Ch. 10- Assessment on the Age of Imperialism

Dear Journal,

I have been studying about America becoming an Empire. It is crazy to think that America was created by someone finding land, and deciding to move there. Even though some of our founding ideals has been broken in the past, we still have most of them today. Also we still abide by the same Constitution we had hundreds of years ago! I have defiantly learned a lot about America, including how strong it is to be able to survive all it has gone through.
There are a lot of positives and negatives about becoming an Empire. The positive, is we are now the world biggest super power. Businesses are growing and our economy is doing better than most. Living in a country that is a world power has its benefits because I am able to keep my freedom, and live the way i want to live. If America was a small country and did not have as strong as a military as we do now, we may not have those rights, and ideals as we have now. it is also nice to have a country where you cannot be stepped on, like some other countries always has someone over their heads bossing them around, and America is defiantly not one of those countries. We also have the ability to create and make new inventions, and tools, and medicine. We are always continually creating and thinking of new things to help us in our everyday lives.
The negative, is some people did not agree with how we got here. We did not really stick to our founding ideals sometimes, and we went to war several times when sometimes we probably did not need to. Another bad thing is since we are such a big country, many people do rely on us. There are so many countries that rely on our resources, or on our military. We are always the ones to come to the rescue. Sometimes it is a good thing, but sometimes we should probably listen to Washington and stay out of some country's affairs especially when they have nothing to do with us. Another bad thing is when we were expanding and believing in manifest destiny, we got it into our mind set that we would do anything, including force, to achieve that. And we did, some countries, races were wronged by us because we believed in it whole heatedly.
I do however, think it was a good idea for America to become and Empire. I am a strong beliver when I say that things would be a whole lot different if we did not have the socail status that we have today. This project did open my eye to the bad that America has done in the past, but also taught me the good of what came out of it.

Kami Mahoney