Messianic Visions of the United States

Author(s):  
Paolo Amorosa

After winning with unexpected ease the Spanish–American War of 1898, justified at home as a case of humanitarian intervention, the United States started understanding itself as a world power. This led to a renewed attention to international law, in order to reconcile the new leading role of the country with its democratic tradition. Even the formal colonialism in the Philippines and the tutelage of the newly independent Cuba were recast by the founders of the American Society of International Law as an expression of egalitarian values, American and universal at the same time. This ambiguous nationalist/cosmopolitan identity was based on a narrative of progress: the peak of civilization reached by the United States would expand world-wide through example and benevolent assimilation. This chapter argues that it was a narrative of primarily religious origin that justified the war in the eyes of the American people and underpinned future foreign policy.

Author(s):  
Stephen Bowman

The introduction provides a grounding in the diplomatic history of Anglo-American relations and surveys the main events of the so-called ‘Great Rapprochement’ between the two countries, including the Alaskan Boundary Dispute, Britain’s response to the Spanish-American War in 1898, and the US’s subsequent attitude to Britain’s war with the Boers. The introduction analyses the concept of ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ and discusses the ways in which it was important both to the Pilgrims Society and to official Anglo-American relations. The introduction also provides a chapter by chapter breakdown of the rest of the book and outlines the argument that while the Pilgrims never set the agenda for official Anglo-American relations it nevertheless played a leading role in public diplomacy and, by extension, in how people have thought about how Britain and the United States have related to each other.


Author(s):  
Stuart White

The Spanish-American War is best understood as a series of linked conflicts. Those conflicts punctuated Madrid’s decline to a third-rank European state and marked the United States’ transition from a regional to an imperial power. The central conflict was a brief conventional war fought in the Caribbean and the Pacific between Madrid and Washington. Those hostilities were preceded and followed by protracted and costly guerrilla wars in Cuba and the Philippines. The Spanish-American War was the consequence of the protracted stalemate in the Spanish-Cuban War. The economic and humanitarian distress which accompanied the fighting made it increasingly difficult for the United States to remain neutral until a series of Spanish missteps and bad fortune in early 1898 hastened the American entry to the war. The US Navy quickly moved to eliminate or blockade the strongest Spanish squadrons in the Philippines and Cuba; Spain’s inability to contest American control of the sea in either theater was decisive and permitted successful American attacks on outnumbered Spanish garrisons in Santiago de Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Manila. The transfer of the Philippines, along with Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam, to the United States in the Treaty of Paris confirmed American imperialist appetites for the Filipino nationalists, led by Emilio Aguinaldo, and contributed to tensions between the Filipino and American armies around and in Manila. Fighting broke out in February 1899, but the Filipino conventional forces were soon driven back from Manila and were utterly defeated by the end of the year. The Filipino forces that evaded capture re-emerged as guerrillas in early 1900, and for the next two and a half years the United States waged an increasingly severe anti-guerrilla war against Filipino irregulars. Despite Aguinaldo’s capture in early 1901, fighting continued in a handful of provinces until the spring of 1902, when the last organized resistance to American governance ended in Samar and Batangas provinces.


1978 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 421-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenton J. Clymer

Although the United States had extensive commercial contacts with the Spanish-owned Philippine Islands early in the nineteenth century, interest in them declined sharply by the 1890s. But with the Spanish-American War of 1898 and Commodore George Dewey's defeat of the Spanish fleet at Manila the Philippines reappeared on the American horizon. At the peace negotiations the United States demanded, and received, the islands.


PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1434-1447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Lifshey

The seminal novels of the Philippines, José Rizal's Noli me tangere (1887) and El filibusterismo (1891), are written in Spanish, a language that began evaporating in the archipelago when the United States defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War in 1898 and imposed English as a lingua franca. Where does a foundational author like Rizal fit in a discussion of globalized literatures when the Philippines are commonly framed as a historical and cultural hybrid neither quite Asian nor quite Western? In Rizal's El filibusterismo, the Philippines are an inchoate national project imagined not in Asia but amid complex allusive dynamics that emanate from the Americas. Rizal and his novel, like the Philippine nation they inspired, appear in global and postcolonial frameworks as both Asian and American in that epistemes Eastern and Western, subaltern and hegemonic, interact in a ceaseless flow that resists easy categorization.


