Sail forth steer for the deep waters only

SAIL FORTH STEER FOR THE DEEP WATERS ONLY SKIN

The second was that it was America's duty to export U.S. The first was that 'inferior races,' as they were known, were incapable of understanding democratic principles. This led to two further assumptions, deeply held even when contradictory. The promulgation of these racial ideologies throughout American society encouraged a cultural assumption that American institutions-the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the economic and political systems generally-were Anglo-Saxon inventions.

SAIL FORTH STEER FOR THE DEEP WATERS ONLY SKIN

In most of the charts developed to illustrate racial hierarchies, Anglo-Saxons (people who could trace their origins to the Germanic tribes-Angles, Saxons, and Jutes-who invaded Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries) were at the top and people of African origin were at the bottom, whereas 'Asiastics,' as they were called, occupied a variety of middle ranks, often closely related to skin color. The doctrine of Manifest Destiny, in turn, was closely allied to a set of racial ideologies that ranked the world's races according to pseudoscientific criteria of intelligence and character traits and that used Darwin's evolutionary ideas to develop, especially through the writings of the social scientist Herbert Spencer, a philosophy of 'survival of the fittest' that could be used to justify military and economic conquest. Mahan's ideas were favorably received, in large part because they fed into a general cultural investment in the idea of Manifest Destiny, the belief that the United States had a special mission to expand across the entire North American continent and beyond, especially to Central America and the Caribbean. Integral to this plan was the necessity of a canal cutting through Central America and overseas colonies that could serve as military bases. Mahan (1840вЂ“1914), whose books The Influence of Sea Power upon History: 1660вЂ“1783 (1890) and The Interest of America in Sea Power (1897) advocated development of a world-class navy that could be used to protect U.S. Many Americans both spoke and wrote to this end among them Alfred T. For many Americans, especially those ambitious to extend American business interests, it became clear that overseas expansion was the way to harness American energies and turn them to profitable development. What was clear to all was that the European imperial powers were reaping extraordinary economic benefits from lands far from their own geopolitical borders. The Boer War of 1899вЂ“1902, the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, the Belgian exploitation of the Congo, French intervention in northern Africa and the Far East all impressed Americans, some favorably, others unfavorably. They were also sharply aware of the ongoing imperialist moves by the European powers, as Great Britain, Spain, Germany, Italy, and France either acquired new colonies or centralized control over existing ones. relations with other American states meant that by the late nineteenth century the people of the United States were already familiar with the idea of taking over neighboring lands or intervening in hemispheric disputes. Texas, also formerly part of Mexico, had already been annexed in 1845. The most famous-as well as the most successful-move, however, was the Mexican-American War of 1848, ending in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ceded 529,200 square miles of Mexican territory to the United States-California, New Mexico, and parts of Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and Colorado. Calls for the annexation of Canada were frequent throughout the nineteenth century. The United States also had a proto-imperialist history in its several moves to acquire contiguous lands. Kennedy's invocation of the doctrine during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Throughout the twentieth century, the United States called on the Monroe Doctrine to justify its dominance over hemispheric conditions, the most notable instance being President John F. Labeled the Monroe Doctrine in 1852, this policy provided a pretext for the threat of military intervention in 1895, when, shortly after gold was discovered in Venezuela, Great Britain, which controlled Guiana, disputed boundary lines. In 1823 President James Monroe (1758вЂ“1831), hoping to prevent Spain from reclaiming former colonies in Latin America, declared the entire hemisphere off-limits for European expansion. The prehistory of American imperialism lay in the European appropriation of Native Americans' lands and in post-Revolutionary demands that the United States annex Florida and Louisiana. When the Civil War drew to a close in 1865, the United States had not yet emerged as an imperialist nation, although the groundwork had long been laid.

Sail forth steer for the deep waters only