The Mexican-German Conspiracy of 1915

1966 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Meyer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Mexico ◽  
World War I ◽  
Foreign Minister ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
German Government ◽  
White House ◽  
Good Percentage

The Zimmermann telegram of 1917, the attempt of the German government to bring Mexico into World War I on the side of the Central Powers, is a well-known diplomatic episode because it is generally conceded to be one of the series of factors which convinced President Woodrow Wilson of the efficacy of abandoning his policy of neutrality. In return for her co-operation, and upon the successful conclusion of the war, Mexico was to “recover the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.” On March 1, 1917, when the incident was recorded in the United States press and before either the State Department or the White House issued a confirmation or a denial, many congressmen and a good percentage of the United States public considered the note to be a brazen forgery and a great hoax. Had they realized that Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann’s proposal to Venustiano Carranza was not a bold and newly devised scheme but rather the climax of several years of intrigue with various Mexican officials and exile groups and had they been aware that the idea of restoring the territory lost in the middle of the nineteenth century was a Mexican rather than a German idea, there would have been but little reason to dispute the validity of the document in question.

The League of Nations and the United States

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlie Laderman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
International Peace ◽  
World War ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
New States ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Global Affairs

Although the League of Nations was the first permanent organization established with the purpose of maintaining international peace, it built on the work of a series of 19th-century intergovernmental institutions. The destructiveness of World War I led American and British statesmen to champion a league as a means of maintaining postwar global order. In the United States, Woodrow Wilson followed his predecessors, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, in advocating American membership of an international peace league, although Wilson’s vision for reforming global affairs was more radical. In Britain, public opinion had begun to coalesce in favor of a league from the outset of the war, though David Lloyd George and many of his Cabinet colleagues were initially skeptical of its benefits. However, Lloyd George was determined to establish an alliance with the United States and warmed to the league idea when Jan Christian Smuts presented a blueprint for an organization that served that end. The creation of the League was a predominantly British and American affair. Yet Wilson was unable to convince Americans to commit themselves to membership in the new organization. The Franco-British-dominated League enjoyed some early successes. Its high point was reached when Europe was infused with the “Spirit of Locarno” in the mid-1920s and the United States played an economically crucial, if politically constrained, role in advancing Continental peace. This tenuous basis for international order collapsed as a result of the economic chaos of the early 1930s, as the League proved incapable of containing the ambitions of revisionist powers in Europe and Asia. Despite its ultimate limitations as a peacekeeping body, recent scholarship has emphasized the League’s relative successes in stabilizing new states, safeguarding minorities, managing the evolution of colonies into notionally sovereign states, and policing transnational trafficking; in doing so, it paved the way for the creation of the United Nations.

Woodrow Wilson and World War I: A Reappraisal

1985 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
World War ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
Political Independence ◽  
American President ◽  
The First World War

Woodrow Wilson was the first American President to leave the Western Hemisphere during his period of office, and, as befitted him, the circumstances in which he did so were neither casual nor frivolous. He went to Europe in late 1918 to take part in the peace conference following a war that the United States had played a crucial part in bringing to a decisive end. His aim was to secure a peace that accorded with the proposals he had set out in his Fourteen Points address of January 1918 and in other speeches — a peace that would be based upon justice and thus secure consent, that would embody liberal principles(the self-determination of peoples as far as practicable, the prohibition of discriminatory trade barriers), and that would be maintained by a new international organization in which the United States, breaking its tradition of isolation, would take part — a league of nations that would provide a general guarantee of “political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”The symbolism of this dramatic moment, with the American prophet coming to bring redemption to the Old World, imprinted on the minds of contemporaries an image of Wilson which has affected most subsequent historiography. Viewing events from Vienna, that special victim of the First World War, Sigmund Freud found “the figure of the American President, as it rose above the horizon of Europeans, from the first unsympathetic, and… this aversion increased in the course of years the more I learned about him and the more severely we suffered from the consequences of his intrusion into our destiny.”

