Spreading The American Dream Summary
In Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945, author Emily S. Rosenberg introduces to us how the United States shared its unique liberal economy and culture with the world. In her introduction, she illustrates the 1893 Chicago World Colombian Exposition and the ideology of liberal developmentalism and gives the reasoning behind the cultural imperialism. Rosenberg does not focus on the reaction to the “Americanizing”, but chooses to focus on the reasoning and justification of “Americanization”. My reaction to the introduction of Spreading the American Dream is that that the United States were, quite interestingly, very imperialistic; that the ideology of liberal developmentalism was a valid reasoning to
…show more content…
She goes on to highlight the five major features of liberal developmentalism which do sound like legitimate reasoning. Point one is basically the imperialistic and nationalistic standpoint that many Americans adopted. On page 7, Rosenberg states that “to many Americans, their country’s economic and social history became a universal model”. This makes sense due to many Americans not having enough money to travel and discover other models, and, also, because the travel of information was still pretty primitive, the amount of knowledge that was shared among the countries and continents was very limited. Points three and four are logical because of the nature of the nation of America. The United States is almost “stranded” on their own continent while Europe is very close and tightly packed, many countries being smaller than some of the states within America and bordering many other nations. With the rise of urbanization and industrialization, America begins to start mass producing products and then over producing. At this time in history, the Americans start looking to the world markets to sell products and improve foreign relations. Points two and five touch on private enterprise, a very important concept to the whole structure of America’s economy; capitalism. The outline of the concept introduced by Rosenberg, liberal developmentalism, is quote logical if one were to do a little research. All these points seemed like plausible justifications for the imperialistic approach that many Americans had towards spreading their culture and setting the
She goes on to highlight the five major features of liberal developmentalism which do sound like legitimate reasoning. Point one is basically the imperialistic and nationalistic standpoint that many Americans adopted. On page 7, Rosenberg states that “to many Americans, their country’s economic and social history became a universal model”. This makes sense due to many Americans not having enough money to travel and discover other models, and, also, because the travel of information was still pretty primitive, the amount of knowledge that was shared among the countries and continents was very limited. Points three and four are logical because of the nature of the nation of America. The United States is almost “stranded” on their own continent while Europe is very close and tightly packed, many countries being smaller than some of the states within America and bordering many other nations. With the rise of urbanization and industrialization, America begins to start mass producing products and then over producing. At this time in history, the Americans start looking to the world markets to sell products and improve foreign relations. Points two and five touch on private enterprise, a very important concept to the whole structure of America’s economy; capitalism. The outline of the concept introduced by Rosenberg, liberal developmentalism, is quote logical if one were to do a little research. All these points seemed like plausible justifications for the imperialistic approach that many Americans had towards spreading their culture and setting the