Japanese internment in WWII is a major episode in U.S. history. But it wasn’t the only one, as the tweet below explains. The gov’t carried out multiple internments in its overseas territories. 1/ t.co/8814ryGOnw
This Tweet is unavailable.
Replying to
This was also the time when the word “global” came into fashion and when globes (as opposed to maps) got hot. Here’s FDR’s enormous globe with more than 17,000 place names on it. 5/
Replying to
My favorite: a page from Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel from Left to Right, printed left to right rather than in the usual vertical style to accommodate the frequent insertion of English. Symbolizing the contortions made around the world to accommodate the USA.
My review of Jared Diamond's Upheaval for The New Republic. All thanks to my brilliant editor .
Replying to
The 1898 war with Spain pushed "America" into the forefront. After the USA annexed the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, Hawai'i, and American Samoa, some felt that phrases like the United States, Republic, or Union no longer fit. 4/
Two movies hit theaters on the same day in 1968: Kubrick’s 2001 and Planet of the Apes. Apes showed how much money space films could make, 2001 showed how inventive they could be.
The 1968 films set off a space race in Hollywood, with young directors taking sci-fi seriously. 1/
Replying to
After 1898 is when you start to see presidents using "America" all the time. And it's when songs like "God Bless America" and "America the Beautiful" become popular.
Replying to
If you had to *invent* a name for a guy like that, for a Disney-sponsored, funny-animal-drawing, ideological counter to Karl Marx, I submit you could not do better than his shit-you-not actual name:
Carl Barks
7/
Replying to
A classic study of cargo cults, about half of which is specifically about Yali and his movement, is Peter Lawrence's Road Belong Cargo. It came out 8 years before Diamond met Yali, 30 before Guns, Germs, and Steel. I hope Diamond read it, but I see no mention of it in GGS.
These rustic proverbs collected in Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen *really* paint a picture.
Replying to
Samuel Jennings’s Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences gets at the self-image of the USA as a bastion of liberty and, my student explained, the not-so-hidden racial assumptions about who would get liberty and who would give it.
Replying to
Yali appears in a BUNCH of books about Papua New Guinea that were published before Diamond met him. He’s got an entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. 6/
adb.anu.edu.au/biography/yali
Replying to
Europeans loved Yali because he knew their ways. He’d worked in a hotel, he’d served on the colonial police force, he’d been in an intelligence unit in the Australian army, he’d spent time on a U.S. submarine. He was a war hero. 4/
Replying to
The term wasn't always in heavy use. Up until the 20th century, it was more common to call the USA the United States, the Union, or the Republic. "Americans" got used for residents, but "America" more often meant the Americas as a whole. 2/
Replying to
I’ll start by saying there’s a lot to like about Diamond. He’s tackled tough topics and avoided the usual traps. Guns, Germs, and Steel: a blazingly erudite book with virtually no “characters” that got millions conversant in a non-racist explanation of European conquest. 2/
Replying to
His “friends” in the USA are senators and venture capitalists (whose “bold” strategies are why they “succeed so well”). Okay, but maybe branch out? Maybe chatting with the elite is not the firmest foundation for useful social theory? 12/
This year's Merle Curti Prize in Intellectual History from the OAH is Sarah Igo's The Known Citizen.
Congrats, Sarah! It's a *stunning* book, which I had the joy of reviewing:
Privacy Settings dissentmagazine.org/article/privac via
Replying to
Quote Tweet
Replying to @dimmerwahr
There's also a pic of "a Khoisan woman" in GGS, who is NIsa. Shostak (who took the picture) wrote two major books on her and she was a notorious informant with anthropologists.
Replying to
Richard Edes Harrison made a number of beautiful maps showing the planet viewed from the air. This one highlights the connection between Alaska (bottom) and Japan. 6/
Replying to
But he’d also become disillusioned with colonial rule and had played an ambivalent but leading role in an insurgent cargo cult movement and had spent nearly 6 years in prison, on the discomfiting charge of “inciting rape.” 5/
Replying to
Diamond gets his info, he keeps saying, from “friends.” It’s painfully clear that he’s friends with the upper crust. They tell him good things about Suharto and Chile’s Pinochet, bad things about Sukarno and Allende, the ousted left-leaning presidents. 11/
Life goal: talking about bird feces on NPR. "'White gold,' as they called it, Dave . . ."
The History Of American Imperialism, From Bloody Conquest To Bird Poop n.pr/2S2NChA
A doctoral candidate under my supervision has just submitted his dissertation draft as a pdf rather than a word doc in order to use a typeface, Minion, that most computers don’t support.
I’m not sure I’ve ever been prouder.
