Uprisings

At the end of the 19th Century and beginning of the 20th Century, there were several political uprisings around the world: the American government decided to intervene. President Theodore Roosevelt felt America was a “civilized nation” and needed to get involved in other parts of the world to protect American commercial interests.

Cuban nationalists led a revolt against the Spanish colonial establishment in 1895. The American interests in the sugar industry were jeopardized by the destruction of the sugar crop by the Cuban nationalists. President McKinley sent the Navy ship USS Maine to Cuba to be on standby to evacuate Americans. While there, an accident happened -- the ship exploded and sank, killing two hundred men. This prompted the Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino war of 1898. (Jones et al., 2008)

Across the Pacific, the U.S. Navy sent a fleet of ships to the Philippines. The Spanish were driven away in defeat. The United States bought the Philippines from Spain for $20 million. The Filipino nationals rebelled against the United States and it took two years to crush the uprising. With the United States having a presence in the Pacific, this enabled President Roosevelt to send in reinforcements to China for the Nationalists' Boxer Uprising in 1900. (Jones et al.. 2008)

Later in his presidency, President Roosevelt proposed the construction of a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. Panama was a province of Columbia then and he encouraged Panamanian nationalists to secede from Columbia in1903: he was able to build the canal that dramatically changed the time it took to travel from the Atlantic Oceanto to the Pacific Ocean.

References

Image Retrieved July, 2009 from

Jones, J., Wood, P.H., Bortelsmann, T., May, E. T., & Ruiz, V.L. (2007). Created Equal (Vol. 2, 2nd ed., pp. 435-441). Pearson Education.


Jones, J., Wood, P., Borstelmann, T., May, E. and Ruiz, V. (2008). Created Equal, A Social and
Political History of the United States (brief 2nd ed.). New York, Pearson Longman