Throughline - How the US became America

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

In the late 1890s, the United States fought wars and backed independence movements around the world. By the time the fighting was over, the US emerged as a new global power —and with it, a new identity. This week: how the U.S. became an empire, and why it started calling itself America.To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is America in Pursuit, a limited-run series from ThruLine and NPR. I'm Rand Abd al-Fahtar. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago, when the country's founders penned its breakup letter with the King of England and launched a revolution founded on the principles of democracy. For years after that, the U.S. was seen as a shining beacon of what democracy could look like, an inspiration to other colonized countries looking to shake off their shackles. And then in 1898, the U.S. made the crucial decision to go to war with Spain

in support of Cuban and Puerto Rican rebels fighting for independence from Spain. But that wasn't the only place the U.S. military got involved. The next year, the U.S. got involved in another rebellion, in another Spanish territory. This time in a nation on the other side of the world. The Philippines. Suddenly, very confusingly, the United States takes the Philippines from Spain. The U.S. ended the war by purchasing the Philippines from Spain for $20 million. And suddenly, the U.S. was no longer this democratic underdog, but an imperial player in its own right.

Today on the show, how the U.S. became an empire, changed its name from the United States, to America and why that matters. That story right after a quick break. It should be the earnest wish and paramount aim of the military administration to win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines. President William McKinley. In February 1899, Filipinos began a new fight for independence, this time against the United States. You know, you can imagine the dashed hopes of people who'd been fighting for independence,

suddenly you have to realize they have to do it again. And they do do it again. This is Daniel Imervar. I wrote a book called How to Hide an Empire, a History of the Greater United States. He's a history professor at Northwestern University. And it becomes a war that just consumes so many lives. I hope that when they are conquered, they will be made to see for many years the iron hand of military rule, the only kind for which they are suited.

The United States is burning villages. U.S. forces are concentrating people in camps or garrison towns, where they're cut off from food supplies. It's torturing people with a kind of water-based torture that bears a discomfiting resemblance to waterboarding today. Back then it was called the water cure, where dirty water was put into insurgents' mouths or suspected insurgents' mouths until they sort of,

of couldn't take it anymore. And it becomes a scandalous war. What people quickly see back in the U.S. mainland and all over the world are accounts and photographs of, you know, trenches full of Filipino corpses and Filipino nationalists who are seeking independence, getting tortured and killed. And that's really hard to understand how that's compatible with the animating virtues of the United States, the core values of the country, at least the core values that had been articulated in 1776. Teddy Roosevelt, who of course would later become president, said this about Filipinos. So far as I'm aware, not one competent witness who has actually known the facts believes the Filipinos capable of self-government at present or believes that such an effort

would result in anything but a horrible confusion of tyranny and anarchy. The institutions of a free republic cannot at a leap be transplanted into wholly alien soil among a people who have not the slightest conception of liberty and self-government as we use those words. You might as well try to transplant a full-grown oak into alien soil. In other words, democracy works in the U.S., not in the Philippines. That war drags on. It just does not end, and it drags on basically until 1913, so from 1899 to 1913. We think that that war killed some three-quarters of a million people.

The U.S. was taking control of nations across the world. It annexed Guam and Hawaii, and this brought up an identity crisis. So, you know, for all the talk about the United States of extending liberty, this stuff makes headlines, and it impinges on the consciousness of mainlanders such that it becomes harder to think of the United States as just a contiguous collection of states because it's quite obvious that the U.S. flag is flying in all sorts of places. The sudden move towards imperial expansion in the late 19th century and the bloody, scandalous conflict in the Philippines

caused the United States to redefine its identity, its place in the world, and even to reconsider its own name. When Daniel Imovar was writing How to Hide an Empire, he noticed something. At some point in the late 19th century, around the time of the Filipino-American War, the name for the United States, sort of changed. I did not go into this, having any thought that the name of the country had changed at all.

I mean, I, you know, I got a doctoral degree in U.S. history, and at no point had I read anything about that. I'd always been interested in the fact that the common shorthand, at least, you know, that I was familiar with for the United States was America. And I was sort of aware that that was something that would, you know, piss people from other parts of the Americas off reliably. But I just assumed that was there from the get-go. So I had this kind of amazing moment where I was in the Library of Congress, which one of the great things about the Library of Congress is not just all the manuscript and archival collections they have. It's also that it is a repository library, which means that pretty much every book published is there. So I had this great experience where I was just plowing through books from around the time when the United States takes a number of overseas territories. And I found one that was written by a British writer.

He said, you know, it's really funny because before 1898, we would always refer to the United States as America. And we were constantly getting corrected. Like, and people would always say, no, no, no, no, America is not the name of our country. It is the United States. Don't call it America. That's wrong. Don't get it twisted. And then the author said, and then the war with Spain happened in 1898.

And now it's like exactly the opposite. it. Now, whenever we refer to the country as the United States, we get corrected the other way. And they say, no, no, no, we call it America. That's how we've always called it. That's how we think of the country. And I read that and I thought, that can't possibly be true. And then I looked.

