Aspects of this topic are discussed in the following places at Britannica.
The territory represented by the continental United States had, of course, been discovered, perhaps several times, before the voyages of Columbus. When Columbus came, he found the New World inhabited by peoples who in all likelihood had originally come from the continent of Asia. Probably these first inhabitants had arrived 20,000 to 35,000 years before in a series of migrations from Asia to...
maritime grievances of the United States against Great Britain, accumulated during and after the American Civil War (1861–65). The claims are significant in international law for furthering the use of arbitration to settle disputes peacefully and for delineating certain responsibilities of neutrals toward belligerents. The dispute centred on the Confederate cruiser Alabama, built...
(1798), four internal security laws passed by the U.S. Congress, restricting aliens and curtailing the excesses of an unrestrained press, in anticipation of an expected war with France. After the XYZ Affair (1797), war appeared inevitable. Federalists, aware that French military successes in Europe had been greatly facilitated by political dissidents in invaded countries, sought to prevent...
...Amistad near the coast of Cuba and had important political and legal repercussions in the American abolition movement. The mutineers were captured and tried in the United States, and a surprising victory for the country’s antislavery forces resulted in 1841 when the U.S. Supreme Court freed the rebels. A committee formed to defend the slaves later developed...
...its annexation of the Svalbard Islands in 1925, Norway eliminated its competitors by means of a treaty in which they agreed to Norwegian possession of the islands. Annexation of Hawaii by the United States in the late 19th century was a peaceful process, based upon the willing acceptance by the Hawaiian government of U.S. authority.
...Britain, and China. World War II ended with the major weights in the balance of power having shifted from the traditional players in western and central Europe to just two non-European ones: the United States and the Soviet Union. The result was a bipolar balance of power across the northern half of the globe that pitted the free-market democracies of the West against the communist one-party...
...first European airline to purchase American aircraft. The intertwining of domestic aircraft manufacture and national airline operation was widely advocated as critical to national defense. In the United States airline pioneers were private operators, as were the aircraft builders, and there was no national policy concerning either operation. Throughout the 1920s there were no adequately...
in airplane: Growth of the aviation industry )Competition for the airmail routes led to the formation of several large American aviation companies. William Boeing, who during World War I as a lumber producer in Seattle had built planes from Sitka spruce (a wood with fibres of great tensile strength), bid on what came to be called the “Columbia Route” (New York City to California’s San Francisco Bay area), winning the western...
...which, during the agricultural and Industrial revolutions, there had been an increasing attack on natural resources, particularly associated with the rise of heavily industrialized cities. When the United States and Canada became industrialized, they used coal, oil, iron, other metals, and wood with extravagance and often with great waste. The waste products of the factories of these countries...
The beginnings of dentistry in the United States came in the 1630s with the settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who were accompanied by barber-surgeons. One of the first dentists in America was English surgeon and dentist John Baker, who settled in Boston in 1763. Other immigrants to follow included Robert Wooffendale, who emigrated from England in 1766 and practiced in New York City, and...
in dentistry: Dentistry in 18th- and 19th-century America )...a university was that at Harvard University in 1867. Nevertheless, most dentists were still being trained by a system of preceptorship with an established dentist. The beginning of licensure in the United States came about in 1868, with the states of New York, Ohio, and Kentucky leading the way.
...through diplomatic accords and a flexible system of rewards and punishments by which Washington might moderate Soviet behaviour. Journalists dubbed this tactic “linkage” insofar as the United States would link positive inducements (e.g., arms control, technology transfers, grain sales) to expected Soviet reciprocity in other areas (e.g., restraint in promoting...
in international relations: The decline of détente )...as well as domestic policy. The Soviets viewed it as a form of mere peaceful coexistence in which revolutionary forces could be expected to take advantage of the new American restraint, while the U.S. administration implicitly sold détente as a means of restraining Communist activity around the world. American conservatives were bound to lose faith in détente with each new...
in international relations: Postmortem )Was détente a failure because the Soviets refused to play by the rules, because the United States was unwilling to accord the U.S.S.R. genuine equality, or because détente was never really tried at all? Or did the differing U.S. and Soviet conceptions of détente ensure that, sooner or later, American patience would wear thin? The last explanation is, in foreshortened...
...depression ever experienced by the industrialized Western world, sparking fundamental changes in economic institutions, macroeconomic policy, and economic theory. Although it originated in the United States, the Great Depression caused drastic declines in output, severe unemployment, and acute deflation in almost every country of the world. Its social and cultural effects were no less...
The massive stream of European emigration to the United States, which had begun in the late 19th century and waned during World War I, slowed to a trickle with immigration reform in the 1920s. As a result, urban industries were faced with labour shortages. A huge internal population shift among African Americans addressed these shortfalls, particularly during the World Wars, when defense...
There has been a remarkable evolution of heraldry in the United States. Ever since the American Revolution the use of arms, especially of arms of English families with whom the users were related or whose surname they bore, has continued. The College of Arms in London claims heraldic jurisdiction over persons of English and Welsh descent (Wales has been reckoned with England in this and all...
Pictorialists in the United States included Alvin Langdon Coburn, F. Holland Day, Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, and Clarence H. White. In the late work of Stieglitz, and that of Paul Strand and Edward Weston, American Pictorialism became less involved with atmospheric effects and beautiful subject matter, but for some years after World War I, the older ideals of...
The United States inherited England’s Anglo-Saxon common law and its system of social obligation, sheriffs, constables, watchmen, and stipendiary justice. As both societies became less rural and agrarian and more urban and industrialized, crime, riots, and other public disturbances became more common. Yet Americans, like the English, were wary of creating standing police forces. Among the first...
in police: Developments in policing since 1900: the United States example )The struggle for political control of the police in the United States gave rise to a distinctive strategy of policing that became influential throughout the Western democracies in the 20th century. The strategy involved new managerial techniques, integrated sources of authority, innovative tactics, and a narrowed definition of police work. Many of the reform leaders were police administrators...
After World War I, another factor contributed to airline development: the desire for an air service to speed up the mails. Unlike Europe, where the nationalized airlines carried the mail, in the United States the Army Air Corps was assigned the job, with generally dreary results. The problems of flying in a country the size of the United States were considerable. Particularly in the East, with...
...where it was carried by massive numbers of German Jewish immigrants in the 1840s and where it coalesced with existing American reform movements. By 1880 almost all of the 200 synagogues in the United States (amalgamated in the Union of American Hebrew Congregations in 1873) were Reform. In 1885 a conference of Reform rabbis formulated what was then the most comprehensive statement of...
...Some European merchants settled there, but there was no large-scale migration; production of the goods followed established procedures and remained in Asian hands. In contrast, in the New World of America and Australia there was so little existing production of trading goods that the establishment of ties required not only the pioneering of the trading route but also the founding of a colony...
in ship: Shipping in the 19th century )Once the extent and nature of the world’s oceans was established, the final stage of the era of sail had been reached. American independence played a major role determining how the final stage developed.
in ship: The steamboat )The ideal venue for steamboats seemed to be the rivers of the eastern United States. Colonial transportation had mainly taken place by water, either on the surfaces of coastal bays and sounds or on fairly broad rivers as far upstream as the lowest falls or rapids. Up to the beginning of the 19th century a system of coastal and inland navigation could care for most of the United States’...
in ship: Passenger liners in the 20th century )...speed that allowed a transatlantic run of four days or less, so that one ship might sail from New York and another from Europe weekly. This competition began when U.S. Lines launched the 53,329-ton United States. Though lighter than the Queen Elizabeth, greater use of aluminum in the superstructure and more efficient steam turbine engines allowed it to carry essentially the same number of...
