Name: 美帝國主義。美國曆史速成班第28期 (American Imperialism: Crash Course US History #28)
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Hi, I’m John Green, this is CrashCourse U.S. History and today we’re gonna talk

about a subject near and dear to my white, male heart: imperialism.

So, here at CrashCourse we occasionally try to point out that the U.S., much as we hate

to admit it, is actually part of a larger world.

Mr. Green, Mr. Green, you mean like Alaska? No, Me from the Past, for reasons that you

will understand after your trip there before your senior year of college, I do not acknowledge

the existence of Canada’s tail. No, I’m referring to all of the Green Parts

of Not-America and the period in the 19th century when we thought, “Maybe we could

make all of those green parts like America, but, you know, without rights and stuff.”

Intro So, the late 19th and early 20th centuries

were a period of expansion and colonization in Asia and Africa, mostly by European powers.

As you’ll know if you watched Crash Course World History, imperialism has a long, long

history pretty much everywhere, so this round of empire building is sometimes called, rather

confusingly, New Imperialism. Because the U.S. acquired territories beyond

its continental boundaries in this period, it’s relatively easy to fit American history

into this world history paradigm. But there’s also an argument that the United States has

always been an empire. From very early on, the European settlers

who became Americans were intent on pushing westward and conquering territory. The obvious

victims of this expansion/imperialism were the Native Americans, but we can also include

the Mexicans who lost their sovereignty after 1848.

And if that doesn’t seem like an empire to you, allow me to draw your attention to

the Russian Empire. Russians were taking control of territory

in Central Asia and Siberia and either absorbing or displacing the native people who lived

there, which was the exact same thing that we were doing.

The empires of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were different because they were

colonial in their own special way. Like, Europeans and Americans would rule other places but

they wouldn’t settle them and more or less completely displace the native people there.

(Well, except for you, Australia and New Zealand.) American historians used to try to excuse

America’s acquisitions of a territorial empire as something of an embarrassing mistake,

but that’s misleading because one of the primary causes of the phenomenon of American

imperialism was economics. We needed places to sell our amazing new products.

And at the time, China actually had all of the customers because apparently it was opposite

day. It’s also not an accident that the U.S.

began pursuing imperialism in earnest during the 1890s, as this was, in many ways, a decade

of crisis in America. The influx of immigrants and the crowded cities

added to anxiety and concern over America’s future. And then, to cap it all off, in 1893

a panic caused by the failure of a British bank led the U.S. into a horrible economic

depression, a great depression, but not The Great Depression.

It did however feature 15,000 business failures and 17% unemployment, so take that, 2008.

According to American diplomatic historian George Herring, imperialism was just what

the doctor ordered to help America get out of its Depression depression.

Other historians, notably Kristin Hoganson, imply that America embarked on imperial adventures

partly so that American men could prove to themselves how manly they were. You know,

by joining the Navy and setting sail for distant waters.

In 1890, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan published “The Influence of Seapower upon History”

and argued that, to be a great power like Great Britain, the U.S. needed to control

the seas and dominate international commerce. Tied into this push to become a maritime power

was the obsession with building a canal through Central America and eventually the U.S. decided

that it should be built in Panama because you know how else are we gonna get malaria.

In order to protect this canal we would need a man, a plan, a canal. Panama. Sorry, I just

wanted to get the palindrome in there somewhere. No we would actually need much more than a

man and a plan. We would need ships and in order to have a functioning two-ocean navy,

we would need colonies. Why? Because the steamships at the time were powered by coal and in order

to re-fuel they needed coal depots. I mean, I suppose we could have, like, rented

harbor space, but why rent when you can conquer? Also, nationalism and the accompanying pride

in one’s “country” was a worldwide phenomenon to which the U.S. was not immune. I mean,

it’s no accident that the 1890s saw Americans begin to recite the pledge of allegiance and

celebrate Flag Day, and what better way to instill national pride than by flying the

stars and stripes over … Guam. So pre-Civil War attempts to expand beyond

what we now know as the continental United States included our efforts to annex Canada,

which were sadly unsuccessful, and also filibustering, which before it meant a senator talking until

he or she had to stop to pee was a thing where we tried to take over Central America to spread

slavery. But, the idea of taking Cuba persisted into

the late 19th century because it is close and also beautiful.

The Grant administration wanted to annex it and the Dominican Republic, but Congress demurred.

But we did succeed in purchasing Canada’s tail. You can see how I feel about that.

To be fair, discovery of gold in the Yukon made Seward’s icebox seem like less of a

Seward’s folly and it did provide coaling stations in the Pacific. But we could have

had rum and Caribbean beaches. Ugh, Stan, all this talk about how much I

hate Alaska has me overheated, I gotta take off my shirt. Ughhh. Waste of my life. So

hard to take off a shirt dramatically. I’m angry.

Anyway, coal stations in the Pacific were important because in 1854 we “opened”

Japan to American trade by sending a flotilla of threatening black ships under Matthew Perry.

No Stan, not that Matthew Perry. You know better.

By far, America’s best piece of imperial business before 1898 was Hawaii. Like, I like

oil and gold as much as the next guy but Hawaii has pineapples and also had sugar, which was

grown on American owned plantations by Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and native workers.

Treaties between the U.S. and the Hawaiian governments exempted this sugar from tariffs,

and America also had established a naval base at Pearl Harbor, which seemed like a really

good idea...then. We eventually annexed Hawaii in 1898 and this

meant that it could eventually become a state, which it did in 1959, two years before Barack

Obama was born in Kenya. And this leads us nicely to the high tide

of American imperialism, the Spanish-American-Cuban-Fillipino War.

The war started out because native Cubans were revolting against Spain, which was holding

on to Cuba for dear life as the remnant of a once-great empire.

The Cubans’ fight for independence was brutal. 95,000 Cubans died from disease and malnutrition

after Spanish general Valeriano Weyler herded Cubans into concentration camps.

For this Weyler was called “Butcher” in the American yellow press, which sold a lot

of newspapers on the backs of stories about his atrocities.

And at last we come to President William McKinley who responded cautiously, with a demand that

Spain get out of Cuba or face war. Now Spain knew that it couldn’t win a war

with the U.S. but, as George Herring put it, they “preferred the honor of war to the

ignominy of surrender.” Let that be a lesson to you. Always choose ignominy.

Oh, it’s time for the Mystery Document? The rules here are simple.

I guess the author of the Mystery Document. I’m either right or I get shocked.

Alright, let’s see what we’ve got today. With such a conflict waged for years in an

island so near us and with which our people have such trade and business relations; when

the lives and liberty of our citizens are in constant danger and their property destroyed

and themselves ruined; where our trading vessels are liable to seizure and are seized at our