Empires & Their Traits
A: What is an empire?
This term describes a large political unit where one state controls others through power or influence.
What phrase described the belief that the U.S. was meant to expand across North America?
What is Manifest Destiny?
According to Yuval Harari, what allows large societies to cooperate and form empires?
What are shared beliefs and imagined orders (like religion or money)?
Which group suffered most from U.S. expansion in the 1800s?
Who are Native Americans?
What is the central research question guiding this unit on U.S. history and empire?
What is “Did the United States act like an empire between 1800 and 1900?”
A: What is military conquest?
Q: Empires often expand using this kind of force or strategy to gain territory.
Which U.S. president purchased the Louisiana Territory in 1803?
Who is Thomas Jefferson?
According to Jarod Ddiamond, what gave some societies advantages over others?
What are geography, technology, diseases, and domesticated animals?
What happened to the American buffalo during westward expansion, and what caused it?
What is near extinction caused by overhunting, railroad expansion, and government policies encouraging western settlement?
What is one major argument that supports the idea that the U.S. acted like an empire in the 1800s?
What is that it expanded its territory through war, displacement of Native peoples, and the ideology of Manifest Destiny?
How does cultural dominance in empires occur?
This often happens through spreading language, religion, or customs and traditions
What event in 1848 led to massive westward migration?
What is the California Gold Rush?
What idea did Yuval Harari suggest binds people in large groups and creates power structures?
What is shared fiction or collective belief?
What economic activity grew because of new western lands?
What is agriculture, cattle ranching, mining, and railroad building?
What is one major argument against the idea that the U.S. acted like an empire in the 1800s?
What is that the U.S. primarily expanded within the North American continent for settlement and economic opportunity, rather than establishing overseas colonies or ruling foreign peoples like European empires?
What four main aspects define an empire’s power?
What are military, economic, political, and cultural control?
What tragic event removed thousands of Native Americans from their homelands in the 1830s?
What is the Trail of Tears?
How does Jared Diamond explain European conquest in the Americas?
What is the geographic advantage and immunity to zoonotic diseases.
When and under which president was the U.S. policy passed that forced Native Americans to move west of the Mississippi River?
What is the Indian Removal Act of 1830, signed by President Andrew Jackson?
Compare the methods and consequences of British imperialism in Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” with U.S. expansionism in the 1800s.
What is both involved using power to control people and land—Britain through colonial authority in Burma and the U.S. through westward expansion and displacement of Native Americans—showing how ideology, economic goals, and social pressures justify expansion, but often harm the local population?
Empires often influence other regions by spreading what?
What are their language, religion, and customs?
What war allowed the U.S. to gain territory in the Southwest, including California and New Mexico?
What is the Mexican–American War?
What is one similarity between Harari’s and Diamond’s explanations of empire?
What is that environment and belief systems shape human power and expansion?
How did Manifest Destiny affect the environment and the peoples living on the land?
What is the destruction of natural habitats, the decimation of the buffalo, and the starvation and displacement of Native peoples due to westward expansion?
To think critically about whether the U.S. acted like an empire, students must compare its expansion to what broader historical patterns?
What are the characteristics and behaviors of other empires, such as Rome, Britain, or Spain, including their use of power, ideology, and control over resources?