Imperial America

Today America stands as one of the youngest countries in the world. This is a known fact, so why does America rival every superpower in the world? There are many reasons for it. One is that America has invested so much in military technology, another is its geographic advantage, how unlike Germany, it is not flanked on all sides by neighboring countries. Lastly, and hopefully this doesn’t come as a shock, America has had a taste of power, and they want more. America was founded on violence and it is only going to end that way. From when America was only but a colony of the British Empire, through the years into Iraq, America has never known peace for what it truly is. For a better understanding of the country who knows no bounds, one must first review the chronology of events leading to today, well the major ones anyway.

In the beginning there were the thirteen colonies. “The very first permanent colony was in Jamestown, New York” (Rubenstein 151). Most of the colonial Americans were people who were outcasts in the eyes of the British. However the colonies flourished, but were in all reality thirteen very separate states with differing visions as well as dialects, “having come from different parts of England, Quakers from the North of England and Puritans from East Anglia” (Rubenstein 151). Of course there was the mix of Irish and Scottish in the middle Atlantic. A great big melting pot, which is what America is.

Then the British began to make decisions without allowing the Americans to put anything to the vote. Voting is representation and when the ludicrous taxations came into play the states began to get upset. One of those taxes was first imposed in 1765 as the Stamp Act which taxed official documents, commercial contracts, licenses, publications, and even playing cards in the Northern colonies” (Encarta). This was repealed in 1766 but it came back in the form of many other crazy taxes which were used by the crown to fight the many wars it was having between other colonies. All of this taxation led to the Boston Tea Party which was thrown in 1773 by the colonists. Of course it wasn’t a real tea party, this one involved boarding three British ships and throwing all of the cargoes of tea overboard into the Boston harbor in protest to the crown’s tax on tea. This was the precursor to the American Revolution.