The roots of American globalization can be found in the War of 1898. Then, as today, the United States actively engaged in globalizing its economic order, itspolitical institutions, and its values. Thomas Schoonover argues that this drive to expand political and cultural reach -- the quest for wealth, missionary fulfillment, security, power, and prestige -- was inherited by the United States from Europe, especially Spain and Great Britain. "Uncle Sam's War of 1898 and the Origins of Globalization" is a pathbreaking work of history that examines U.S. growth from its early nationhood to its first major military conflict on the world stage, also known as the Spanish-American War. As the new nation's military, industrial, and economic strength developed, the United States created policies designed to protect itself from challenges beyond its borders. According to Schoonover, a surge in U.S. activity in the Gulf-Caribbean and in Central America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was catalyzed by the same avarice and competitiveness that motivated the European adventurers to seek a route to Asia centuries earlier. Addressing the basic chronology and themes of the first century of the nation's expansion, Schoonover locates the origins of the U.S. goal of globalization. U.S. involvement in the War of 1898 reflects many of the fundamental patterns in our national history -- exploration and discovery, labor exploitation, violence, racism, class conflict, and concern for security -- that many believe shaped America's course in the twentieth and twenty-first century.

Uncle Sam's War of 1898 and the Origins of Globalization

The present analysis interrogates the ways that American educators and bureaucrats at the turn of the twentieth century conceptualised the project of nationalism and modernity in the newly annexed nation of the Philippines through the trope of ‘linguistic unification’. These robust ideologies of language arose from the perception that national progress and democracy were centrally achievable through a shared linguistic code, arising from Enlightenment concepts of nationhood imported from Europe and subsequently figured in the uniquely American framework of exceptionalism, expansionism, and economic logics framed in the political and religious concept of ‘benevolent assimilation’. Focusing attention on a series of documents written by American teachers and administrators during the transitional time of the Insular Government from 1900 to 1916, the details of the ideological foundations of the role of English in the Philippines is explored.

Edmundo Eusebio Valera

Papers

``Imperialism of righteousness'': The influence of the *American Protestant social gospel on foreign missions and expansionism, 1890--1910