When I first encountered Alvita Akiboh’s research project several years ago, I was pleasantly surprised by a photo she presented of my hometown branch of the United States Postal Service. To many folks familiar with Post Office iconography, it looks like any other post office in any of the 50 US states. Yet I recognized that this office is thousands of miles away in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in the village of Barrigada (Barigåda) in the US territory of Guam (Guåhan). As someone born and raised in Guam, I was ecstatic to see that Akiboh saw how American national symbols become imperial symbols across the US empire—and was traveling the world to write this history.

With archival research spanning the North American continent and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, Akiboh’s stellar first book, Imperial Material: National Symbols in the US Colonial Empire, sheds light on how the little things—dollar bills, stamps, flags, and the colors red, white, and blue—symbolically tethered together the far-flung territories and colonies under US sovereignty. From the annual flag-raising ceremony in American Sāmoa to George Washington’s image on a Philippine peso, she uncovers how these “imperial materials” reflected how much effort US state and nonstate actors took to display US sovereignty and Americanize their colonial subjects through the little things they would see and touch every day.

The winner of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Myrna F. Bernath Book Award, Imperial Material brings together the histories of the US colonies into a single historical narrative, a much-needed and innovative practice to show how the US empire worked and continues to work across its imperial domain. After years of following this project, I finally had the opportunity to talk about it with Akiboh, an assistant professor of history at Yale University. What you will read next is our conversation.

Kristin Oberiano (KO): Will you tell us a little bit about your book Imperial Material and what brought you to this topic?

Alvita Akiboh (AA): Imperial Material is a history of the role that symbolic objects like flags, stamps, and money have played in the US overseas colonies. These are places that are legally neither foreign nor domestic to the United States. They are often thought of as the borders of the US national community, and so have a really complex relationship to objects with national iconography.

I first came to the topic very early in grad school when I was researching the extension of the US Postal Service to overseas colonies. I was looking at stamps that were used in the colonial Philippines and I found that they had a really familiar cast of characters like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Benjamin Franklin, among others. I was really struck by the objects and confused, because so much of the story we get told (if we get told a story about US formal colonies at all) is that the US government really wanted to downplay the existence of the colonies. So seeing these objects that depicted US national heroes really made the fact that the Philippines was a formal US colony plainly obvious to any postal user or collector who might come across them. This realization got me thinking about how, while formal colonies might be out of sight, out of mind for a lot of people in the continental United States, it is really plainly obvious to those who are in a US colony that you are in a US colony, and these symbolic objects are a key part of that. The US flag is always flying; if you buy something, the money is US money; and the stamps are US stamps.

KO: Can you tell us a little bit about why colonial officials thought that these stamps and dollar bills offered new ways to impose and codify American power?

AA: I was surprised over and over again how important these symbolic objects were in the minds of colonial officials and how central they were for showing US power and sovereignty. These imperialists, mainly soldiers, viewed the initial act of planting the flag as the symbolic act of establishing US sovereignty. In some places, this involved replacing the flag of a former colonizer like Spain with the flag of a new colonizer: the United States. In others, it meant supplanting the flag of an independent nation and declaring the supremacy of the US flag—a symbolic attack on local and/or Indigenous claims to sovereignty. But for a lot of the imperialists who followed the initial establishment of US sovereignty, both state and nonstate actors, they really saw objects like flags, stamps, and money as an important part of Americanization, which in their minds was an effort to make the colonies and their inhabitants more closely resemble their idea of the United States and their idea of Americans. They had this belief that, just as in the continental United States, when someone in a new US colony saw the US flag or George Washington on their money or stamps, the national iconography would be a constant reminder of their association with the United States and their place in this national community. These imperialists put a really astonishing amount of time, effort, money, and resources into creating and circulating these symbolic objects and teaching people who live in the colonies what these symbols should mean to them. They launched a major effort to try and make sure that people in the colonies absorbed those messages—including the really uncomfortable message, given their legal status, that when they saw or interacted with these objects, they should think of themselves as fellow Americans. So you had people—whom Congress refused to grant citizenship to, in places where the Supreme Court decided constitutional rights did not have to apply—who were still surrounded by these US national symbols.

KO: Was there one particular object that surprised you?

AA: The Philippine ten-peso bill is really interesting to me, and it was one of the first objects that I wrote about in a 2017 article in Diplomatic History. It looks exactly like the US one-dollar bill with Washington’s portrait that we use today in the United States, and at first I thought it must be that this Philippine bill was modeled after the US one-dollar bill. But then I learned that it was the other way around and the design was adopted on Philippine money in 1903 and wasn’t proposed for US money until the late 1920s. There was actually this big controversy where, as the federal government was reforming the size and design of US money, bureaucrats realized that if they adopt a similar design for the US one-dollar bill, it might be confused with the Philippine ten-peso bill. So the federal government asked the US colonial government in the Philippines to take George Washington off of the money, and the governor-general of the Philippines point-blank refused. He argued that the image of George Washington on money was doing important work in the Philippines. It was just one of those moments where you are sitting in the archive and you say to your historical actors, “Wow, thank you for saying this out loud and thank you for writing it down.” It was just such a clear statement from the governor-general of the Philippines that he really, truly believed in the power of something as banal and mundane as a little piece of paper money to have a really important influence on people’s viewpoints of US rule in the Philippines. He believed in it so much that he was willing to go up against his superiors in DC and tell them no, George Washington is staying on Philippine money.

KO: That is really cool. To clarify, you’re arguing that the Philippine dollar bill ended up being the inspiration for what we have in our wallets now?

AA: Yeah, so US money used to be quite large—about 3 x 7″. There was no way that it could be confused with US Philippine paper money, which was much smaller, like the size of the bills that we are more familiar with today. When the government decided to create separate money for the Philippines, they went with the smaller bill size to save money, and they threw George Washington’s portrait on there as part of their Americanization efforts. By the 1920s, the US federal government wanted to adopt this smaller size for US money and that was when it got flagged as a concern for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing—the fear that the two bills might be confused. These federal bureaucrats were thinking, “Obviously we get to keep Washington, we are the United States” (the implication there being that the Philippines was not part of the United States, despite decades of “Americanization” at this point). But for the US governor-general of the Philippines, he very much made the argument that Washington was also an important figure for the US colonial Philippines.

KO: At the same time that you have imperial agents using all of these symbolic material and imagery for Americanization in US colonies, they were also depicting figures like José Rizal, the Filipino nationalist largely credited with launching the Philippine Revolution, right? What role did someone like Rizal play in this national imaginary, especially when there were moves to have the Philippines become independent, especially in the 1930s and later? Was there a shift over time?

AA: José Rizal is a really interesting figure because Spanish officials executed him in 1896 before the advent of US rule in 1898. US officials talked a lot about whether they could use José Rizal to create a version of Filipino nationalism that did not challenge US sovereignty in the Philippines. They believed Rizal was a safe figure because he was an anti-colonial revolutionary, but against Spain, not the United States. So that is the one Filipino that US officials decided to put on the first series of US stamps and money. They had a lot of American figures, but then they also had some figures from the Spanish colonial past in the Philippines, like Magellan and Legazpi, so there was this mix. But they were very clear that their goal was to choose a cast of characters that they thought conveyed a vision of a nascent Filipino nation while still making it safe for the continuation of US colonial rule.

KO: That is so interesting that they are doing this at the same time. They are wary of the colonial context, but they are trying to merge these two contradictory figures of Rizal and Washington, so that seems like they are taking into consideration the history of the Philippines.

AA: Yes. They basically co-opted Rizal and tried to argue that he would have supported a period of “tutelage” under US rule before independence. But these officials who were willing to have Rizal on the national iconography consciously excluded people like Emilio Aguinaldo, the president of the First Philippine Republic who fought for independence from Spain and then the United States during what’s commonly known as the Philippine-American War, even though people at the time often compared Aguinaldo’s fight for Philippine independence to Washington’s fight for US independence.

you had people—whom Congress refused to grant citizenship to—who were surrounded by these U.S. national symbols.

