Writing the History of the Greater United States: A Reply to Paul Kramer

Abstract

Paul Kramer is a luminary in the field of U.S. foreign relations, known especially for his penetrating book on the colonial Philippines, The Blood of Government, and a series of influential and wide-ranging reflections on historiography. In “How Not to Write the History of U.S. Empire,” Kramer offers another historiographic intervention. This one, however, is focused on a single work, my 2016 Bernath Lecture, “The Greater United States,” given at the American Historical Association and published in Diplomatic History. In that lecture, I propose a different unit of analysis for the field of U.S. history. Rather than thinking of the United States as the contiguous blob, bounded by Canada, Mexico, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, I invite historians to consider all the land under U.S. jurisdiction as part of the United States and therefore as part of its history. Borrowing a term from the past, I call this wider geography the “Greater United States.”