Though the exact details of his life and expeditions are the subject of
debate, John Cabot (or Giovanni Cabot, as he was known in Italian) may
have developed the idea of sailing westward to reach the riches of Asia
while working for a Venetian merchant. By the late 1490s, he was living
in England, and gained a commission from King Henry VII to make an
expedition across the northern Atlantic. He sailed from Bristol in May
1497 and made landfall in late June. The exact site of Cabot’s landing
has not been definitively established; it may have been located in
Newfoundland, Cape Breton Island or southern Labrador. After returning
to England to report his success, Cabot departed on a second expedition
in mid-1498, but is thought to have perished in a shipwreck en route.
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By the time World War II ended, most American officials agreed that the best defense against the Soviet threat was a strategy called “containment.” In his famous “Long Telegram,” the diplomat George Kennan (1904-2005) explained the policy: The Soviet Union, he wrote, was “a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi [agreement between parties that disagree].” As a result, America’s only choice was the “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” “It must be the policy of the United States,” he declared before Congress in 1947, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation…by outside pressures.” This way of thinking would shape American foreign policy for the next four decades.
