Summary

This section encompasses “Introduction: Looking Beyond the Logo Map,” and the first three chapters of Part I: The Colonial Empire. The introduction opens with a description of the attacks on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Immerwahr points out that on the same day, bombs were also dropped on the Philippines, which was also a U.S. territory at the time. He suggests that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt chose to emphasize the attacks against Hawai’i because he believed that the public would perceive Hawai’i to be more American than the Philippines.

Immerwahr in the introduction then goes on to compare the so-called “logo map” (the image of the continental United States, also known as the “mainland”) with an image of how the Greater United States would have looked in 1941. Immerwahr explains that even though some of the islands that the U.S. possessed...