scholarly journals THEODORE ROOSEVELT IN THE EYES OF THE ALLIES

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-101
Author(s):  
Michael Patrick Cullinane
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
World History ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Theodore Roosevelt ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
Transnational Relations ◽  
Treaty Of Versailles ◽  
Political Speeches

As Woodrow Wilson traveled across the Atlantic to negotiate the peace after World War I, Theodore Roosevelt died in Long Island. His passing launched a wave of commemoration in the United States that did not go unrivaled in Europe. Favorable tributes inundated the European press and coursed through the rhetoric of political speeches. This article examines the sentiment of Allied nations toward Roosevelt and argues that his posthumous image came to symbolize American intervention in the war and, subsequently, the reservations with the Treaty of Versailles, both endearing positions to the Allies that fueled tributes. Historians have long depicted Woodrow Wilson's arrival in Europe as the most celebrated reception of an American visitor, but Roosevelt's death and memory shared equal pomp in 1919 and endured long after Wilson departed. Observing this epochal moment in world history from the unique perspective of Roosevelt's passing extends the already intricate view of transnational relations.

Teaching International Relations to American Students

1984 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 13-17
Author(s):  
George H. Quester
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
Realistic Interpretation ◽  
American Students ◽  
Moments Of Truth ◽  
Hans Morgenthau

The teaching of international politics within the United States has been buffeted about a great deal in the past decade, reflecting shifting trends in social science analysis, reflecting also some major rethinkings and “moments of truth” about America's role in the world.The end of World War II had seen a widespread acceptance of Realpolitik analysis, as exemplified in the writings of Hans Morgenthau, generally responding to the unprecedented degree of United States participation in world affairs in the resistance to Hitler's Germany. This new realistic interpretation contrasted itself with an original, more idealistic, liberal position attributed to Americans in general for the earlier and more naive times before 1939, an idealism attributed in an extreme form to Woodrow Wilson in his approach to the outcome of World War I.

World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States

1981 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 165
Author(s):  
Arthur S. Link ◽  
Paul L. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War

International Aviation Rivalry in Latin America, 1919-1927

1965 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wesley Phillips Newton
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
World War I ◽  
Transportation Problem ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Panama Canal ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Form ◽  
Pan American

In Latin America, international rivalry over aviation followed World War I. In its early form, it consisted of a commercial scramble among several Western European nations and the United States to sell airplanes and aviation products and to establish airlines in Latin America. Somewhat later, expanding European aviation activities posed an implicit threat to the Panama Canal.Before World War I, certain aerophiles had sought to advance the airplane as the panacea for the transportation problem in Latin America. The aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont of Brazil and the Aero Club of America, an influential private United States association, were in the van. In 1916, efforts by these enthusiasts led to the formation of the Pan American Aviation Federation, which they envisioned as the means of promoting and publicizing aviation throughout the Western Hemisphere.

scholarly journals PLAYING ON UNCLE SAM'S TEAM: AMERICAN CHILDHOODS DURING WORLD WAR I

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 677-690 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mischa Honeck
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Young People ◽  
World War I ◽  
Children And Adolescents ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Childhood And Youth ◽  
Constructions Of Childhood

If World War I has interested historians of the United States considerably less than other major wars, it is also true that children rank among the most neglected actors in the literature that exists on the topic. This essay challenges this limited understanding of the roles children and adolescents played in this transformative period by highlighting their importance in three different realms. It shows how childhood emerged as a contested resource in prewar debates over militarist versus pacifist education; examines the affective power of images of children—American as well as foreign—in U.S. wartime propaganda; and maps various social arenas in which the young engaged with the war on their own account. While constructions of childhood and youth as universally valid physical and developmental categories gained greater currency in the early twentieth century, investigations of young people in wartime reveal how much the realities of childhood and youth differed according to gender, class, race, region, and age.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document