ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the expansion of the United States, by far the most powerful North American country, from its Atlantic origins through its ongoing westward march towards the Pacific Basin. The enormity and diversity of the Pacific Basin defined the limits no less than the possibilities of American involvement in the region. The Western missionaries that followed came with their own separate but related blinders— to deeply rooted Asian social and religious customs, to traditions of isolationism, and to regional variations in culture and history. Americans of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century construed this truth in conflicting ways, alternately interpreting it in Darwinian terms as a process of God-given natural selection, in less prosaic terms as the beginning of a more proactive phase of American development, and finally as a call to adjustment, change, and accommodation.