This concept was eventually used by John Logie Baird in Britain (see the photograph) and Charles Francis Jenkins in the United States to build the world’s first successful televisions. The question of priority depends on one’s definition of television. In 1922 Jenkins sent a still picture by radio waves, but the first true television success, the transmission of a live human face, was...
...France occupied it as a portion of Louisiana after 1695. Under the Treaty of Paris of 1763, West Florida was held by Great Britain, which returned it to Spain under the Treaty of Paris of 1783. The United States, wishing to control the river outlets in the region, claimed the area as part of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. In 1810 American frontiersmen in the Baton Rouge section rebelled...
...expansion of motor vehicle production. During a 35-year period the total world output increased almost 10-fold. The most significant feature of this increase was that most of it occurred outside the United States. Although American production continued to grow, its share of world automotive production fell from about 80 percent of the total to 20 percent. Among individual countries the United...
the open yet restricted rivalry that developed after World War II between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies. The Cold War was waged on political, economic, and propaganda fronts and had only limited recourse to weapons. The term was first used by the American financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch during a congressional debate in 1947.
in international relations: The coming of the Cold War, 1945–57 )The symbolic first meeting of American and Soviet soldiers occurred at Torgau, Ger., on April 25, 1945. Their handshakes and toasts in beer and vodka celebrated their common victory over Nazi Germany and marked the collapse of old Europe altogether; but their inarticulate grunts and exaggerated smiles presaged the lack of communication in their relationship to come. Grand wartime coalitions...
in international relations: Total Cold War and the diffusion of power, 1957–72 )...heralded, that a Cold War competition would now extend into other realms—science and technology, economic growth, social welfare, race relations, image making—in which the Soviets or Americans could try to prove that their system was the best. At the same time, the decolonization of dozens of underdeveloped states in Asia and Africa induced the superpowers to look beyond the...
in international relations: The end of the Cold War )In retrospect, the course of the Cold War appears to have been cyclical, with both the United States and the U.S.S.R. alternating between periods of assertion and relaxation. In the first years after 1945 the United States hastily demobilized its wartime military forces while pursuing universal, liberal internationalist solutions to problems of security and recovery. Stalin, however, rejected...
international crisis that arose from an attempt by the Soviet Union, in 1948–49, to force the Western Allied powers (the United States, the United Kingdom, and France) to abandon their post-World War II jurisdictions in West Berlin. In March 1948 the Allied powers decided to unite their different occupation zones of Germany into a single economic unit. In protest, the Soviet...
In the Cold War era, which followed World War II, both the Soviet Union and the United States, as well as their respective allies, embarked on large-scale biological warfare R&D and weapons production programs. These programs were required by law to be halted and dismantled upon the signing of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) in 1972 and the entry into force of that treaty in 1975....
strategic foreign policy pursued by the United States in the late 1940s and the early 1950s in order to check the expansionist policy of the Soviet Union. In an anonymous article in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, George F. Kennan, diplomat and U.S. State Department adviser on Soviet affairs, suggested a “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian...
(October 1962), major confrontation that brought the United States and the Soviet Union close to war over the presence of Soviet nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba.
in international relations: The Cuban missile crisis )...Khrushchev, his nation still behind in strategic nuclear firepower, tried to redress the balance by insinuating 42 medium-range missiles into Cuba, whence they could reach most of the continental United States. He apparently hoped that these missiles, once in place, could then serve as a bargaining chip in negotiations leading to a neutralized Germany, which in turn might help Moscow persuade...
Whatever policies Latin American countries adopted in the postwar era, they had to take into account the probable reaction of the United States, now more than ever the dominant power in the hemisphere. It was the principal trading partner and source of loans, grants, and private investment for almost all countries, and Latin American leaders considered its favour worth having. Policy makers in...
...U.S.-sponsored program designed to rehabilitate the economies of 17 western and southern European countries in order to create stable conditions in which democratic institutions could survive. The United States feared that the poverty, unemployment, and dislocation of the postwar period were reinforcing the appeal of communist parties to voters in western Europe. On June 5, 1947, in an address...
in Europe, history of: The blast of World War II )...craters, railways out of action, bridges destroyed or truncated, harbours filled with sunken, listing ships. “Berlin,” said General Lucius D. Clay, the deputy military governor in the U.S. zone of postwar Germany, “was like a city of the dead.”
...appeared to be stealing a march on a demoralized Western alliance through its arms buildup, occupation of Afghanistan, and influence with African and Central American revolutionaries, while the United States had been expelled from Iran and was suffering from inflation and recession at home. Eight years later the Reagan administration had rebuilt American defenses, presided over the longest...
pronouncement by U.S. Pres. Harry S. Truman on March 12, 1947, declaring immediate economic and military aid to the governments of Greece, threatened by Communist insurrection, and Turkey, under pressure from Soviet expansion in the Mediterranean area. As the United States and the Soviet Union struggled to reach a balance of power during the Cold War that followed World War II, Great Britain...
in Europe, history of: The United States to the rescue )Greece and Turkey, in the Cold War conditions of 1947, were strategically vital and highly vulnerable Western outposts on the southern flank of the U.S.S.R. and its satellite states. Turkey was especially exposed. In Greece, the mainly communist National Liberation Front (EAM) had failed in its violent bid for power, but guerrilla units were still fighting in the Pindus Mountains and the...
...and some 66,000 people instantly killed by the blast and heat of a single nuclear weapon. (By the end of the year, radiation injury brought the death toll to 140,000.) During the Cold War the United States, the Soviet Union, and other major powers built up enormous stockpiles containing tens of thousands of nuclear bombs, missile warheads, and artillery shells—so many that the...
...had fled to Iran. The mujahideen were eventually able to neutralize Soviet air power through the use of shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles supplied by the Soviet Union’s Cold War adversary, the United States.
in international relations: The Soviets in Afghanistan )...an application of the Brezhnev Doctrine and was all the more pressing given that the Central Asian provinces of the Soviet Union were also vulnerable to the rise of Islāmic fundamentalism. The United States was tardy in responding to the 1978 coup despite Carter’s concern over the arc of crisis and the murder of the U.S. ambassador in Kabul in February 1979. At the same time, the Soviet...
in international relations: Afghanistan )...on the Soviet budget and a blow to Soviet military prestige. In the atmosphere of glasnost even an antiwar movement of sorts arose in the Soviet Union. A turning point came in mid-1986, when the United States began to supply the Afghan rebels with surface-to-air Stinger missiles, which forced Soviet aircraft and helicopters to suspend their low-level raids on rebel villages and strongholds....
...arid country and training a reserve force of 200,000 men and women armed primarily with French weapons. Ben-Gurion believed that the Arabs would never accept the existence of Israel except by force. U.S. policy was to play down the Arab–Israeli dispute and alert all parties to the danger of Communist penetration. To this end, Eisenhower dispatched a futile mission in January 1956 in hopes...
in international relations: The Six-Day War )...Secretary-General U Thant complied on May 19, 1967. Four days later Nasser closed the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping. The Soviets apparently urged Nasser to show moderation, while President Johnson told Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban to remain calm: “Israel will not be alone unless it decides to go alone.” Neither superpower, however, was able to restrain its client....
in international relations: Palestinian terrorism and diplomacy )...Bar-Lev line. For the first time it made substantial progress and inflicted a level of casualties especially damaging for the outnumbered Israelis. Syrian forces also stormed the Golan Heights. The United States and the Soviet Union reacted with subtle attempts to fine-tune the outcome by alternately withholding or providing arms to the belligerents and by urging or discouraging a UN...
