1. Good afternoon!
Phones up
Be ready for a 3-2-1

2. (make an educated guess about what the message is)
3 observations
2 questions
1 inference
(make an educated guess about what the message is)

3. American Expansionism
….a nicer way of saying Imperialism...

4. What is imperialism?
Industrialized nations seeking raw materials and resources from non- industrialized nations
Think of it as a new form of colonialism
It can take many shapes
Direct colonial control
Think Britain ruling India
Foreign businesses dominating local politics
Think US business interests Central America
Sphere of Influence
Everyone and China
Protectorate
Powerful industrialized nation “protecting” and “guiding” weaker nations
Early players:
Belgium, Great Britain, France
Later players
US, Germany, Japan

5. So why do we become imperialists?

6. The Closing of the Frontier
“Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, continuous recession, and the advance of American settlements westward, explain American development….And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period in American history.”
~Frederick Jackson Turner

9. How did Manifest Destiny help influence Imperialism?

10. MONEY New markets Territory seen as a stepping stone to bigger prize
Build up powerful navy
Industrialized and have things to sell
exotic raw materials
Sugar and pineapples
Territory seen as a stepping stone to bigger prize
Foothold in Pacific led to developed Navy
Greater access to China and Japan

11. Have students analyze the implications of the great connector

12. . . The interesting and significant feature of this changing attitude is the turning of the eyes outward, instead of inward only, to seek the welfare of the country. To affirm the importance of distant markets, and the relation to them of our own immense powers of production, implies logically the recognition of the link that joins the products and the markets,--that is, the carrying trade; the three together constituting that chain of maritime power to which Great Britain owes her wealth and greatness.
Despite a certain great original superiority conferred by our geographical nearness and immense resources,--due, in other words, to our natural advantages, and not to our intelligent preparations,--the United States is woefully unready, not only in fact but in purpose to assert in the Caribbean and Central America a weight of influence proportioned to the extent of her interests. We have not the navy… that will weigh seriously in any disputes with those nations whose interests will conflict there with our own.
Source: Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Interest of America in Sea Power (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1897), pp

15. White Man’s Burden “Civilize” Christianize
Save them for their own good
When have we done this in our own country?
Spread democracy
But really?
Ideas of racial superiority
Social Darwinism

18. Literally “White Man’s Burden”
(a poem by Rudyard Kipling written in response to the US and the Philippines
“Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go send your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child…”