Discuss the reasons why Americans were drawn to expand overseas in the late nineteenth century.

Lecture notes- DO NOT COPY NOTES, USE THEM TO HELP YOU ANSWER QUESTION

Territorial expansion had been part of American life from the beginning, but the 1890s marked a major transformation of America’s relationship to the rest of the world. Americans more and more saw their nation as an emerging world power. Until the 1890s, the expansion of the United States had been in North America, though ever since the Monroe Doctrine, many Americans had seen the Western Hemisphere as an American sphere of influence. Americans talked of acquiring Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and other territories, but the only territory acquired after the Civil War was Alaska, regarded by many as worthless. Most who looked overseas wanted to expand trade, not take new possessions. Many farmers and manufacturers believed that America’s production could no longer be absorbed in domestic markets, and thought “overproduction” was causing recurrent economic crises. They wanted foreign customers for their products.

Christian missionaries actively spread American influence overseas in the late nineteenth century. Groups like the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions believed it was their mission to prepare the world for Christ’s second coming and enlighten the heathens abroad. A few late-nineteenth-century thinkers actively promoted American expansionism. Josiah Strong, a well-known Congregationalist clergyman, tried to update manifest destiny in his book, Our Country (1885). He argued that Anglo-Saxon Americans, who had shown their ability for liberty and self-government in North America, should spread their institutions and values to “inferior races” overseas who, he suggested, would benefit American manufacturers by becoming new consumers of their goods. Naval officer Alfred T. Mahan, in The Influence of Sea Power Upon History (1890), argued that no nation could prosper without a large merchant fleet engaged in international trade and a powerful navy to protect it, which required overseas bases. Mahan insisted that with the western frontier closed, Americans had to look overseas for opportunity. Mahan influenced James G. Blaine, President Benjamin Harrison’s secretary of state, who advocated the acquisition of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Cuba for naval bases. In 1893, American planters in Hawaii organized a rebellion there that overthrew the native Hawaiian government of Queen Liliuokalani. Though Harrison asked the Senate to pass a treaty of annexation, President Grover Cleveland withdrew it. In 1898, during the Spanish-American War, the United States annexed the Hawaii islands. The depression that began in 1893 intensified Americans’ belief that an aggressive foreign policy would create markets for manufactured goods.

2. What were the origins and goals of the “new feminism”?

LECTURE NOTES

“Feminism” first became a widely used word in the Progressive era. Inspired by the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the Feminist Alliance, a small organization of New York professional women, developed plans to aid women in their community by building apartment houses with communal kitchens, cafeterias, and daycare centers, to free women from the constraints of the home. However, the women were unable to obtain a mortgage and the buildings were never built. In 1914, a mass meeting in New York that debated the question, “What Is Feminism?” was organized by Heterodoxy, a women’s club in Greenwich Village. New Feminism’s attack on traditional gender norms and sexual behavior added a new dimension to the idea of personal freedom.

Heterodoxy was part of a new radical “bohemia” (a social circle of artists, writers, and others who reject conventional rules and practices), and its definition of feminism merged calls for the vote and greater economic opportunity with open discussions of sexuality. Before World War I, in Greenwich Village and equivalent neighborhoods in Chicago, San Francisco, and other cities, a “lyrical left” took shape that included discussion clubs, experimental theaters, and magazines, and which anticipated the emancipation of the human spirit from nineteenth-century prejudices. Isadora Duncan’s new expressive dance was one symbol of the era.

Freedom was central to the lyrical left’s vision of society, but their individualist notion of freedom was quite different from other Progressives’ interest in order and efficiency. Yet sexual freedom came alive in this period. Free sexual expression and reproductive choice became critical elements of women’s liberation for many women. The sexual theories of the founder of psychiatry, Sigmund Freud, were popular. New sexual attitudes spread beyond bohemia to many young, unmarried, and independent women, and the new tolerance for sexual freedom drew gay people to Greenwich Village for the first time. But new sexual attitudes spread far beyond bohemia; they flourished among the young, unmarried, self-supporting women who made sexual freedom a hallmark of their oft-proclaimed personal independence

Women’s growing presence in the labor market strengthened demands for birth control, giving political expression to changes in sexual behavior. In the nineteenth century, the right to “control one’s body” meant the ability to refuse sexual advances, including those of a husband, but now it meant enjoying an active sexual life without necessarily bearing children. Emma Goldman, an anarchist and Lithuanian immigrant, regularly wrote and lectured about the right to birth control and called for a more enlightened view of homosexuality, and was arrested often. Margaret Sanger placed birth control at the center of the new feminism. By 1914, after facing censorship from the U.S. Post Office for writing about how to use birth control, she openly advertised birth-control devices in her journal, The Woman Rebel. She argued no woman could be free who did not control her own body and decisions about whether to become a mother. In 1916, when Sanger opened a clinic in a working-class area of Brooklyn and started giving contraceptive devices to poor Jewish and Italian women, she was jailed for a month. Labor radicals and cultural modernists, not just feminists, promoted Sanger and birth control. Sanger’s struggles illustrated the way in which local authorities and national obscenity legislation set rigid limits to Americans’ freedom of expression.NO PLAGIARISM. I provide the answer to each question in lecture notes that are under the question. I just need you to read the notes I give you and come up with your own 200 word answer for each question. US HISTORY. NO REFERENCES ARE NEEDED. I provide everything you need in the attachments.