First Year Book

Welcome!

We are excited to welcome you to one of the University of Maryland’s most meaningful campus traditions—the First Year Book program. Each year since 1993, the University of Maryland has invited all first-year students to read a single written work that sparks thoughtful conversation, explores big questions, and connects ideas across disciplines.

This year, we invite you to read How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr, a book that provides timely context for current debates and challenges conventional ways of understanding American history. Many of us learn U.S. history through a familiar map of the fifty states and a storyline that treats everything beyond them as peripheral. This book asks you to consider what isn’t included in that iconic map. This country’s history of occupying overseas territories, establishing military bases abroad, and exerting control around the world is more often ignored than acknowledged. These regions and topics shape American life, politics, and culture, as well as the meaning of citizenship, in ways that are impossible to ignore once recognized.

How to Hide an Empire raises especially relevant questions as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. This year provides an opportunity to reflect on whose stories are told and whose are minimized—a time to consider the myths that shape America’s history and its place in the world. Immerwahr’s book asks us to consider: What gets left out when we define a nation only by what appears on an iconic map? Who is included or excluded in discussions about rights, representation, and belonging? And what responsibilities follow from confronting histories that have been minimized, obscured, or treated as exceptions?

The First Year Book program aims to create a shared intellectual experience for the campus, empowering our students to think critically and debate respectfully as we address grand challenges. We hope you’ll join classroom discussions, campus events, and community conversations related to How to Hide an Empire throughout the year. We want you to ask hard questions, follow the evidence, and remain open to challenging perspectives. It’s how we move fearlessly forward, together.

Jennifer King Rice

Jennifer King Rice
Senior Vice President and Provost

William A. Cohen

William A. Cohen
Associate Provost and Dean for Undergraduate Studies