Author(s):  
Ramón J. Guerra

This chapter examines the development of Latino literature in the United States during the time when realism emerged as a dominant aesthetic representation. Beginning with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and including the migrations resulting from the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Mexican Revolution (1910), Latinos in the United States began to realistically craft an identity served by a sense of displacement. Latinos living in the United States as a result of migration or exile were concerned with similar issues, including but not limited to their predominant status as working-class, loss of homeland and culture, social justice, and racial/ethnic profiling or discrimination. The literature produced during the latter part of the nineteenth century by some Latinos began to merge the influence of romantic style with a more socially conscious manner to reproduce the lives of ordinary men and women, draw out the specifics of their existence, characterize their dialects, and connect larger issues to the concerns of the common man, among other realist techniques.


Author(s):  
Marvin C. Ott

With the exception of the Philippines, America’s strategic interest in and engagement with Southeast Asia begins with World War II. Prior to that “Monsoon Asia” was remote and exotic—a place of fabled kingdoms, jungle headhunters, and tropical seas. By the end of the nineteenth century European powers had established colonial rule over the entire region except Thailand. Then, as the twentieth century dawned, the Spanish colonial holdings in the Philippines suddenly and unexpectedly became available to the United States as an outcome of the Spanish-American War and Admiral Dewey’s destruction of the decrepit Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. This chapter examines the strategic pivot in Southeast Asia and the role China plays in affecting the U.S. position in this region.


1968 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. S. Grenville

The historical debate over the Spanish-American War of 1898 is being reopened on both sides of the Atlantic. Until comparatively recently historians gave confident answers to the questions of the causes and consequences of the war. Moral assumptions about America's true mission were never very far from the surface of the interpretations which had won general acceptance in the United States. America's involvement in world affairs and more especially the acquisition of an empire was viewed as a perversion of her mission. There existed a consensus of opinion among historians that President McKinley and his administration were not in control of policy; that they were swept forward by a tide of public feeling, by political considerations, and by Congressional pressures they found impossible to resist. It was believed that war had been foisted on the American people by those who manipulated public opinion, by mass hysteria cleverly fomented by sectional interests, by the newspapers, by business pressure groups, and by jingo senators. Responsibility for the acquisition of the Philippines was uncritically ascribed to a junior member of the administration, Theodore Roosevelt, who when Assistant Secretary of the Navy, it was alleged, had plotted the whole thing with his friend, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Rigorous research is challenging every one of these assumptions. The strategic aspects of American foreign policy, and more particularly the influence of naval officers on national policy, have been seriously studied by only a few historians, whose work has as yet little affected the ‘classical’ textbook versions of American policy before the war with Spain.


2017 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 69-71
Author(s):  
Lori F. Damrosch

Our moderator's questions begin with “in what sense is international law and in what sense isn't it universal?” and continue with whether international law may be “different in different places” and what the implications of such differences may be. I am here to defend the “universalist” perspective, as the immediate past president of the American Society of International Law and before that, editor-in-chief of the American Journal of International Law. Though both the Society and the Journal have “American” in their titles and our geographic headquarters is in the United States, the Society's mission statement commits us to pursue “a just world under law,” which I interpret as a global vision for a universal system of international law.


1934 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 555-559
Author(s):  
William L. Rodgers

At the recent annual dinner of the American Society of International Law I listened with much interest to the eloquent and impassioned address of Judge Florence E. Allen, of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, asserting that the conservation of peace has not hitherto been, and should be made, the principal objective in the development of international law. I think that her views might be summarized not unfairly in the form of a syllogism. Undeniable is its major premise that war is cruel, costly in life and resources, full of horror—a terrible infliction on those who resort to it. The minor premise is that means exist and others may be discovered whereby disputes may always be settled and peace enforced without recourse to war. And so comes the conclusion that all these means should be sought for, discovered and used, after which war will be unnecessary and will disappear from the world, leaving us under the rule of perpetual physical peace, no matter what may be the mental and emotional differences between nations.


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