Welcome to the Empire Files podcast. This is your host, Abby Martin. This is the audio of our show.

You can watch the episodes on our YouTube channel or at the Empirefiles.tv.

How many Americans know that Donald Trump is the president of Guam?

We all grow up learning the official origin story and history of the United States.

What we never learn is what this country really is, the greater United States.

This is the subject of a new book by historian Daniel Emmervar, How to Hide an Empire,

a history of the greater United States.

At a time when reckoning with our history is more urgent than ever, Professor Emmervar lays out,

through years of research, the true size of the American Empire, how it acquired other nations

and hundreds of islands as territories it still controls today, and how whiteness drew the borders of all 50 states.

As the title reflects, this reality is completely hidden to those of us living on the mainland.

And whatever the empire wants hidden should always be brought to light.

So when we first started Empire Files a couple couple years ago, we were hesitant to use the word

empire because it wasn't really in the mainstream lexicon at the time. And that's why it's so

incredible to see your book come out, how to hide an empire, Daniel. Through all your extensive

research, why don't we start off by talking about what makes you quantify the U.S. as an empire?

So there are a couple things that we can mean when we say empire. Empire is often used as a

pejorative, and I think that's why it becomes such a contentious term, to say that the United

States as an empire is to disapprove it. But empire is also a technical term. Empire is a way of referring

to polities that have colonies and outposts. And in that technical sense, the United States is

unambiguously been an empire. It's had overseas territories. In fact, it still has overseas territories

today, and it has some 800 military basis that

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