And I thought, oh my God, that's right. Wow. Another way that you can see it, and this kind of stunned me is I looked at all of the anthems I could find about the United States. And so it would be like, you know, these are familiar to us today. Yankee Doodle. Hail to the Chief. My country tis of thee. Battle cry of freedom. Same deal on the other side.

Battle him of the Republic, stars in stripe forever, and the star-spangled banner. These are all 19th century or 18th century songs that people sang about the United States. Not a single one of them mentions the word America in its lyrics. The national anthem, Star-Spangled Banner, does not refer to America. At any point, like you might not know which country is being referred to because the name of the country, at least the name that I was familiar with, is nowhere in the lyrics to this. America the beautiful and God bless America,

those are all anthems that come after 1898. But by the end of the 19th century, when the U.S. is emerging as this like world power, something changes, right? Yeah, so it's interesting. By this time, there's still a kind of evasion about referring to the United States of America in shorthand as just America,

and people tend to go for the republic, the Union, the United States, sometimes if you're writing it, it might just be the U period states. Things change at the end of the 19th century, and it's not the way you might think it would be. It's not a just sort of gradual shift. As far as I can tell,

there's actually a pretty abrupt shift. It all started to change with the U.S.'s decision to wage war in Cuba and the Philippines and the country's eventual takeover of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. And then at the same time, in a sort of burst of imperial enthusiasm, it also takes the non-Spanish lands of Hawaii and American Sommelin. So very quickly, the United States has a really serious and populous overseas empire.

And it just becomes clear to everyone who's paying attention that the borders of the United States have just changed dramatically in a very short amount of time, and that that might have some serious implications for the identity of the United States. once the Philippines is part of the United States, once Puerto Rico is part of the country, then people start to have very different thoughts, and they start to think, is this really a union of states?

Because suddenly the name no longer works in any way. It's not a union, because this was certainly not consensual. It is not a collection of states because places like the Philippines are quite clearly colonies, and it's not at all clear that they're going to be states, and it also isn't entirely restricted to the Americas either. The contradictions of these seemingly colonial wars caused many U.S. citizens to question what the country even stood for.

But the reality is, the wars of expansion had been building for a century and had many supporters. Some people are quite proud of that. People like Teddy Roosevelt, an ardent imperialist, are quite eager to revise how they see the United States. If you think about what it is if you're a young man in the 1890s, you know, let's say you're in your 30s, you were just born or very young while the Civil War was happening. The Civil War was your dad's generation.

And so by the 1890s, the opportunities to prove oneself on the battlefield like your dad did, those seem to be vanishing. And there's, you know, part of what seems to be in the air is men like Teddy Roosevelt who want to be hard. and who have a real commitment and investment in a certain kind of violent masculinity and are eager for opportunities for that. So there's a lot of jingoism or war fever that has to do with people who want to have an opportunity for the United States to have more warfare.

You know, at the same time as that's all happening, there's this theory in the air that grows quite popular that the democracy in the United States has been sustained by the presence of a frontier. And in 1890, the Census Bureau says, actually the United States technically doesn't really have any more settlement frontier. Its borders aren't growing. And so whatever historical experience has characterized the United States to this day is over. And we're imagining a different kind of the United States.

There's a solution. Make more frontier. Sees more territory. And that's what brings us to how all of a sudden presidents go from calling the country. The United States, the Republic, or the United States, the Republic, or the, union or something like that. To Teddy Roosevelt taking office and rebranding the country, America. You know, his first message to Congress, he refers to it as America, and he's gone.

Like, I found a two-week period where he uses the word America to refer to the country, just in that two-week period, more than every past president combined had. And once Roosevelt takes office and kind of rebrands the country in this way, he's not the only one doing it, then you just see, you know, that's it. you know, now it's entirely normal to refer to the United States as America. And I think part of the thought here, and we have contemporary evidence that this is the case, is that people like Roosevelt don't find as much sense and comfort in the United States as their predecessors did because they're actually aware that the political character of the United States is changing

and that it might make sense to have a different kind of way to refer to it that doesn't involve describing it as a union of states because they're forthrightly imagining their country to be an empire. That's it for this week's episode of America in Pursuit. And yes, duly noted, this whole series refers to the U.S. as America. If you want to hear the whole story about how the U.S. became America, listen to our full-length episode called Becoming America. It's actually one of the first episodes we ever made on ThruLine. And make sure to join us next week

when we keep exploring the geography of what constitutes the United States. it states, not just through expansion, but by creating and closing borders. Customs officers start saying, you know, this is impossible for us to police this space that people can just walk through John Brickwood's saloon and we can't see if they're entering the U.S. or Mexico. The story of the first border wall along the U.S. and Mexico border. Don't miss it. This episode was produced by Kiana Mogadam and edited by Christina Kim with help from the

throughline production team. Music as always by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Noguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Minor, and Lindsay McKenna. We're your host, Rand Abd Fattah, and Ramtin Arablui. Thank you for listening.