Expansion played a crucial role in shaping the military and economic landscape of the United States, as highlighted by Frederick Jackson Turner’s exploration of the frontier. He asserts that the frontier fostered "coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness," traits that enhanced American resilience and ingenuity, essential during times of conflict. This boundless quest for new opportunities has historically driven the "restless, nervous energy" of Americans, further cementing their capacity to navigate both military engagements and economic expansion. Ultimately, the closing of the frontier marked the end of an era that had significantly influenced both American identity and its assertive role on the global stage.
How had expansion helped the United States militarily and economically? Provide historical detail. (Impact at home. answer this by using only information I provide n 4 sentences and use quotes from only what I provide
“The Significance of the Frontier in American History”
From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not tabula rasa. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.
—Frederick Jackson Turner, from The Frontier in American History
For nearly a century, European nations had negotiated a series of alliances, or formal agreements between nations for mutual support in case of war, to secure themselves against their imperialist rivals. To expand German interests, German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted to obtain overseas colonies. Recall that imperialism is a nation’s policy of extending its power and dominion, especially by conquering territories.
By 1914, Europe had become divided into two competing sides. The Triple Entente included France, Great Britain, and Russia. Opposite them, the Triple Alliance included Germany, Austria-Hungary, and initially Italy. Later, other nations joined the war on both the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance sides. Eventually, the sides became known as the Allied powers (this is the side the U.S. joined) and the Central powers. At the same time European rivals were committing themselves to these defense pacts, they were competing for power and glorifying their own military might, an idea known as militarism.
On June 29, 1914, a man named Gavrilo Princip and his accomplices assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne in Austria-Hungary, during a trip to Bosnia. Princip was a Serbian nationalist who believed that all Slavic people should have their own homeland. Serbia and Bosnia had been annexed by Austria-Hungary. This annexation had angered Serbian nationalists. Recall that nationalism is the exalting of one’s nation above all others. The assassination set off a chain of events that caused nations to take sides and war to break out.
Militarization, or the buildup of warships and other armaments in preparation for war, played a significant role in World War I. By early 1915, the German navy had dispatched a fleet of U-boats, or submarines, around Great Britain to attack both merchant and military ships. Britain had already blockaded Germany when the war first broke out in order to prevent Germany and its allies from receiving imports of food and war materials. In retaliation, Germany declared the North Sea a war zone. These German U-boats acted in direct violation of international law, attacking without warning from beneath the water instead of surfacing and permitting the surrender of civilians or crew. Such attacks are known as unrestricted submarine warfare.
On May 7, 1915, the British passenger ship RMS Lusitania was attacked on its way from New York City to Liverpool, England. The German Embassy in the United States had warned that this ship would be subject to attack because it was carrying ammunition, an allegation that later proved true. Nonetheless, almost 1,200 civilians died in the attack, including 128 Americans. The attack shocked the world and tested President Wilson’s desire to stay out of what had been a largely European conflict.
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