Howe, again, points out that the most obvious “imperial” project in US history is the one we take most for granted, the conquest of the American continent: “it is the internal expansion of the continental USA, across the intervening hundred years, which evokes the most direct parallels with empire-building elsewhere. Exterminatory war, ‘freelance’ expansionism by adventurers, farmers, prospectors, and religious fanatics, ecological devastation, and drawing up of oft-broken treaties and protectorates, experiments in Indirect Rule and drives for cultural assimilation - all featured at one time or another, just as they did in British, French, or Russian imperialisms.”