Reasons For The American Empire In The 1800s

In the mid-late 1800’s New Empires started to gain power and grew dramatically. The new and upcoming empires were, Japan, United States of America, and Germany. These countries had been slowly gaining power for their entire existence, but were never considered world powers. Well that all changed towards the early 1900’s, these countries were emerging and became leaders of the worlds.

The United States was not interested in having people with different cultures, languages, and religions where an older generation of moralists thought it violate a core principle of republicanism, while a younger generation believed that the United States had a role to uplift backward societies. When the foreign policy changed after 1890, the US became an imperialist nation. After the United States bought Alaska from Russia the US quickly decided to look into overseas. Their plan was to take over other foreign lands and slowly gain an empire, and soon become a world power. The two major causes for US expansion after 1890 were for economic benefits and military control overseas.

Within the years 1800 and 1855 an issue that was making waves in the United States was whether the country should expand in size or not. Multiple events such as the Mexican-American war and the idea of “Manifest Destiny” lead to a growing discrepancy between the supporters and opponents of expansion. Although the opponents had some valid and understandable concerns with expansion, the supporters overall had a better argument. To start off, trade was a reason that many people supported the expansion of the United States. The supporters claimed that the expansion could lead to a route to Asia and that the United States trade would flourish and the economy would boom and everyone would have their fair share of the success (Doc. F).

Was American expansion justified during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s? This was a debate that Americans fought over then and still now fight over now. There were two types of people some were for expansion and others were against expansion of the U.S. Both sides of the story will be well explained in this essay. First, this will explain the people for expansion’s side.

In the early 1800’s we were expanding westward towards California, Oregon, etc. In the late 1800’s we were still expanding westward, but expanding our empire to Guam, the Philippines, and Hawaii. When we opened up the frontier in the late 1800s, many people traveled west for new opportunities to develop new settlement there (Document 2). There was new life in the West that people wanted to go to start over. We were destined to spread throughout the continent and dominate (Document 1).

Imperialism was a big impact on the late 1800’s leading into the early 1900’s with counties like the British, Spanish, Russia, and Germany pushing to gain more land in different counties. This would lead to an arms race and the buildup which would lead into World War 1. Many different alliance were made if another country would attack another other countries would help with the fight. This would keep peace till the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria.

In the late 1800’s America started to expand across the world. America went to areas like Alaska, Hawaii, Japan, and the Philippines. The U.S. wanted to expand and tried to annex many countries. Many people wonder if the American expansion was justifiable or not. Alaska, a piece of land bought by the U.S. was called “Seward’s Folly” because when William Seward bought it America thought that there was nothing there.

That is just one of many reasons there was Westward Expansion. Overpopulation, new inventions of transportation methods, and new opportunities. These are three of many reasons why Americans in the 1800’s felt urged to move west. Some may claim that Westward expansion was not right for America to do because of the conflicts that were aroused afterward.

Between 1800 and 1875, America continuously expanded westward through the acquisition of new land; there were both favorable and unfavorable consequences and outcomes of westward expansion. From 1800 to 1875 due to westward expansion, America was able to reach the goal of expanding

And lastly the desire for a new frontier to settle in order to maintain America’s identity and prosperity. All three of the examples: economically, politically/military, and culturally can simply explain why and how America became an imperialist nation in the late

Before the 20th century the United States was an isolationist nation but around the late 19th century America decided to convert into an imperialist power. They had numerous reasons to shift into being an imperialist nation. America didn’t want to begin imperializing to settle and live in the nations they were taking over, they already had America for that reason, they wanted to adopt these nations for what they had to offer, which was many things. America saw an opportunity to improving their nation and took it. Even if there were many causes for America to imperialize, three of them stood out the most.

How did the United States expand over the years and why? The expansion of the United States was a vital part of America’s history and greatly affects how we live today. America's early days only started in 13 states and then progressively grew to 50 states in total. The time throughout the 1800’s and what happened throughout that time greatly impacted how America expanded land, resources, opportunity, trade, and money. Two of many main causes that evoked American expansion was the amount of opportunity that America could take, the idea of Manifest destiny, and the amount of power that the US had on other countries.

The United States became first place in the world in farm output and and in number of factories. For example, the number of American export tripled wile American direct investments increased as well. Generally, new businesses and economic interest motivated expansionism within the United States. However, the book also states that politics, joined profits, patriotism, and piety played a huge role in expansionism. What do you think the biggest role in expansionism in the 1890's was?

America had a booming population and they needed more land to satisfy the growing nation, even though america was a young nation we needed to grow. America was willing to sacrifice many things to be able to expand. 2,000 Americans died on the Oregon Trail in search of new land (SOU). We also did many things to keep the power to only whites. We had limited civil rights to only pure whites (Crash Course).

When reflecting on the two fundamentally conflicting arguments -are foreigners better on their own or do they need our help? “American imperialism” comes to mind. This term denotes the economic, military, and cultural influence of the United States internationally. First propagated during the presidency of James K. Polk, the concept of empire-building in the America’s, developed throughout the late 1800th century. During this time, industrialization caused American capitalists to seek new global markets in which to sell their commodities.