Daniel Immerwahr

Daniel Immerwahr
Born	(1980-05-21) May 21, 1980
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley (PhD) King's College, Cambridge (BA) Columbia University (BA)
Genre	Non-fiction

Daniel Immerwahr (born May 21, 1980) is an American historian and author. He is the Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences at Northwestern University and associate chair of the history department.

His first book, Thinking Small, was published in 2015 and won the Merle Curti Award. His second book, How to Hide an Empire (2019), was a national bestseller, one of the New York Times critics' top books of the year, and winner of the Robert H. Ferrell Prize.

Early life and education

Immerwahr grew up in Swarthmore, PA. He is Jewish and is first cousin twice removed of Clara Immerwahr, the pioneering chemist and first wife of Fritz Haber. He completed an undergraduate degree at Columbia University in 2002, and a second undergraduate degree at King's College, Cambridge in 2004, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley in 2011. From 2011-2012, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University's Committee on Global Thought.

Career

He is a professor of history at Northwestern University.

His work has appeared in n+1, Slate, Jacobin, Dissent, and The New Yorker.

Books

• Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2015, ISBN 978-0-6742-8994-9, OCLC 949790596
• How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, ISBN 978-0-3741-7214-5, OCLC 1088916388

Articles

• "Fort Everywhere: How did the United States become entangled in a cycle of endless war?" (review of David Vine, The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State, University of California Press, 2020, 464 pp.), The Nation, 14/21 December 2020, pp. 34–37.
• "Your Lying Eyes: People now use A.I. to generate fake videos indistinguishable from real ones. How much does it matter?", The New Yorker, 20 November 2023, pp. 54–59. "If by 'deepfakes' we mean realistic videos produced using artificial intelligence that actually deceive people, then they barely exist. The fakes aren't deep, and the deeps aren't fake. [...] A.I.-generated videos are not, in general, operating in our media as counterfeited evidence. Their role better resembles that of cartoons, especially smutty ones." (p. 59.)
• "Everything in Hand: the C.I.A.'s covert ops have mattered – but not in the way that it hoped", The New Yorker, 17 June 2024, pp. 53-57. "After the Second World War, the United States set out to direct politics on a global scale. This mission was unpopular, hence the cloak-and-dagger secrecy, and difficult, hence the regular fiascoes. [...] 'We knew nothing,' the onetime C.I.A. director Richard Helms remembered. [...] Ivy League professors were tasked with steering top students toward intelligence careers. [Particularly] literature students. [...] Something about sorting through ambiguity, paradox, and hidden meanings equipped students for espionage." (p. 54.) "[In the 1950s] hundreds of the CIA's foreign agents were sent to their deaths in [Albania,] Russia, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and the Baltic states... [I]ntelligence officers [then] shifted their attention to [...] the Third World, today more often called the Global South. [But t]he U.S. lacked the generations-deep, place-based colonial knowledge that Britain and France had." (p. 55.) "The Lawrencian fantasy was that U.S. agents would embed themselves in foreign lands. In reality [...] ambitious foreigners infiltrat[ed] the United States. [A long] list of world leaders [...] trained Stateside [...[. [...] The C.I.A. interfered constantly in foreign politics, but its typical mode wasn't micromanaging; it was subcontracting. [...] For all the heady talk of promoting democracy, more than two-thirds of U.S. covert interventions during the Cold War were in support of authoritarian regimes..." (p. 56.) "As the [1990s] wore on, U.S. leaders grew increasingly alarmed about [Iraq dictator] Saddam's continued military capacities. But intelligence was wanting. [...] The combination of scant knowledge and overweening concern created demand, and [Ahmad] Chalabi arrange[d] the supply. He promoted sources who [falsely] claimed that Saddam was stockpiling chemical and biological weapons and had kept working toward nuclear ones. [...] In the end, the C.I.A. has the power to break things, but not the skill to build them. [...] The heart of the issue is the United States' determination to control global affairs." (p. 57.)
• "Doctor's Orders: It used to be progressives who distrusted experts. What happened?", The New Yorker, 26 May 2025, pp. 56–61. "The philosopher Bernard Williams noted that science isn't a free market of ideas but a managed one; without filters against cranks, trolls, and merchants of doubt, knowledge production 'would grind to a halt.' But in science, and in intellectual inquiry more broadly, where you draw the line matters enormously. Keep things too open and you're endlessly debating whether Bush did 9/11. Close them too quickly, though, and you turn hasty, uncertain conclusions into orthodoxies. You also marginalize too many intelligent people, who will be strongly encouraged to challenge your legitimacy by seizing on your missteps, broadcasting your hypocrisies, and waving counter-evidence in your face. That could be the story of the past six decades. ... J.F.K. ... warned of those who adhered to 'doctrines wholly unrelated to reality' and spread 'ignorance and misinformation.' Or at least he planned to issue that warning. En route to giving his intended speech at the Dallas Trade Mart, the President was shot twice and killed." (p. 58.)

External links

• Official Northwestern website