15 - The Environment, the United States, and the World in the Nineteenth Century

Summary

In 1900, Governor Theodore Roosevelt of New York wrote a new foreword to The Winning of the West, his four-volume history of English-speaking settlers’ conquest of North America. Composing his new foreword in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt unambiguously connected that conflict to English-speaking settlers’ colonization of North America beginning in the seventeenth century. “In the year 1898 the United States finished the work begun over a century before by the backwoodsman, and drove the Spaniard outright from the western world,” he wrote. “The backwoodsmen had pushed the Spaniards from the Mississippi, had set up a slaveholding republic in Texas, and had conquered the California gold fields, in the sheer masterful exercise of might.”