Rwanda

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Somalia & "Blackhawk Down"

Vietnam in the Cold War

NATO and Korea (following 1949)

The War in the Pacific

The documentary clip below focuses (at least early on) with the Battle of midway.
Note the importance of 1.) American airpower and 2.) the Navy's aircraft carriers in delivering that firepower.





The two video documentaries are short--about 9 to 10 minutes each. They are from the "exhaustive" series, "The World at War." The first deals specifically with battle for Iwo Jim, the second with Okinawa.





The documentary below is one of my favorite discussions regarding civilians as legitimate military targets. The main figure is Robert McNamara (later the Secretary of Defense through much of Vietnam) and his commander in Japan, General Curtis LeMay. The clip is from the highly recommended documentary, "The Fog of War" by Errol Morris.

The March to War

U.S. Expansion in the Late Gilded Age--Arguments For & Against

The link below has an interesting discussion regarding the "philosophical underpinnings" of US imperialism. Keep in mind that many of these "rationalizations" for empire were voiced and embraced not only in Washington, D.C. and New York City, but also in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, and even Brussels.
US Expansion
View these brief clips (from a very good History Channel documentary on the war's centennial) in order from top to bottom after reading the essay above.




Note that the majority of Americans who do oppose expansion do so not out of the sense that empire and democracy don't mix, but out of racialized fears of integrating dark-skinned natives into America's body politic.

Study Terms for the Empire & Expansion Chapters

Empire in Africa and Elsewhere
(Chapter 24--pgs. 738-752)
The Scramble for Africa
Berlin Conference of 1884
Great Britain
“From Cairo to Capetown”
Cecil Rhodes
South Africa
France
French West Africa
Germany
South West Africa (Namibia) General Lothar von Trotha/Herero Extermination
Belgium
King Leopold
Henry Stanley (David Livingston-Missionary)
Belgian Congo (latex)/Joseph Conrad/Heart of Darkness

Imperialism in Asia: India, the Philippines, China, and Japan
(Chapter 25)
India Mughal Rule/East India Company
Sepoy Rebellion
United States
William McKinley
Spanish-American War/Philippine Insurrection/War of 1898
Cuba/Puerto Rico/Guam/The Philippines—Spanish Colonies
China Qing Dynasty/Manzhou
Xenophobia
The Myth of the China Market /New Markets for New Products
Opium Wars/“Spheres of Influence” (leases)/Hong Kong
Taiping Rebellion
Cixi (Tu-shi)
Sino-Japanese War
Boxer Rebellion
New China Movement
Sun Yat-sen/Chiang Kai-shek /Nationalists
Chinese Communism/Mao Zedong
Japan Tokugawa/Shogun/Samurai
Matthew Perry
Meiji Restoration:
Military
Constitutional
Industrial (Zaibatsu)
Imperialism
Nationalism
Sino-Japanese War & Russo-Japanese War
Manchuria (1931)/“The Rape of Nanjing”
Social Darwinism—Race and the “Struggle” for Survival among Nations
Racism & Empire—Rudyard Kipling: “The White Man’s Burden”
U.S. and the Japanese Pacific Empire

Joseph Conrad, the Congo, and the "Heart of Darkness"

The explorer and journalist Henry Stanley played a significant role in the founding of Leopold's Congo. He figures here in this advertisement as an endorser of "Congo Soap."


For many the Congo came to represent the epitome of the violence and brutality that lay at the true "heart of darkness" of the imperial project.

Joseph Conrad's first language was Polish. Yet as a young man he learned English and went on to become one of the great stylists in the language. It was Conrad's experiences a river steamboat captain in the Congo that would inspire him to write one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century--"Heart of Darkness."


Conrad's exploration of the cruelty and violence that man can release on his fellow man inspired the filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola to bring those same issues forward to America's experiences in the jungles of Vietnam in his classic, "Apocalypse Now."

Leopold II, "King of the Belgians" and his Congo

Leopold's humanitarian image was undermined by the unusually brutal methods used on natives in the Congo.


Leopold's imperial ambitions benefitted from a significant upturn in the demand for (natural) rubber at the turn of the last century. Rubber hoses, wire insulation and (especially) bicycle tires drove the demand-side of the economic equation. Unfortunately for natives of the Congo, Leopold soon saw competition on the horizon from domesticated rubber plantations in southeast Asia and South America. The competition drove Leopold's agents to more and more brutal means of extraction--means which included severed hands and feet.

Unique in the imperial world, the "Congo Free State" was the personal property of Leopold himself, not the government or the people. This style of ownership allowed Leopold and his operatives in Africa a remarkably free hand in the extraction of latex.