American imperialism essays

American imperialism essays In the late 1800s, I believe that the United States was an imperialist nation even though it was mainly the European powers doing all the imperialism like Spain and Great Britain, but the United States like it usually does, and acted exactly the opposite of what they preached. While the United States was being hypocritical we had imperialist conflicts with Spain, Cuba, The Philippines, China, Alaska, and Hawaii. Spain, the biggest conflict with the United States, at this time had control of Cuba and the Philippines. The Cubans revolted from Spanish rule because the Cuban economy was so terribly horrible. The Spanish in an attempt to control the second revolution put many Cubans were affected by a policy of reconcentration. Reconcentration is similar to the WWII German concentration camps, the Spanish forced a few hundred thousand Cubans into guarded camps. The prisoners ranged from young children to seniors. These camps killed around 200,000 Cubans, which created uproar in the American journalism. Since these stories of Cubans being tortured sold lots of papers the journalists continued creating more and more fantastic stories of the tortured Cubans and of the destruction of the American sugar plantations by Cuban rebels. This eventually lead to the journalism called yellow journalism. This type of journalism is just to increase the newspapers sales; the two major yellow journalists were J oseph Pulitzer (Worlds) and his new enemy William Randolph Hearst (Journals). These newspapers caused an almost domino effect of events leading to the American intervention in Cuba. Although yellow journalism pushed the public in the direction of war the president, McKinley, moved a ship called the U.S.S Maine around Cuba to protect American interests in Cuba. On February 15th 1898, the U.S.S Maine was destroyed killing more than 250 Americans. The yellow journalism in a rush to get mo...