America Used to Have an Overseas Empire. What Happened to It?

A few years ago I was preparing to write a magazine profile of Rodrigo Duterte, who had then recently been elected as president of the Philippines, when I came across “The White Man’s Burden,” Rudyard Kipling’s famous ode to imperialism, in a history book. I had never seen the full title before: “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands.” I had always thought it was a racist relic of the British empire! But no, Kipling wrote it after the U.S. won the Philippines from the Spanish in the Spanish-American War in 1898. The victory had announced

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