During the Cold War the United States patronized Yugoslavia because of its independence from the Soviet bloc. The Bush administration, preoccupied elsewhere, regarded the Yugoslav breakup as a European problem. The EC, in turn, did not want to wade into a civil war and could not agree on a common posture until Germany abruptly recognized Slovenia and Croatia. In late...
...(Bay of Pigs), or Playa Girón (Girón Beach) to Cubans, on the southwestern coast by some 1,500 Cuban exiles opposed to Fidel Castro. The invasion was financed and directed by the U.S. government.
In two further respects, World War II left a lasting mark on Europe. The first and most obvious was its division between East and West. Both U.S. and Soviet troops, from opposite directions, had helped to liberate Europe, and on April 25, 1945, they met on the Elbe River. They toasted each other and posed for the photographers; then the Soviets dug themselves into new defensive positions, still...
dispute between the United States, on the one hand, and Great Britain and Canada, on the other, over the international status of the Bering Sea. In an attempt to control seal hunting off the Alaskan coast, the United States in 1881 claimed authority over all the Bering Sea waters. Britain refused to recognize this claim. In 1886 the U.S. government ordered the seizure of all vessels found...
(1854–59), small civil war in the United States, fought between proslavery and antislavery advocates for control of the new territory of Kansas under the doctrine of popular sovereignty (q.v.). Sponsors of the Kansas–Nebraska Act (May 30, 1854) expected its provisions for territorial self-government to arrest the “torrent of fanaticism” that had been dividing the...
...in April 1982. The British government of Margaret Thatcher was taken by surprise but began at once to mobilize supplies, ships, and men to reconquer the islands some 8,000 miles from home. The United States was torn between loyalty to its NATO ally (and political friend of President Reagan) and the fear of antagonizing South Americans by siding with the “imperialists.” When...
...Bishop. Over the next several years the Bishop regime socialized the country, signed mutual-assistance agreements with Soviet-bloc states, and hastened construction of a large airstrip that the United States feared would ultimately be used by Soviet aircraft. The evident incompetence of the New Jewel leadership, however, prompted a split in 1982 between Bishop’s supporters and hard-line...
...Islamic fundamentalism in the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Iran struck an answering chord with Shīʿites and Iranian workers in the Arabian states, which gave financial support to Iraq. U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his successor in 1981, Ronald Reagan, pledged American support to keep open the Strait of Hormuz, through which some 60 percent of the industrial world’s oil supply...
in international relations: The Soviets in Afghanistan )...had direct interest in the war, except for a common opposition to any overthrow of the local balance of power, but the Soviets tended to benefit from a prolongation of the conflict. In 1987 the United States sharply increased its presence in the gulf by permitting Kuwaiti oil tankers to fly the U.S. flag and by deploying a naval task force to protect them in passage through the gulf....
Debate rapidly shifted, however, following a series of deadly terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 (see September 11 attacks). No clear connection was made linking Iraq with the attacks, but U.S. President George W. Bush argued that the attacks demonstrated the vulnerability of the United States and that this vulnerability, combined with Iraq’s antipathy for the United...
in Baghdad: Health )...of the 1990s, and the best medical care was generally available only to members of the ruling party and its supporters. Reviving the city’s greatly degraded health-care system became a major task of U.S. administrators following the 2003 conflict.
in Baghdad: The contemporary city )Continuing tension between the U.S. and Iraqi governments led to the Second Persian Gulf War in 2003. American troops entered the city in April and, despite criticism from other Arab states, met with little resistance from city residents. The main task of the U.S. administrators was to reestablish law and order and begin the rehabilitation of the city’s infrastructure and vital services.
in Iraq War )conflict in Iraq beginning in 2003 and consisting of two phases. The first of these was a brief, conventionally fought war (March–April 2003), in which a combined force of troops from the United States and Great Britain (with smaller contingents from several other countries) invaded Iraq and rapidly defeated Iraqi military and paramilitary forces. It was followed by a longer second phase...
...million persons lost their lives. The war reached international proportions in June 1950 when North Korea, supplied and advised by the Soviet Union, invaded the South. The United Nations, with the United States as the principal participant, joined the war on the side of the South Koreans, and the People’s Republic of China came to North Korea’s aid. After more than a million combat casualties...
in Korean War: North to the Yalu )...selected the 1st Marine Division and the Eighth Army’s remaining infantry division, the 7th. As the force developed, it also included South Korean marine and infantry units and an assortment of U.S. support troops. The entire force was designated X Corps and was commanded by Major General Edward M. Almond, MacArthur’s chief of staff.
in Korean War: Air warfare )Throughout the war U.S. political and military leaders studied the possible use of nuclear weapons, and upon four separate occasions they gave this study serious attention. The answer was always the same: existing atomic bombs, carried by modified B-29s, would have little effect except for leveling cities. The one time that Truman suggested (in December 1950) that he was considering the nuclear...
in international relations: The Korean War )Events in neighbouring Korea determined that the dust would not settle for another 20 years. In 1945 Soviet and American troops occupied the peninsula, ruled by Japan since 1910, on either side of the 38th parallel. In North Korea indigenous Marxists under Kim Il-sung took control with Soviet assistance and began to organize a totalitarian state. In South Korea General John R. Hodge, lacking...
(July 25, 1814), engagement fought a mile west of Niagara Falls, ending a U.S. invasion of Canada during the War of 1812. After defeating the British in the Battle of Chippewa on July 5, 1814, U.S. troops under General Jacob Brown established themselves at Queenston. On the night of July 24–25, a British force under General Phineas Riall moved forward to Lundy’s Lane. On the 25th he was...
...a Federalist and opponent of the Roman Catholic church; in actuality, however, he established a centralized state. He remained in power until 1836, when he marched into Texas to quell a rebellion by U.S. settlers there. During the course of this punitive expedition, Texas declared its independence from Mexico (March 2). Santa Anna, after defeating Texan forces at the Alamo (q.v.) and...
in Mexico: The age of Santa Anna: Texas and the Mexican-American War )At that time a doctrine now known as Manifest Destiny was a driving sociopolitical force in the United States. It envisioned a United States that would extend from sea to shining sea and perhaps would ultimately encompass all of Mexico. The United States annexed the Republic of Texas in 1845, a move that Mexico saw as the first aggressive step and one which prompted a rupture in diplomatic...
