The United States Role in World Affairs in the 19th and 20th Centuries

The United States has been a major player in world affairs over the last two centuries. In the years following its War of Independence, its policies tended to be isolationist, but over the centuries it has been transformed, mainly by trade and economic imperatives, into a superpower that exerts military, economic and cultural domination over much of the rest of the world. The following essay will outline some of the main events of this period.
The Monroe Doctrine was a statement of United States policy on the activities and rights of European powers in the western hemisphere. …