KO: Were there any failed imperial materials? Meaning, things that people dreamt up, but that didn’t actually go through?

AA: There were tons of designs that didn’t get chosen. It is really interesting being in the archives and reading how many letters there are and how many designs got proposed. It is especially fascinating how many ordinary people were constantly writing in to the federal government saying who they thought should be on stamps and money and why.

One interesting story is that in the 1930s, during a moment of a lot of activity from the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and resistance all over the island, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and the US Post Office thought it would be a great idea to put out a commemorative stamp for the 40th anniversary of 1898—in other words, commemorating the US colonization of Puerto Rico. They had some designs and ideas, and they wrote to the US governor of Puerto Rico, asking him what he thought. He wrote back and basically said, “I think this is a terrible idea. I think it is a really bad time and the one thing we don’t want to do is remind people of the anniversary of the US occupation of Puerto Rico while there is so much resistance against US rule.” And the officials in DC were like, “Oh, we hadn’t heard anything about that.” So seeing the flows of information (or lack thereof) is interesting. Something that officials in DC thought would be pretty banal, like celebrating what to them was just an anniversary, would provoke a strong reaction from officials in Puerto Rico who had to let them know that no, the island is actually a tinderbox right now.

KO: Can you talk a little bit more about how imperial materials have been used in acts of resistance or criticism of US empire?

AA: This is really interesting because initially US imperialists were placing so much importance on these objects and sending the clear message that they were associating reverence for these symbols with loyalty to the United States. As a result, people in the colonies reached for these objects all the time when they wanted to express their discontent or resist US rule.

Puerto Rico in the 1930s is a great example of this. Protesters all over the island were tearing down US flags on schools and other public buildings. The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party for a while printed its own currency signed by the Nationalist leader Pedro Albizu Campos as the presidente of an independent República de Puerto Rico. And they put Puerto Rican national heroes like Francisco Ramírez or José de Diego in the same places that those American portraits usually would be.

There were also more-intimate acts of resistance, like Hawaiian flag quilting, where Hawaiian women would stitch quilts that had four Hawaiian flags around the borders. They usually had some royal iconography in the center, like the royal coat of arms of the monarchy that was overthrown by US citizens in the early 1890s. Those quilts are really interesting because they were not meant to publicly challenge US rule. They were not meant to be public objects at all. They were kept private in people’s homes. Many of them were even burned upon the death of the creator because they really were not meant for public viewing or consumption. But a lot of women would write or speak about what the quilts meant to them, saying things like, “I keep this quilt hanging above my bed so that all of my children can be born under the flag of the Hawaiian kingdom and so that I can die under the flag of the Hawaiian Kingdom.” For these women, it didn’t matter if the US flag was flying outside of ‘Iolani Palace. In their homes, they still flew the flag of the Hawaiian Kingdom.

KO: What was your archival research like? Did you do the imperial archive and national archives? Did you go to territories like the Philippines? How did that shape the way that you are asking questions and how you are interpreting the research that you are doing?

AA: I did both. I did a fair amount of research in the continental United States. My overseas research started in the Caribbean. I went to Puerto Rico for a few weeks, then I went to St. Thomas and St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands. This was in early 2017, so it was the hundredth anniversary of the 1917 US purchase of the Virgin Islands from Denmark. Every March 31, they have an annual holiday called Transfer Day that marks the anniversary of the first raising of the US flag. I was there right around that time, so there was a lot of conversation going on about what that hundredth anniversary of the first raising of the US flag meant to people, and specifically whether it ought to be a day of celebration or a somber commemoration of the continuation of colonialism. After that, I went across the Pacific to the Philippines where I spent a few weeks in the metro Manila area at various archives. Then I went to Guam, Hawai‘i, and finally to American Samoa, where they were also preparing for their annual holiday in April celebrating the first raising of the US flag.