Replying to
It's a terrific book! I made a map to accompany my review of it, showing major Cold War-fueled conflicts and (in orange) George Orwell's prediction in 1984 of where the Cold War fighting would take place.
thenation.com/article/cold-w
Replying to
Major magazines went nuts printing new maps. One was Buckminster Fuller’s “Dymaxion Map,” breaking up the globe into triangles that could be reassembled in different ways to focus on different areas of combat. 4/
Re-reading Enders Game. I hadn’t noticed, when I read it as a teenager, how obsessed it is with the U.S.-Japanese relationship. 1/
Replying to
His most popular map was a “polar azimuthal projection,” centering the globe on the North Pole to show the proximity, especially by plane routes, of North America to Eurasia. 8/
Replying to
None of the early patriotic songs--Yankee Doodle, the Star-Spangled Banner, the Battle Cry of Freedom--have the word "America" in their lyrics. From the founding to 1900, sitting presidents used "America" to refer to their country in public speech only 11 times. 3/
I often think about Kieran Healy's “Fuck Nuance” (). It’s got to be one of the only conference papers that’s gone viral since Turner’s “Significance of the Frontier in American History” in (checks flash card) 1893. 1/
Replying to
The current flag was designed by a 17-year-old, Robert Heft, who did it for an assignment in 1958. It took him 12 hours over three days to sew. But his teacher gave him a B-, objecting that Heft “had too many stars” and didn’t “even know how many states we had.” 4/
Replying to
The flight plan for Wendell Willkie’s round-the-world journey during World War II. This was a “pivotal moment” in the history of U.S. foreign relations, endowing the United States with truly global ambitions, wrote the student.
Quote Tweet
Is the United States an empire? Daniel Immerwahr says the answer is yes. In this week’s episode, he explains how he reached this conclusion & shares fascinating stories from his new book “How to Hide an Empire.” theroadtonow.com/episodes/e134
Yeah, I know the early 20thC anthropologist Franz Boas dismantled scientific racism and trained Zora Neale Hurston and Margaret Mead. But let’s take a sec to appreciate the contents of his “Sexy Photos to Send—Maybe?” folder.
A few crucial arguments in this article by and Michael Brenes:
1) Alt-ac strategies are a capitulation. They accept the premise that there are "no jobs" when actually there are, they've just been adjunctified.
A Moral Stain on the Profession disq.us/t/3e2xors
Replying to
Fine, whatever. We’ve got our 12 Habits of Highly Effective Nations, and we’re going to see if they work. Diamond examines countries he’s lived in. He also includes Japan because, uh, he has Japanese nieces and cousins by marriage. Really. 9/
Replying to
The attack on Pearl Harbor was many things, among them an object lesson in the perils of the Europe-centered Mercator projection. How could a country in the “Far East” have attacked Hawai‘i, on the western edge of the map? 2/
Replying to
I’ve written an essay for the Journal of American-East Asian Relations to introduce readers to the wild, covert, and profoundly weird world of The Ugly American. 5/5
faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/daniel-immerwa
Replying to
If you need to move your AutoCorrect entries between computers, the file (for US English) is MSO1033.acl. Similarly named files for other languages. They are in different places on different systems, usually in hidden files. But you can look up location.
Roses are red
Cads have two faces
Gosh, there are a lot of
Military bases
Replying to
That map became the basis for the original UN logo, designed by OSS agent Donal McLaughlin. It shows the United States as the center of the world, as it was in Harrison’s map. 9/
Replying to
The comics were all over Latin America, too. When Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart wrote their trail-blazing critique of cultural imperialism, it targeted Donald Duck, whom Dorfman called “the most imperialist of all creatures.” 9/
Replying to
Over years, you accumulate a lot of these. And your writing looks like this:
th gmn scl sct, mwbr, argued tht cpsm devld frm clt.
=
The German social scientist, Max Weber, argued that capitalism developed from culture.
5/
Replying to
It’s easy, seeing some of the images Diamond includes of New Guineans (his first one is below) and reading his talk of “modern ‘Stone Age’ peoples,” to assume Yali to be a random lowlander, innocent of the ways of the wider world. 2/
Replying to
Barks’s comics sold massively abroad. Here’s a card from Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy and pioneer of manga, to Carl Barks. Tezuka was deeply influenced by the comics that arrived in occupied Japan “by the bushelful” from the US. 8/
Time to statehood map. A reminder that, even on the mainland, the territory-to-statehood transition could be long and complicated. Average time was 45 years. Oklahoma took more than a century.
Replying to
By the time Diamond gets to the USA, you see just how empty and vapid his takes are. Political polarization is bad, too few people vote, leadership matters, and we don’t pay teachers enough. All true, but c’mon man. 13/
Replying to
Lots of writing about Harrison. Susan Schulten’s work is especially great. Here’s a taste:
newrepublic.com/article/117835
And check out 's book on this, too.
11/11
Spot-check on piece on aging and creativity. Brooks says that historians are unusual for their creativity at later ages. Average age of the last 10 Bancroft Prize winners whose ages I could easily find, indeed, was 56. Oldest was 70 at time of prize. Katznelson!
Quote Tweet
“The likelihood of a major discovery increases steadily through one’s 20s and 30s and then declines through one’s 40s, 50s, and 60s.... The likelihood of producing a major innovation at age 70 is approximately what it was at age 20—almost nonexistent.” theatlantic.com/magazine/archi
TFW there aren’t any good photography studios in Dakota Territory but you are Teddy Roosevelt so you bring your buckskin, rifle, and ridiculous hat to New York so everyone will understand you are a cowboy now no big deal.
Replying to
Great books on Barks are Thomas Andrae’s Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book and Donald Ault’s Carl Barks: Conversations. Fantagraphics is reprinting the whole Carl Barks Library right now. On Tezuka: comicscube.com/2016/01/the-ca