Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Springboards and strategies
- 2 The second Industrial Revolution at home and abroad
- 3 Race for empire
- 4 “America Will Take This Continent in Hand Alone”
- 5 Crossing the oceans
- 6 1893–1896: chaos and crises
- 7 The empire of 1898 – and upheaval
- 8 Pacific empire – and upheaval
- 9 Theodore Roosevelt: conservative as revolutionary
- 10 William Howard Taft and the age of revolution
- Conclusion: The 1865–1913 Era Restated
- Bibliographic Essay
- Index
- THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF AMERICAN FOREIGN RELATIONS
- References
5 - Crossing the oceans
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
- Frontmatter
- 1 Springboards and strategies
- 2 The second Industrial Revolution at home and abroad
- 3 Race for empire
- 4 “America Will Take This Continent in Hand Alone”
- 5 Crossing the oceans
- 6 1893–1896: chaos and crises
- 7 The empire of 1898 – and upheaval
- 8 Pacific empire – and upheaval
- 9 Theodore Roosevelt: conservative as revolutionary
- 10 William Howard Taft and the age of revolution
- Conclusion: The 1865–1913 Era Restated
- Bibliographic Essay
- Index
- THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF AMERICAN FOREIGN RELATIONS
- References
Summary
Almost from their beginnings as an independent people, Americans used the oceans not as a moat to protect themselves against the corruptions and armies of Europe but as a highway to reach the markets of Europe and Asia as well as the colonial settlements of West Africa. In the 1780s, as a century later, merchants were driven abroad by the exigencies of economic depression at home, as well as by the attraction of profits (and settlements) overseas. By the 1830s, colonizers of both the white and black races had, with the help of several presidential administrations, established an American settlement for freed African-American slaves in Liberia. A decade later, driven again in part by the economic bad times of 1837 to 1841, U.S. officials signed their first treaty with China. In the next decade of the 1850s they sent Matthew Perry to open Japan to U.S. interests, both secular and religious. After 1865, the United States rapidly became one of the six great powers fighting over the remains of China’s Manchu dynasty and, for a time, even was an unlikely participant in the great colonial struggle over Africa’s riches.
Africa, Kasson, and African Americans
Africa burst into American (and much of the world’s) attention in 1870 when the New York Herald sent Henry M. Stanley to find the supposedly lost missionary David Livingstone in the interior of Africa. Stanley’s alleged greeting, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” became famous, but Stanley’s discovery of the Congo’s rich mineral wealth received more attention at the time. In 1878 one of the great U.S. explorers, Rear Admiral Robert Shufeldt, sailed along the West African coast and into several of its rivers.
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations , pp. 83 - 102Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993