Once again it has been too long my avid blog readers. Last week, we finished the unit on westward expansion and spent 3 days in class with the substitute working on our Oregon Trail simulations. Once again technology gave us some trouble but I really enjoyed the project and how mine turned out.
We have now moved on to imperialism in the United States. We are all familiar with the imperialism that occurred in Europe, but at least I have not heard much about it occurring here. We started by looking at the poem, "the White Man's Burden," and also the responses to it such as "The Black Man's Burden." European nations preached to Americans that it was their duty and god given purpose to spread their "good" ways to "lesser people." And following the Spanish-American war, that is exactly what they did. After this, America took over many Central American countries.
However, this wasn't the United States first encounter with imperialism. They had been dominating Native Americans since its establishment. By the time the Civil War was over and Andrew Jackson was elected president. With the worst of internal fighting over, people now focused their attention on expanding west and they were more than willing to step over anything or anyone to get there.
Westward expansion but mainly the moving of the Native Americans to make this possible became a highly disputed topic. Jackson was the main advocate for their relocation arguing that they are dying out in the east and this is exactly what the needed for a new start. Pretty much everyone else such as the judicial branch, Christian missionaries and the Indians themselves disagreed.
This however, did not stop Jackson. He implemented the Indian Removal Act, which even though it was found to be unconstitutional, but due to the presidents connections in congress he was not impeached. Even though he without a doubt deserved to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment