Daniel Immerwahr

I am a scholar of U.S. and global history. I teach at Northwestern University and I'm a contributing writer at The New Yorker. My last name is pronounced IM-mer-var and my Erdös number is 5.

Books:

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (FSG), a national bestseller, New York Times critics' top books of 2019 title, and winner of the Robert H. Ferrell Prize

"Wry, readable, and often astonishing." - New York Times

indiebound, amazon, powells, bn

Thinking Small (Harvard), a critical account of grassroots foreign aid. Winner of the Merle Curti Award in intellectual history and the Society for U.S. Intellectual History's book prize.

indiebound, amazon, powells, bn

Teaching:

• I've taught at Berkeley, Columbia, Northwestern, and San Quentin State Prison. My main teaching subjects are global history and U.S. foreign relations. Syllabi here. Due to the state of the academic job market, I am not admitting doctoral students as advisees, though I happily serve on dissertation committees in Northwestern's excellent program.

Some articles and essays (more here):

• The Power of the Pirates, The New Yorker
• Mother Trees and Socialist Forests: Is the 'Wood Wide Web' a Fantasy? The Guardian
• Make It Hurt: What Frantz Fanon and Ian Fleming Agreed On, The New Yorker
• Burning Down the House: Slavery and Arson in America, Journal of American History, preprint
• Zoning Out: On Economic Zones, New York Review of Books
• Your Lying Eyes: What the Doomsayers Get Wrong about Deepfakes, The New Yorker
• The Pitchfork of History: Beyond the Myth of Rural America, The New Yorker
• Bury My Heart at Waco, The New Yorker
• Are We Really Prisoners of Geography? The Guardian
• Forgetting the Apocalypse: Why Our Nuclear Fears Have Faded and Why That's Dangerous, The Guardian
• Change the Map, Change the Moral: A New History of World War II, The Atlantic
• A Deranged Pyroscape: How Fires Across the World Have Grown Weirder, The Guardian
• The Quileute Dune: Frank Herbert, Indigeneity, and Empire, Journal of American Studies
• The Strange, Sad Death of America's Political Imagination, New York Times
• History Isn't Just for Patriots, Washington Post
• Should America Still Police the World? The New Yorker
• Ten-Cent Ideology: Donald Duck Comics and U.S. Global Hegemony, Modern American History
• The Center Does Not Hold: Jill Lepore's Awkward Embrace of the Nation, The Nation
• All Over the Map: Jared Diamond Struggles to Understand a Connected World, The New Republic
• How the US Has Hidden Its Empire, The Guardian
• The Lethal Crescent: Where the Cold War Was Hot, The Nation
• The Greater United States: Territory and Empire in U.S. History, Diplomatic History
• Debate over this lecture with Paul Kramer here (Kramer) and here
• Polanyi in the United States: Peter Drucker, Karl Polanyi, and the Midcentury Critique of Economic Society, Journal of the History of Ideas
• Caste or Colony?: Indianizing Race in the United States, Modern Intellectual History

Other stuff:

• My website The Books of the Century lists bestsellers, Book-of-the-Month Club selections, and other notable books for every year of the twentieth century.
• And, guano: