American Imperialism In Vietnam

151 Words1 Pages
When political decisions are out of the hands of the public, popular ideas about how those decisions are made are likely to be astoundingly wrong. That so many Americans still believe that this country 's military presence in Vietnam was the consequence only of accidents, miscalculations, and basically benign intentions is the most striking recent example. Such popular misconceptions are strengthened by the mass media 's failure to place contemporary events in a larger historical context. While the forms of American expansionism have changed over the past 200 years, and several major shifts in the ideology surrounding U.S. imperialism have occurred, it is possible to trace this history of change systematically. Each era of expansionism