Imperialistic Expansionism by the United States

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Since its institution, the heart of the United States has smoldered with the burning desire to push past its own boundaries and establish itself as a world power, acquiring most its territory during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. However, the means by which the United States acquired new territories changed drastically in nature from its original non-aggressive attitude to a largely assertive and belligerent temperament in the second half of its expansive conquest. In order to fully illustrate the changes in the motives and character of United States expansionism, the proliferation of boundary extension must be broken into two separate time periods – the acquisition of land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, motivated solely by the need to build and establish a country, and the imperialistic expansion of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which was fueled by a desire to implement the United States as a world power. As the United States evolved economically, religiously, and politically, its methods of expansionism evolved from being mostly unintrusive to democratically controlling, all the while struggling to keep a common goal and stay true to the ideals of its ancestors.

In order to acquire new territories, the United States implemented methods of expansionism and later imperialism in the first and second phases, respectively, of its expansion. These two means of self-establishment had several striking similarities between them. Through expansionism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the main logic behind annexation was for the country to grow and establish itself within its continent. Of course, the desire for increased political power in new states led to conflicts such as Bleed...

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...eign they may be to American values. On paper, it was now lawful for the United States to forcefully implement American traditions upon newly annexed foreign citizens under the reasoning that their lives would be bettered by such imperialistic control over their own customs.

The climax of the United States’ evolution from honest expansion to dominant imperialism is marked at the turn of the twentieth century. Though attempting to abide by its own fundamental ideas and grow as a country itself, a rapidly growing competition around the globe resulted in America’s somewhat reluctant ejection from continental expansion to global imperialism. Though never straying too far from its unhindered adherence to its faith, the United States was eventually forced to force itself upon the globe, thus marking it as both a powerful world ally to some and a global threat to others.

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