Rationales for Imperialism
A policy in which strong nations extend their political, military, and economic control over weaker territories.
Imperialism
What are key inventions that enabled African conquest?
Quinine and Steamships
By the 1850s, this crop became a central, profitable export for American missionaries and entrepreneurs in Hawaii.
sugar
This sensationalist style of reporting on Spanish atrocities and the sinking of the USS Maine helped sway popular American opinion in favor of war.
Yellow Journalism
The most famous military unit of the war, officially the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, led by Theodore Roosevelt.
Rough Riders
Charles Darwin's original scientific theory that explains how plants and animals survive and reproduce based on traits that help them fit their environment.
Natural Selection
These conflicts forced China to concede five trade port cities, including Hong Kong, to the British.
Opium Wars
White businessmen forced King Kalākaua to sign this document at gunpoint, stripping Native Hawaiians of land and voting rights and diminishing the monarchy's power.
Bayonet Constitution
This Cuban revolutionary launched a war for independence against Spain in 1895 and used guerrilla tactics against Spanish forces.
José Martí
This U.S. naval leader destroyed the entire Spanish Pacific fleet at the Battle of Manila Bay in the Philippines.
Commodore George Dewey
This pseudoscience misapplied Darwin's ideas to human society, claiming the "strong" are naturally superior and the "weak" are meant to fall behind.
Social Darwinism
Otto von Bismarck organized this 1884 meeting with the intention of peacefully dividing Africa amongst European powers.
Berlin Conference
The last reigning monarch of Hawaii whose main goal was to restore power to the Hawaiian people by writing a new constitution.
Queen Liliʻuokalani
The U.S. naval destroyer whose mysterious sinking in Havana Harbor sparked the popular rallying cry, "Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain".
USS Maine
These African American soldiers played a crucial, though often overlooked, role fighting alongside the Rough Riders at the Battle of San Juan Hill.
Buffalo Soldiers
This idea argued that Western nations had a duty to "civilize" non-Western peoples, often pairing with Social Darwinist justifications for conquest.
White Man's Burden
In the 1890s, European powers and Japan divided China into these exclusive economic zones where they held sole trading rights.
Spheres of Influence
This American entrepreneur and head of a fruit company formed the "Committee of Safety" to overthrow the Queen in 1893.
Sanford B. Dole
The Spanish placed the rural Cuban population into these camps, where tens of thousands died from disease and starvation.
concentration camps
Out of roughly 3,000 American deaths, this was the cause of far more casualties than actual combat.
disease (e.g., yellow fever, malaria)
The thinker who first took Charles Darwin’s ideas and misapplied them to human beings, creating the false framework of Social Darwinism.
Herbert Spencer
The Belgian ruler who oversaw a notorious private colony in the Congo that included barbaric practices like forced labor, torture, and mutilation.
King Leopold II
The strategic importance of Hawaii as a location for this during the Spanish-American War convinced Congress to approve its formal annexation in 1898.
naval base (or Pearl Harbor)
Passed before the declaration of war, this promised that the U.S. would not take permanent control of Cuba after the war.
Teller Amendment
Passed after the war, this amendment limited Cuba's independence by giving the U.S. the right to intervene in Cuban affairs and securing a permanent naval base at Guantánamo Bay.
Platt Amendment