Ms. Maria Hernandez Professor Dr. Botson History 1302 MF 10:00 AM -12:00 PM The reasons Japan attacked the US was for the access to natural resources such as oil, rubber, coal rice and tin through Southeast Asia. This also was a preventive action which kept the US Pacific Fleet ships from interfering with military actions. In addition, Japan and US had tensions and hostility since the 1920s and with the attacks on the USS Panay and the Nanking Massacre the Americans’ public opinion turn against Japan resulting in a Western fear of Japanese expansion. Furthermore, Japan invaded Indochina in 1940 leading US to stop shipments of airplanes, parts, machine tools and gasoline therefore Japan interpreted as an unfriendly act.
The Disguised Truth About American Christianity In “The Christian Paradox: How a Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong,” Bill Mckibben argues that the way Americans view the messages and teachings Christianity displays are far from what the Gospels of the Bible actually say and teach. McKibben points out how our nation is the most outspoken when it comes to Christianity. However, he later goes on to claim that as the most outspoken of the Christian nations our actions and decisions do not reflect what we preach. It is this contradiction that McKibben insists is the paradox of our Christianity in America. According to a statistic laid out by McKibben, seventy-five percent of the American population is under the belief that “God helps those who
Planters in Hawaii were understandably very displeased with this turn of events, so they plotted to make Hawaii an official territory of the United States. With tensions rising between American-Hawaiians and the government of Hawaii, the sugar growers continued to push for Hawaii to be annexed by the U.S. Finally in 1900 Hawaii became an official U.S. territory. I think the annexation of Hawaii is a clear-cut example of American Imperialism at both its finest and worst. All the facts point straight towards imperialism, such as building a naval base on Pearl Harbor and granting favored-nation status to control the economy of Hawaii.
Mahan thought that the country with the most powerful navy would control the earth. He believed we should build a canal, and to protect the canal by controlling Hawaii and Cuba, which he thought was a necessity. During this time, thoughts of Anglo-Saxon superiority were a common "excuse" for imperialism. The political scientist and professor of Columbia University, John Burgess said the Anglo-Saxon races were "particularly endowed with the capacity for establishing national state, they are entrusted with the mission of conducting the political civilization of the modern world." Even before McKinley's presidency, he showed interest in foreign markets for the surplus of American products.
Then, after McKinley declared war upon the Spanish in 1889, America could use imperialism to gain land and power in the world. America declared war on Spain in April 1889, not to gain land, but to assist Cuba in gaining its independence. Only later into the war, it realized how it can benefit through imperialism. The newly acquired land increased America’s resources and gave them new countries to trade with and worked as an advantage for the U.S. military as well. Turner believed that the idea of the frontier shaped the American being and their characteristics.
In 1898, the United States fought the Spanish-American War. The victory over Spain made the United States a colonial power. The Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, as well as the formerly independent nation of Hawaii, became American possessions. In 1895 civil war broke out in Cuba between Spain and the Cubans. The conflict was described by Senator Redfield Proctor of Vermont as bloody and brutal.
Missionaries did their job of preaching that the savages of the world need to be civilized and Christianized. Thus, the United States began to become very nationalistic, and tensions with foreign powers began to rise. Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” gave a call to the white population of the United States to reach out and ‘civilize’ the rest of the world With the White Man’s Burden and the widespread dogma of social Darwinism, the United States also started taking advantage of the fact that it could make quite a fortune by doing what it felt was ‘right’. Roosevelt’s quote, “Our endeavors overseas are not for the purpose of empire, but rather salvation.” spoke of what the ‘White Man’ was supposed to do. The United States claimed they weren’t taking advantage of the Cubans, Filipinos, and Hawaiians because of imperialistic measures, but because it was what the ‘needed’ to do.
The common belief today is that our nation, the United States of America, was founded on Christian principles by colonists who fled from religious persecution. Most American’s are under the impression that the Founding Fathers came from the same background as the Puritans or Pilgrims and instilled their Christian beliefs into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But the early presidents and patriots were generally Deists or Unitarians, who believed in one God, but found fault with organized religion. When you examine the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights, you will see the absence of any reference to Christianity and the Constitution has no reference to God or religion except to ensure it wasn’t part of America’s framework. The United States of America was not founded on Christian principles but on the enlightened principle of human rights, that all people are created equal, and endowed with certain rights, among those are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
“Cultural imperialism is the practice of promoting, distinguishing, separating, and artificially injecting the culture or language of one nation in another” Usually, the country who is colonizing must be large and economically powerful to influence a smaller and less affluent nation. When arguing about American cultural imperialism, one must refer to the United States as the “American Empire” This term expresses the “historical expansionism and the current political, economical, and cultural influence” of the United States on the world. American cultural imperialism redefines cultures and creates cultural diversity. Cultures all over the world are seeing their basic beliefs altered in significant ways. Cultural diversity promotes equality by minimizing differences.
APUSH DBQ ESSAY The view of overseas expansion in the late 19th and early 20th century was mainly driven by Imperialism. With that being said, there emerged two groups with viewpoints on overseas expansion, imperialists and anti-imperialists. Although there are plenty of differences, the main one between the two was over territorial expansion. The imperialists were all for it, thinking that it would help the American market and the depressed economy from the panic of 1893. On the other hand, the anti-imperialists argued that it went against our American democracy and was harmful to the territories we were trying to acquire and our country itself.