The American empire is made from bird shit. Literally. Ben Franklin's prediction of nitrogen depletion in farmlands led us to mine the far-off guano islands for nitrogen-rich guano in order to [unsuccessfully] reseed our fields, and that's our first sip of imperialism.
We take Puerto Rico, Guam, The Philippines, the Panama Canal, Guantanamo Bay, Hawaii, etc. After pearl harbor, a [minor] attack that at the time was on a territory and not a state because it was occupied mainly by brown bodies and didn't vibe well with the white mainlanders, we used these conquests as eventual airbases to expand our military footprint and retaliate against Japan and a long list of others.
Countries all over the world started leasing plots of land to us so we could provide them aid and defense. Global manufacturing is so similar country to country because in over 100 territorial points, the US had to ship and reassemble everything in pieces, and that could only work if the manufacturing in those territories matched the US standard.
Down to the diameter of screw threading, this is just a taste of how we Americanized the world. We were drug dealers hooking countries on the US economy. If our military presence fled, small economies would tank. Classic Stockholm Syndrome. This book is about the history we edit out, the history of fine-tuning medicine at the demise of our second-class citizens, of presidents cutting their rabid teeth on lowercase wars, and of many non-white peoples fighting for statehood and the rights that came with it into a country that didn't want anything to do with them.