What schools didn't teach about empire

[bemildred]

By Howard Zinn

With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with military bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a question any more of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the once fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed embrace of the idea.

However, the very idea that the United States was an empire did not occur to me until after I finished my work as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force in the Second World War, and came home. Even as I began to have second thoughts about the purity of the "Good War", even after being horrified by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even after rethinking my own bombing of towns in

Europe, I still did not put all that together in the context of an American "Empire".

I was conscious, like everyone, of the British Empire and the other imperial powers of Europe, but the United States was not seen in the same way. When, after the war, I went to college under the GI Bill of Rights and took courses in US history, I usually found a chapter in the history texts called "The Age of Imperialism". It invariably referred to the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the conquest of the Philippines that followed. It seemed that American imperialism lasted only a relatively few years. There was no overarching view of US expansion that might lead to the idea of a more far-ranging empire - or period of "imperialism".

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JD04Aa02.html

[zonmoy]

1. we became an empire

the moment we started expanding past the Mississippi river. if not earlier.