I had very different experiences in all of these places, but in every place, I had great experiences in the archives and I also had people who took time out of their days to share sources and their own insights about the current state of US imperialism where they live. It was a lot of travel, but it was also very enlightening, and the book would definitely not be the same had it only been written from the perspective of the materials in DC.

It’s just different when you actually go and see it yourself. When you get on a plane and travel hours and hours and hours and thousands of miles, and then you get off and the first thing you see is a giant American flag. The first thing you are meant to feel as soon as you land in a place like Guam, for example, is that you are still in the United States. The sign says “Welcome to Guam U.S.A.,” with the official motto being “Where America’s Day Begins.” There is a big mural on the main road that goes around the island with American flags on it. I think being really immersed in that shaped how I approached my sources. Speaking to local people really echoed what I was reading in the archives—that there is just no one opinion about what these objects, what these symbols, and what being under US rule mean to people. You have some people who feel a very strong attachment to these objects and feel very patriotic. You have others who outright reject them and criticize these symbols as symbols of colonialism. And a lot of people just feel really ambivalent about the United States and about being under US rule, which I think is an experience that a lot of people in the continental United States have as well.

KO: What are the overall takeaways that you want your readers to get from your book?

AA: At one level, for people from the continental United States who maybe have not thought much about the colonies, I hope they are able to realize that a lot of the things they associate with life in the continental United States—like pledging allegiance to the flag or living with all of these national symbols—have also been a part of life in the colonies for over a century. In doing so, I want to trouble that distinction most people have between the continental United States and its colonies. I also want to show that efforts to colonize and Americanize the nation’s overseas territories didn’t go without questioning. I hope people can see the way colonized people reacted, responded to, and repurposed these objects, which also reshaped their meaning in ways that we don’t often take into account because many people don’t consider what has happened in the colonies as having much influence on people’s lives in the continental United States. Just because people in the territories may have an ambivalent relationship to the United States or these objects doesn’t mean that their experience is somehow outside of US history. I also hope that, for people who are either from these places or deeply familiar with them, that there might be something useful about taking a broader view and showing moments where things were different in different places, but also those moments where similar things were happening in different places across the empire. I hope it shows that it is possible to write histories of the entire colonial empire that are still attuned to the specificities of each place.

KO: Do you want to hear a really interesting, funny story about me growing up in Guam?

AA: Yes.

KO: I went to Catholic school in Guam, but every morning we would have an assembly where we would do “The Star-Spangled Banner” and then the “The Guam Hymn”” (“Fanohge CHamoru”), or the regional anthem for Guam, on opposite days, so we would go back and forth.

Part of it was flag raising. I was a color guard for that for my seventh- and eighth-grade years, so I would do the flag raising and march out. So from a really early age, this focus on American symbols was there all the time. The US flag flies above the Guam flag and then you do raise them together.

I’m also thinking about how, in the high schools in Guam, where I grew up, there is George Washington High School and then John F. Kennedy High School.

AA: Oh, that is so interesting. One of the things that really struck me when I was doing my archival research that I hadn’t expected was how mundane the fact of present-day colonialism is in these places. There is a sense, when you look at global history, that there was a period of decolonization in the decades following World War II, and that any remaining colonies in the 21st century are huge outliers that everyone sees as anachronistic. But for people who live in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, some of their neighboring islands are also still colonies. For example, when you travel from the US Virgin Islands to the neighboring British Virgin Islands, you go from a territory under the US flag to a territory under the British flag. The same goes for all the US, British, French, and Dutch islands in the region. In all these places, the flag of the colonizing country still flies in the 21st century. That was a mental shift for me as someone from the continental United States who learned a certain version of the history of decolonization: recognizing that in certain regions of the world, colonialism is very much alive and well and the United States is just one of the colonial powers still around to this day. 

Featured-image photograph courtesy of Alvita Akiboh.