An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States Ortiz

US Triumphalism and Peacetime Colonialism 163

l83J and 1896, on all continents, and the United States dominated

most of Latin America economically, some countries militarily. The

forty interventions and occupations between 1898 and 1919 were

conducted with even more military heft but using the same methods

and sometimes the same personnel.

CONNECTIONS

US colonies established during 189 8-1919 include Hawai'i (formerly
called the Sandwich Islands), Alaska, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Is­
lands, Guam, American Samoa, the Marshall Islands, and Northern
Mariana. Most of these, and dozens more islands depopulated in the
Pacific and Indian Oceans and the Caribbean for military bases and
bomb testing, remain colonies (called "territories" and "common­
wealths") in the twenty-first century. 1
One of the first outspoken proponents of transoceanic imperial­
ism was former abolitionist William H. Seward who was Lincoln's
secretary of state and who considered it the destiny of the United
States to dominate the Pacific Ocean. Seward did everything possi­
ble to fulfill that perceived destiny, including arranging the purchase
of Alaska in 186 7. In early 1874 , the United States began military
control of Hawai'i, and in 1898 it annexed the islands after over­
throwing the Hawai'ian queen, Liliuokalani. Following post-World
War II ascendancy to statehood, Indigenous Hawai'ians and Alas­
kan Natives were brought under similar US colonial rule as Native
Americans.^2
Overseas ventures gained increasingly exuberant public support
in the late nineteenth century. In the best-selling book Our Country
(1885) the Reverend Josiah Strong of the American Home Mission­
ary Society argued that the United States had inherited the mantle of
Anglo-Saxonism and, as a superior race, had a divine responsibility
to control the world. By 1914 there were six thousand US Protestant
missionaries in China and thousands of others in every other part
of the non-European world, and they remained, as from the early
seventeenth century, ensconced in Native American communities.
The United States built the naval "Great White Fleet" and ex-