...government responded by formally annexing Kuwait on August 8.) Iraq’s invasion and the potential threat it then posed to Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer and exporter, prompted the United States and its western European NATO allies to rush troops to Saudi Arabia to deter a possible attack. Egypt and several other Arab nations joined the anti-Iraq coalition and contributed...
in Iraq: The invasion )Ṣaddām showed no sign that he was prepared to withdraw from Kuwait, and on August 8 Iraq declared Kuwait to be its 19th province. U.S. President George Bush and various allies, considering Iraq’s action an act of blatant aggression as well as a threat to Western interests, decided that the status quo ante had to be reestablished, and U.S. troops began arriving in Saudi Arabia the...
in international relations: The first post-Cold War crisis: war in the Persian Gulf )...tolerate his seizure and despoliation of Kuwait rather than call upon outsiders for help. Instead, the government of Kuwait, now in exile, and the fearful King Fahd of Saudi Arabia looked at once to Washington and the United Nations for support. President Bush condemned Hussein’s act, as did the British and Soviet governments, and the UN Security Council immediately demanded that Iraq withdraw....
a war between the United States and Filipino revolutionaries from 1899 to 1902; the insurrection may be seen as a continuation of the Philippine Revolution against Spanish rule. The Treaty of Paris (1898) transferred Philippine sovereignty from Spain to the United States but was not recognized by Filipino leaders, whose troops were in actual control of the entire archipelago except the capital...
...D.C., on September 11 quickly centred on members of a Muslim extremist group, al-Qaeda, based in Afghanistan and headed by bin Laden. (See September 11 attacks.) The Taliban refused repeated U.S. demands to extradite bin Laden and his associates and to dismantle terrorist training facilities in Afghanistan. Within weeks of the attacks, the United States and Britain launched an intensive...
(1898), conflict between the United States and Spain that ended Spanish colonial rule in the Americas and resulted in U.S. acquisition of territories in the western Pacific and Latin America.
in McKinley, William )...McKinley took the oath of office as president, many Americans—influenced greatly by the sensationalistic yellow journalism of the Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers—were eager to see the United States intervene in Cuba, where Spain was engaged in brutal repression of an independence movement. Initially, McKinley hoped to avoid American involvement, but in February 1898 two events...
in Philippines: The Philippine Revolution )Meanwhile, war had broken out between Spain and the United States (the Spanish-American War). After the U.S. naval victory in the Battle of Manila Bay in May 1898, Aguinaldo and his entourage returned to the Philippines with the help of Adm. George Dewey. Confident of U.S. support, Aguinaldo reorganized his forces and soon liberated several towns south of Manila. Independence was declared on...
(1861), incident during the American Civil War involving the doctrine of freedom of the seas, which nearly precipitated war between Great Britain and the United States. On Nov. 8, 1861, Captain Charles Wilkes, commanding the Union frigate San Jacinto, seized from the neutral British ship Trent two Confederate commissioners, James Murray Mason and John Slidell, who were seeking...
...United States and the Soviet Union that began with the shooting down of a U.S. U-2 reconnaissance plane over the Soviet Union and that caused the collapse of a summit conference in Paris between the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France.
(April 21–Nov. 14, 1914), the occupation of Veracruz, the chief port on the east coast of Mexico, by military forces of the United States during the civil wars of the Mexican Revolution.
...protracted conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam, known as the Viet Cong, against the government of South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. Called the “American War” in Vietnam (or, in full, the “War Against the Americans to Save the Nation”), the war was also part of a larger regional conflict...
in international relations: End of the Vietnam War )The American achievement of détente with both Moscow and Peking and the failure of North Vietnam’s spring 1972 offensive moved both protagonists in that conflict to bargain as well. In October the secret talks in Paris between Kissinger and Le Duc Tho finally produced an agreement on a cease-fire, the release of prisoners of war, evacuation of remaining U.S. forces within 60 days, and...
mass killing of as many as 500 unarmed villagers by U.S. soldiers in the hamlet of My Lai on March 16, 1968, during the Vietnam War.
...groups new to the local society or region; thus, the most visible and violent gangs in each period had their roots in the latest wave of immigration. For example, Irish gangs were prevalent in the United States in the mid-19th century, followed by Jewish gangs in the early 20th century, and Asian and Latino gangs in the late 20th and early 21st century.
...or replace legal procedure or to fill the void where institutional justice did not yet exist. Such conditions commonly give rise to acts of genocide. Statistics of reported lynching in the United States indicate that, between 1882 and 1951, 4,730 persons were lynched, of whom 1,293 were white and 3,437 were black. Lynching continued to be associated with U.S. racial unrest during the...
Similar institutions for boys also appeared in the United States in the mid-19th century, and reformatories for girls spread rapidly from the early 20th century. The institutions for girls, which usually were smaller than those for boys, were concerned primarily with controlling sexual promiscuity and teaching domestic skills. As in England, most reformatories for boys attempted to transform...
In the United States through much of the 20th century, a combination of federal and state regulations, such as the Banking Act of 1933, prohibited interstate banking and prevented the development of nationwide bank branches. Although the intent of the Depression-era legislation was the prevention of banking collapses, in many cases states prohibited statewide branch banking owing to the...
During World War II, Great Britain and the United States outlined the postwar monetary system. Their plan, approved by more than 40 countries at the Bretton Woods Conference in July 1944, aimed to correct the perceived deficiencies of the interwar gold exchange standard. These included the volatility of floating exchange rates, the inflexibility of fixed exchange rates, and reliance on an...
Although various U.S. state governments experimented with deposit insurance prior to the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in 1933, most of these experiments failed (in some cases because the banks engaged in excessive risk taking). The concept of national deposit insurance had garnered little support until large numbers of bank failures during the first years of...
...and 1979, however, the country’s economic growth was guided by several five-year and seven-year plans and was aided by extensive foreign assistance. This aid, primarily from the Soviet Union and the United States, accounted for more than four-fifths of government investment and development expenditures during that period. Roads, dams, power plants, and factories were constructed, irrigation...
in Afghanistan: Civil war, communist phase (1978–92) )...spread throughout all of Afghanistan’s provinces, and periodic explosions rocked Kabul and other major cities. On February 14, 1979, U.S. Ambassador Adolph Dubs was killed, and the elimination of U.S. assistance to Afghanistan was guaranteed.
...were destined to remain outside Armenia. On January 15, 1920, the Allies recognized the de facto existence of the three Transcaucasian republics. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson hoped to persuade the United States to accept a mandate for an independent Armenia, but the Senate refused the responsibility (June 1, 1920). On August 10 Armenia, now recognized de jure, signed the Treaty of...
The United States became Australia’s major ally. In a famous statement (December 1941), Prime Minister Curtin declared: “I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free from any pangs about our traditional links of friendship to Britain.” A sharper note of independence from Britain came when Curtin insisted (February 1942) that Australian troops recalled from the Middle...
in Australia: International affairs )...Queen Elizabeth II in 1954 to provoke mass emotion. Menzies, an ardent royalist, upheld the British position in the Suez Crisis of 1956. Yet overall the stronger theme was Australian acceptance of U.S. dominance—all the more inexorable as the United Kingdom abandoned much of the modest interest it had cherished for Australia. The U.S. alliance crystallized in the 1951 Australia–New...
...of ending the war. When this move was opposed by the Germans as well as by the Allies, Burián tried for a separate peace settlement for Austria-Hungary. On Oct. 14, 1918, he sent a note to President Wilson asking for an armistice on the basis of the Fourteen Points. On October 18 the U.S. secretary of state, Robert Lansing, replied that, in view of the political development of the...
in Austria: Allied occupation )...Austria to the U.S.S.R.), control machinery was set up for the administration of Austria, giving supreme political and administrative powers to the military commanders of the four occupying armies (U.S., British, French, and Soviet). In September 1945 a conference of representatives of all states extended the authority of the Renner government to all parts of Austria.
in Austria: Anschluss and World War II )...an independent Austrian republic as an essential part of the postwar order in central Europe. In October 1943, at a meeting in Moscow of the foreign ministers of Great Britain, the U.S.S.R., and the United States, a declaration was published that declared the Anschluss null and void and pledged the Allies to restore Austrian independence; it also reminded the Austrians that they had to make an...
...military and police force relative to its population, but it is one of the smallest in the region. In 1991, following the Persian Gulf War, Bahrain signed a defense cooperation agreement with the United States. Bahrain is the headquarters for the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet. The United Kingdom maintains a small military presence.
...tourism. As a result the colony has become an important offshore financial centre, and many insurance and investment companies have established offices there. Principal trading partners include the United States, which supplies nearly three-fourths of Bermuda’s imports by value; Canada; Japan; and the Netherlands Antilles, which supplies oil imports.
...which had completed the revolutionary process by virtually destroying the older middle-class supporters of the MNR. Siles initiated an economic program, with massive financial support from the United States, that brought inflation under control; at the same time, he also suspended most of the advanced social programs of the revolution. The government ended worker coadministration of the...
After the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the Japanese attack on the United States, Bulgaria yielded to German pressure to declare war on Great Britain and the United States, a move of only symbolic importance, but Tsar Boris avoided joining the war against the Soviet Union, fearing that this would lead to popular unrest. Bulgaria did not send troops to the front and was relatively...
...the late 1960s, when opposition to his rule intensified. He saw Thailand and what was then South Vietnam as the greatest threats to Cambodia’s survival. Those two countries were allied with the United States, which the prince disliked. At the same time, Sihanouk feared the eventual success of the Vietnamese communists in their war against South Vietnam and the United States, and he dreaded...
The most significant outcome of World War II for Canada in its foreign relations was the relative decline of Britain and the emergence of the United States as the world’s foremost economic and military power. Canada’s relations with Britain became increasingly distant, while those with the United States became closer. The creation of the Permanent Joint Board on Defense in 1940 was a...
in Canada: U.S.-Canadian relations )The policy of the Liberal government (in power since 1935), wartime cooperation, and the close economic interconnections between Canada and the United States had brought the two neighbours into a more intimate relationship than ever before. After World War II Canada’s special relations with the United States continued and expanded. Two new trends proved significant. One was the growth of...
in Canada: Foreign relations )Canada’s relations with the United States were close, but there had been a long record of border disputes, the settlements of which frequently were resented, rightly or wrongly, by Canadians. Canada and the United States also clashed over fishing rights in the North Atlantic and, in the 1890s, over the sealing industry in the Pacific. Raids by the Fenians (Irish supporters of an uprising...
...and Carthage for exclusive influence in peripheral areas of the western Mediterranean led to the Punic Wars beginning in the 3rd century bc. More recently, the Monroe Doctrine (1823) asserted a U.S. sphere of influence in the “New World,” excluding further European colonization in the Americas and presaging attempts by the United States to intervene in the internal affairs of...
(1891), two serious occurrences involving the United States and Chile, the first taking place during and the second shortly after the Chilean civil war of 1891.
in Chile: The presidency of Gabriel González Videla )Economic links with the United States, which had grown after the economic crisis of the 1930s, were strengthened after World War II; U.S. investments in Chile increased from $414,000,000 in 1945 to $540,000,000 in 1950, largely in copper production. By 1952 the United States had loaned $342,000,000 to the Chilean government. The exchange of technicians and professors helped tighten technical...
The Treaty of Nanjing was followed by two supplementary arrangements with the British in 1843. In addition, in July 1844 China signed the Treaty of Wanghia (Wangxia) with the United States and in October the Treaty of Whampoa (Huangpu) with France. These arrangements made up a complex of foreign privileges by virtue of the most-favoured-nation clauses (guaranteeing trading equality) conceded to...
in China: International relations )The bloody suppression of the demonstrations in 1989 set back China’s foreign relations. The United States, the European Community (European Union since 1993), and Japan imposed sanctions, though by 1992 China had largely regained its international standing with all but the United States. But by the mid-1990s both sides had taken steps toward improved relations, and China retained its...
in international relations: The Chinese civil war )...Asian future would be determined above all by the outcome of the civil war in China, a war that had never totally ceased even during the Japanese invasion and occupation. In 1945, Truman reaffirmed America’s commitment to a “strong, united, and democratic China” and dispatched Marshall to seek a truce and a coalition government between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists at Chungking and...
The devastating civil war was followed by the loss of Panama. The Colombian Congress refused an offer from the United States to build a canal across the isthmus, and in 1903 the Panamanians revolted against the government in Bogotá. They negotiated a treaty with the United States that created a Canal Zone 10 miles (16 km) wide under U.S. sovereignty in exchange for an agreement by the...
in canals and inland waterways: The Panama Canal )...Panama. Further problems, especially yellow fever among the work force, halted construction after about 78,000,000 cubic yards (60,000,000 cubic metres) of material had been excavated. Meanwhile, U.S. interest had been actively maintained, but the situation was complicated by political difficulties and questions of sovereignty. A treaty between Britain and the United States recognized the...
...Asia. It was established at Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), in 1950 as a result of discussions by the governments of India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand, and Great Britain. The United States, Japan, and a number of Southeast Asian, East Asian, and Pacific countries joined later. The plan came into full operation in 1951. Its name was changed following the end of...
...when the building was destroyed in the 1910 earthquake, the headquarters were moved to San José. One of the court’s landmark cases involved the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty of 1916, which gave the United States permission to use the San Juan River (the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica) as part of an interoceanic canal route. Costa Rica protested that Nicaragua was violating preexisting...
Havana, meanwhile, continued to grow as a major world port, rivaling in population and in trade both New York City and Buenos Aires. Cuba became independent from Spain in 1898 with the aid of the United States, and for six decades thereafter Cuba was a close economic and political ally of that country. Increasing numbers of U.S. businesses and tourists were drawn to Havana, which acquired the...
in Cuba: Filibustering and the struggle for independence )...economic differences between metropolis and colony, and laid the foundation for the break with Spain in 1898. Spanish colonial administration was corrupt, inefficient, and inflexible. People in the United States, especially in the southern slave states, showed a lively and growing interest in the island and supported a series of filibustering expeditions led by Narciso López...
in Cuba: National evolution and Soviet influence )Although there has been some improvement in relations between Cuba and the United States since the revolution, the U.S. trade embargo imposed in the early 1960s remains essentially in force. U.S. activities such as the invasion of Grenada, investigations concerning the condition of political prisoners in Cuba, and propaganda radio broadcasts beamed toward Cuba since 1985 perpetuated bilateral...
...from Russian camps and trained for service on the Allied side. A Czechoslovak brigade participated in the last Russian offensive and distinguished itself at Zborov (Ukraine) in July 1917. From the United States came moral encouragement, but U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s early statements pertaining to the peace aims were rather hazy. Several weeks after the United States declared war on...
...the last of the plantation workers and their families were removed—mostly to Mauritius, but smaller numbers went to Seychelles and Great Britain. This was done to enable the development of U.S. military facilities established in accordance with a 1966 agreement between the United States and the United Kingdom. Development of this base for air and naval support in the late 1970s and...
...was thoroughly discredited as a traitor, and Spain withdrew its troops after a brief occupation (1861–65) and a series of battles against patriotic forces. Báez then approached the United States with a protectorate plan. Pres. Ulysses S. Grant favoured annexation, but the U.S. Senate failed to ratify the treaty by one vote.
...lacked caution, however, and his reign ended in catastrophe. From his predecessors he inherited a precarious economy and a burden of debt. The decline in North American cotton exports caused by the American Civil War (1861–65) greatly increased Britain’s demand for Egyptian long-staple cotton. This product had been introduced and developed in Muḥammad ʿAlī’s time, but...
in Egypt: The Nasser regime )...East Treaty Organization, later known as the Central Treaty Organization), which had been formed earlier that year by Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom, with the support of the United States, to counter the threat of Soviet expansion in the Middle East. With the 1955 arms deal, the Soviet Union established itself as a force in the region.
in Egypt: The Sādāt regime )Egypt did not win the war in any military sense. As soon as Israel recovered from the initial shock of Arab gains in the first few days of fighting—and once the United States abandoned its early neutrality and resupplied Israel with a massive airlift of military supplies—the Israelis drove the Egyptians and Syrians back. A cease-fire was secured by the United States while Egyptian...
in Egypt: Egypt after Sādāt )The Egyptian public also grew skeptical of ongoing efforts by successive U.S. presidents and by their own president to promote peace between Israel and other Arab countries and, particularly, the Palestinians. In a changing global economy, there was a popular suspicion that such attempts at fostering better relations might have some ulterior motive. In particular, many Egyptians feared a...
In addition, the role of the United States, which previously had shown very little interest in the affairs of El Salvador, changed markedly with Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as president in January 1981. During the balance of the decade, the United States supplied El Salvador with financial aid amounting to $4 billion; assumed responsibility for the organization and training of elite military...
in international relations: Nicaragua and El Salvador )...increasingly confused by evidence of atrocities on all sides and were again torn between their desire to promote human rights and their determination to halt the spread of Communism. Opponents of U.S. involvement warned of another Vietnam in Central America, while supporters warned of another Cuba.
...to restore Ethiopia’s sovereignty and to fend off British colonial encirclement and the isolation of his state. He regarded British activities in Somaliland as subversive and turned to the United States, which he concluded would be the dominant postwar power, to balance the geopolitical threat. American lend-lease and other assistance permitted Ethiopia to rebuff Britain and to secure...
in eastern Africa, history of: Cracks in the empire )...Front (ELF). Its manifesto, which called for armed struggle to obtain Eritrea’s rights, attracted the support of Syria, which eagerly offered military training for rebellion in a country tied to the United States and Israel. This largely Muslim movement received an infusion of young Christians after 1962, when, through Addis Ababa’s manipulation, the Eritrean assembly voted to adopt the status...
The one French success in the century-long competition with Britain was the support given to the rebellious North American colonies in the American Revolution (1775–83). French military officers, most notably the young marquis de Lafayette, fought with the American forces, and for a short while the French navy had control of the high seas. The real victor of the Siege of Yorktown,...
in international relations: France’s independent course )In defense matters, de Gaulle bristled at NATO’s reliance on the United States and publicly doubted whether the U.S. nuclear umbrella over Europe was still reliable after Sputnik. Would the Americans really risk a nuclear attack on New York City or Washington, D.C., to defend Berlin or Paris? Therefore, de Gaulle accelerated the quiet development of a nuclear capacity begun under the Fourth...
... colossal statue on Liberty Island in the Upper New York Bay, U.S., commemorating the friendship of the peoples of the United States and France. Standing 305 feet (93 metres) high including its pedestal, it represents a woman holding a torch in her raised right hand and a tablet bearing the adoption date of the Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776) in her left. The torch, which...
...a united Germany to be prevented from aspiring to military power or hegemony in the power vacuum of eastern Europe? The Soviets seemed unlikely to countenance a united Germany fully allied with the United States and the EC, while a neutral Germany might become a loose cannon vacillating between Moscow and the West. So it was that on the day after the Malta summit, President Bush declared his...
For purposes of occupation, the Americans, British, French, and Soviets divided Germany into four zones. The American, British, and French zones together made up the western two-thirds of Germany, while the Soviet zone comprised the...
...economic problems, which had culminated in national bankruptcy in 1893. Economic difficulties were primarily responsible for the great wave of emigration, principally from the Peloponnese to the United States, that characterized the last decade of the 19th and the first decade of the 20th century. About one-sixth of the entire population participated in this great exodus. Very largely male,...
in Greece, history of: Civil war and its legacy )...the declaration of the Truman Doctrine in March 1947, which pledged support for “free peoples” in their fight against internal subversion, the tide gradually began to turn, as the United States, assuming Britain’s former mantle as Greece’s chief external patron, provided military equipment and advice. American intervention and the consequences of the break between Josip Broz...
Greenland fell under the protection of the United States during the German occupation of Denmark in World War II and was returned to Denmark in 1945. Following the war, Denmark responded to Greenlanders’ complaints over its administration of the island. The monopoly of the Royal Greenland Trading Company was abolished in 1951, and, after Greenland became an integral part of the Kingdom of...
...the country, the U.S.-based United Fruit Company, whose idle lands he tried to expropriate. He also insisted that the company and other large landowners pay more taxes. As the reforms advanced, the U.S. government, cued by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, became increasingly alarmed, fearing the threat to sizable American banana investments and to U.S. bank loans to the Guatemalan...
in Guatemala: Demographic trends )...region to the north. In the early 21st century, some 250,000 Guatemalans were still internally displaced. Others fled to Mexico, where more than 100 refugee camps existed in the 1980s, and to the United States and Belize. Many of these refugees returned home with the help of a United Nations refugee commission, which functioned until 2004; however, the number of Guatemalans emigrating...
in Guatemala: Guatemala from 1931 to 1954 )The land reform, which had a heavy impact upon the U.S.-owned United Fruit Company, and the growth of communist influence became the most troublesome issues of the Arbenz regime. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began efforts to destabilize the regime and recruited a force of Guatemalan exiles in Honduras, which was led by the exiled Col....
...20th century, Nicaraguan strongman José Santos Zelaya put Miguel Dávila into the Honduran presidency. This led in 1911 and 1912 to something more serious than periodic revolutions. The U.S. president, William Howard Taft, sent marines to protect American banana investments, which by this time had grown considerably, with three companies exploiting this Honduran product. All three...
...in 1946, a year after its founding. In the post-World War II period it has based its foreign policy on peaceful international cooperation and participated in joint Western defense efforts. The United States, having assumed responsibility for Iceland’s defense, maintains a naval air station at Keflavík International Airport under NATO auspices.
...hostilities ceased, and a UN-sponsored cease-fire was agreed to by both parties on Jan. 1, 1949. No statewide plebiscite was held, however, for in 1954, after Pakistan began to receive arms from the United States, Nehru withdrew his support.
in India: Foreign policy )Relations with the United States improved during the last half of the 1980s, with greater trade, scientific cooperation, and cultural exchanges. When civil rule resumed in Pakistan in 1988, India’s relations with that country also reached a new level of friendship, though the South Asian thaw proved to be brief.
in international relations: China, India, and Pakistan )...another system of conflict focused on border disputes among India, Pakistan, and China. Nehru’s Congress Party had stabilized the political life of the teeming and disparate peoples of India. The United States looked to India as a laboratory of democracy and development in the Third World and a critical foil to Communist China and in consequence had contributed substantial amounts of aid. The...
...Conference of 1955. Like Nasser, Nehru, and Mao, he ruled his 100,000,000 people by vague, hortatory slogans that added up to a personal ideology with nationalist and Communist overtones. The Kennedy administration had tried to appease Sukarno with development aid and even obliged the Dutch to cede Irian Barat (Irian Jaya) in the face of Sukarno’s threats in 1963. Sukarno still turned to...
...to dismiss Mosaddeq but was himself forced to leave the country by Mosaddeq’s supporters. Several days later, however, Mosaddeq’s opponents, probably with the covert support and assistance of the United States, restored Mohammad Reza to power.
in international relations: The Iranian revolution )...revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. By November 1978 the beleaguered Shah saw his options reduced to democratization, military repression, or abdication. Despite the importance of Iran for U.S. interests, including the presence there of critical electronic listening posts used to monitor missile tests inside the U.S.S.R., Carter was unable to choose between personal loyalty toward an...
in Iran: Foreign relations )Relations with the United States remained close, reflected by the increasing predominance of Western culture in the country and the growing number of American advisers, who were necessary to administer the shah’s ambitious economic reforms and, most important, to aid in the development of Iran’s military. The Iranian army was the cornerstone of the country’s foreign policy and had become,...
in Iran: Postrevolutionary chaos )...influence, and, facing persecution and violence, many of the Western-educated elite fled the country. This anti-Western sentiment eventually manifested itself in the November 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy by a group of Iranian protesters demanding the extradition of the shah, who at that time was undergoing medical treatment in the United States. Through the embassy takeover, Khomeini’s...
Relations with the United States, which had resumed in 1984, began to improve. In 1987 the United States agreed to reflag 11 Kuwaiti tankers and escort them in international waters through the Strait of Hormuz. Britain and France also escorted tankers carrying their own flags. Although a U.S. destroyer was inadvertently attacked by an Iraqi bomber in May 1987, the United States supported Iraq,...
...of Western political and economic domination of the Middle East. This is well illustrated by the writings of Osama bin Laden, the founder and leader of al-Qaeda, which repeatedly condemn the United States for enabling the dispossession of the Palestinians, for orchestrating international sanctions on Iraq that contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens in the...
On April 2, 1947, Bevin washed his hands of Palestine and placed it on the docket of the UN, which recommended partition into Jewish and Arab states. The United States and Britain feared that the Arabs would turn to the Soviets for aid, but the U.S.S.R. mystified all parties in October by agreeing with the American plan for partition. The Soviets apparently hoped to hasten British withdrawal,...
in Israel: The war of 1948 )...gained the upper hand over the Palestinians through skill and pluck, aided considerably by intra-Arab rivalries. Israel’s declaration of independence on May 14, 1948, was quickly recognized by the United States, the Soviet Union, and many other governments, fulfilling the Zionist dream of an internationally approved Jewish state. Neither the UN nor the world leaders, however, could spare...
in Israel: The Suez War )...to withdraw their troops, effectively ending much of the influence of those two countries in the region. Israel was also compelled to return to the old armistice lines, but not before the United States had agreed to placing a UN peacekeeping force in the Sinai. American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles also promised in writing that the United States would treat the Strait of...
In 1947 the Cold War began to influence Italian politics. De Gasperi visited the United States in January 1947 and returned with $150 million in aid. He had excluded the Communists and their allies, the Socialists, from his government the previous May both to placate the Vatican and the conservative south and to ensure that much-needed U.S. aid continued. As parliamentary elections approached,...
Rumours had long circulated among the various Western powers that the U.S. government would send an expeditionary fleet to Japan. In 1846 Commander James Biddle of the American East Indian fleet appeared with two warships in Uraga Harbour (near Yokohama) and held consultations with bakufu representatives on the question of opening commercial relations. When refused by the bakufu,...
in Japan: Foreign relations )Japan’s relations with the democratic powers deteriorated steadily. The United States and Great Britain did what they could to assist the Chinese Nationalist cause. The Burma Road into southern China permitted the transport of minimal supplies to Nationalist forces. Constant Japanese efforts to close this route led to further tensions between Great Britain and Japan. Anti-Japanese feeling...
in Japan: International relations )Japan has continued its close cooperation with the United States, but it also has sought to rebuild relations with its Asian neighbours. Despite the rapid political transformation of the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, ties between the United States and Japan have been little altered in their fundamental tenets. Both countries officially remained...
...Fayṣal and his family were killed in an army coup in Iraq coordinated by Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Ḥussein, realizing his regime was under threat, turned to Great Britain and the United States for assistance. Washington agreed to provide additional military and economic aid. The British government, eager to see the pro-Western Ḥussein secure in Jordan, stationed...
parallel of latitude that in East Asia roughly demarcates North and South Korea. The line was chosen by U.S. military planners at the Potsdam Conference, in July 1945, as an army boundary, north of which the U.S.S.R. was to accept the surrender of the Japanese forces in Korea and south of which the Americans were to accept the Japanese surrender. The line was intended as a temporary division...
in Korea, North: North Korea under Kim Jong Il )...government reestablished diplomatic relations with several Western countries and pledged to continue its moratorium on missile testing. In 2001, however, the new George W. Bush administration in the United States put on hold all negotiations with North Korea; the gulf between the two countries widened when President Bush, following the September 11 attacks, included North Korea (along with Iraq...
in Korea, history of: Division of Korea )The Cairo Declaration, issued on Dec. 1, 1943, by the United States, Great Britain, and China, pledged independence for Korea “in due course.” This vague phrase aroused the leaders of the Korean provisional government in Chungking to request interpretation from the United States. Their request, however, received no answer. At the Yalta Conference held in February 1945, U.S....
in Korea, South: Health and welfare )...widows, and orphans), vocational training of women, and care of juvenile delinquents. Following on the devastation of the Korean War, United Nations agencies, civilian and military agencies of the United States, and private volunteer agencies played a significant role in the steadily improving living conditions in South Korea. Also significant was the dramatic increase in household income,...
...began to concentrate its attacks on gulf shipping, largely on Kuwaiti tankers. This led Kuwait to invite both the Soviet Union (with which it had established diplomatic relations in 1963) and the United States to provide protection for its tankers in early 1987. The effect of the war was to promote closer relations with Kuwait’s conservative gulf Arab neighbours (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar,...
Finally, Cold War rivalry and Third World problems intersected devastatingly in America’s own backyard. Before the era of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, the United States had frequently been accused of meddling too much in the affairs of other states in the hemisphere. By the 1950s the contradictory charge was leveled that the United States was not involving itself enough, as evidenced by...
in international relations: Latin-American problems )...and violent protests against Vice President Richard M. Nixon during his trip to Caracas and Lima in 1958 alerted Washington to the dangers inherent in neglecting the genuine needs of the region. The United States agreed to fund an Inter-American Development Bank, while the State Department sought to avoid too close an association with unpopular, authoritarian regimes. Whatever the overall merits...
in international relations: Marxism and the Cuban role )...and North America. To Castro and other radical intellectuals, a stagnant Latin America without strong middle classes was precisely suited for a Marxist, not a democratic, revolution. Before 1958 the United States—the “colossus to the north”—had used its influence to quell revolutionary disturbances, whether out of fear of Communism, to preserve economic interests, or to...
in Latin America, history of: Good Neighbor Policy and World War II )One reason Latin American nations avoided an overly close association with fascism was a desire not to offend the dominant power of the hemisphere, the United States. During the 1920s it had already begun a retreat from the policy of active intervention in Latin America. This policy, adopted in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War and the United States’ open support of Panamanian secession...
