Modern Latin America

Nearly 150 years after the North American Revolution and the South American Wars for Independence, Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. wrote an essay entitled “America’s 10 Gift to Civilization.”  The first gift, he observed, was the right of revolution.  For many revolutionaries, the US was their example, at least until 1850.  By the time the Spanish American war came and the bloody suppression of the Philippine rebellion by US troops in 1902, the gift had lost a good deal of its value.

Some of the driving forces for US expansionism were the idea of Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine.  The Monroe Doctrine was issue in 1823 by President James Monroe and John Quincy Adams in which they warned European colonial power to keep hands off the Western Hemisphere.

With the War of 1898 the US committed itself to intervention in Latin America, effectively terminating four centuries of Spanish colonial rule in that region, and launching a paradigm for US-Latin American relation that would dominate the twentieth century.

Within our lecture we are going to explore the following issues:

1. What were the forces that plunged the United States to enter the imperial race?

2. Why are American scholar so entrenched in their denial of the US imperial past/present?

3. What were the different interpretations of the Cuban Revolution and the Spanish-American War?  Why do we know so little about the Cuban side of the war?

The Cuban War and eventually the Spanish-Cuban-American War was one the first war to be film.  Furthermore, the American press played a pivotal role in shaping Americans’ opinion about the Spanish, the Cubans and the role the US needed to played in the War.

The following links will take to a series of videos.  Please watch and consider them for our discussion.

Spanish-American War

Crucible of Empire