...had been initially excluded), helped settle minor international disputes, and experienced no serious challenges to its authority. It was seriously weakened, however, by the nonadherence of the United States; the U.S. Congress failed to ratify the Treaty of Versailles (containing the Covenant). One of the League’s main purposes in preventing aggression was to preserve the status quo as...
...of the strategic al-Biqāʿ valley and intensified what already amounted to a Lebanese civil war among Palestinians, Muslims of various sects and allegiances, and Christian militiamen. The United States sent Marines to Beirut to facilitate the evacuation of the PLO, while it tried without success to piece together a coalition Lebanese government and induce the Israelis and Syrians to...
in Lebanon: Chamoun regime and the 1958 crisis )...accusing the United Arab Republic of intervention, and UN observers were sent to Lebanon. When in July the pro-Western regime in Iraq was toppled in a coup, President Chamoun immediately requested U.S. military intervention, and on the following day U.S. Marines landed outside Beirut. The presence of U.S. troops had little immediate effect on the internal situation, but the insurrection slowly...
African sovereignty had also been infringed between Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast where, inspired by the Sierra Leone example, private U.S organizations had settled freed slaves for whom there was no place in their own society prior to 1863. British and French merchants questioned the right of the settlers to control and to tax their trade and, since formal U.S. policy was anticolonial, the...
in Liberia: Outside intervention )...attempts to work out a plan of assistance involving appointing foreign administrators, declaring a moratorium on the Firestone loan, and suspending diplomatic relations with Great Britain and the United States. After the League Council had finally withdrawn its plan of assistance, the Liberian government reached an agreement with Firestone along lines similar to the league’s recommendations.
In 1959 Libya changed abruptly from a pauper state, dependent on international aid and the rent from U.S. and British air bases, to an oil-rich monarchy. The discovery of major petroleum deposits in both Tripolitania and Cyrenaica assured the country of income on a vast scale. Soon after the discovery there was an enormous expansion of all government services and also of construction projects,...
in Libya: Qaddafi’s regime )...two states. Libya was eventually bested by Chad’s military, and diplomatic ties with Chad were restored in October 1988. In 1994 Libya withdrew its troops from the Aozou strip. Relations with the United States deteriorated in the 1980s as the U.S. government protested Qaddafi’s support for international terrorist groups and claimed Libya was producing chemical weapons. A series of retaliatory...
The United States is Mexico’s most important trading partner, and U.S.-based companies account for more than half of Mexico’s foreign investment. The United States is also the source of about three-fifths of Mexican imports and the destination for more than four-fifths of the country’s exports. In contrast, trade with Mexico represents only about one-tenth of total U.S. trade. Thus, Mexico is...
in Mexico: Expansion of Spanish rule )Near the end of the 16th century, the northern frontier of New Spain in most areas was close to the present Mexican-U.S. boundary line. Within the area that is now the United States, a settlement had been made in Florida in 1565. In 1598 Juan de Oñate began the conquest of New Mexico, though the Pueblo Indians of the region rebelled in 1680 and were not reconquered until 1694. The Pueblo...
in Mexico: The military revolution )The new president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, was determined to oust Huerta and, on flimsy pretexts, landed U.S. troops at Veracruz and occupied it (see Veracruz incident). All of the revolutionary leaders except Villa rejected this external intervention in a national struggle. The combined revolutionary forces unseated Huerta in 1914 but then split over who...
...considerably in the mid-1980s, leading to the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1986. On January 27, 1987, diplomatic relations also were established between the United States and the Mongolian People’s Republic for the first time in the history of the two countries.
(December 2, 1823), cornerstone of U.S foreign policy enunciated by President James Monroe in his annual message to Congress. Declaring that the Old World and New World had different systems and must remain distinct spheres, Monroe made four basic points: (1) The United States would not interfere in the internal affairs of or the wars between European powers; (2) the United States recognized...
The Pacific theatre was dominated by the United States, the forces of which provided New Zealand’s sole defense. The fact that disaster was averted by American and not by British forces required a change in New Zealand’s attitudes; security was conferred by a foreign, though friendly, power. External relations in the postwar period reflected this new situation, chiefly through the ANZUS pact...
...from 1980 through 1983; however, public spending on many state enterprises combined with continued price controls and subsidies led to economic problems. A trade embargo declared on Nicaragua by the United States in 1985, along with economic mismanagement by the Sandinista government, brought about economic decline, service shortages, war-driven inflation, and a growing foreign debt that lasted...
in Nicaragua: The Sandinista government )The 1990 general elections were held under careful international observation. Contra activity increased during the electoral period. On Feb. 25, 1990, the U.S.-endorsed and U.S.-financed National Opposition Union (Unión Nacional Opositor; UNO) coalition and its presidential candidate, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, the widow of the martyred newspaper editor, won an upset victory, and a...
in international relations: Nicaragua and El Salvador )...human rights policies, the Carter administration cut off aid to Somoza, permitting the Sandinistas to take power in 1979. They appeared to Americans as democratic patriots and received large sums of U.S. aid. A radical faction soon took control of the revolution, however, and moderates either departed or were forced out of the government in Managua. The Sandinistas then socialized the economy,...
in international relations: The Philippines and Central America )The U.S. conflict with the Nicaraguan revolutionary regime of Daniel Ortega also reached a climax in 1989. On February 14 five Central American presidents, inspired by the earlier initiatives of the Costa Rican president and Nobel Peace laureate Oscar Arias, agreed to plans for a cease-fire in the...
...limited resources with which to assist the refugees or the Afghan mujahideen, and assistance was sought from other Muslim states, especially Saudi Arabia. After Ronald Reagan became president of the United States in 1981, Washington also answered the call for help. Pakistan soon became the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid, which by the end of Reagan’s second term had reached several...
A first apparent breakthrough for U.S. policy occurred in November 1988, when the Palestine National Council, meeting in Algiers, voted overwhelmingly to accept UN Resolutions 242 and 338, calling for Israel to evacuate the occupied territories and for all countries in the region “to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries.” Did this imply PLO recognition of Israel’s...
in Palestine: World War II )The Allied discovery of the Nazi extermination camps at the end of World War II and the undecided future of Holocaust survivors led to an increasing number of pro-Zionist statements from U.S. politicians. In August 1945 U.S. President Harry S. Truman requested that British Prime Minister Clement Attlee facilitate the immediate admission of 100,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors into Palestine, and...
in Palestine: The move toward self-rule )...between the PLO and the Israeli government. Nonetheless, on September 28, 1995, ʿArafāt and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres signed an agreement in Washington providing for the expansion of Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and for elections of a chairman and a legislative council of the PA. The PA would gain control over six large West...
Closer to home, the United States continued to face not only the aggressively hostile Sandinista regime in Nicaragua and the leftist rebellion in El Salvador (backed, the White House said, by Nicaragua, Cuba, and the Soviet Union) but also a growing rift with the Panamanian dictator General Manuel Noriega. For decades Noriega had collaborated with U.S. intelligence...
in Panama: Panama Canal and coastal ports )The Panama Canal, built by the United States and operated continuously since its opening in 1914, has fortified Panama’s role as an international shipping and trade centre. From 1903 until 1979 a strip of land 10 miles (16 km) wide lying on either side of the canal, the Canal Zone, was controlled by the United States. By treaties signed between the two countries in 1977, the Canal Zone was...
in
