IN THE 1630S, ENGLISH PURITANS IN MASSACHUSETTS BAY COLONY CRE- ATED A SELF-GOVERNMENT THAT WENT FAR BEYOND WHAT EXISTED IN ENGLAND. SOME HISTORIANS ARGUE THAT IT WAS A RELIGIOUS GOVERNMENT, OR THEOCRACY. ... Many Anglicans were called Puritans because they wanted to purify the church and make it simpler.
There was great tension between pro-slavery and anti-slavery representatives over how new territories won would handle the issue of slavery.
The Mexican-American War and the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, forced onto the remnant Mexican government, drew some criticism in the U.S. for their casualties, monetary cost, and heavy-handedness. Furthermore, the question of how to treat the new acquisitions also intensified the debate over slavery and in many ways inflamed it, as potential westward expansion of the institution took an increasingly central and heated theme in national debates preceding the American Civil War.
Hello. You did not post the announcements that the question refers to, but I can help you, since the announcements that reflected European views at the time of imperialism, generally displayed obvious ideas about the purity and superiority of the white man and the idea that colonies are dirty places without civilization.
The idea of purity and superiority is related to the idea of the "white man's burden", which was a concept that stated that it was a duty (given by God) to Europeans to "clean up", take Christianity and dominate regions with inferior people , in this case, non-white people who lived in other countries, who were considered unclean and therefore needed to be purified by whites.
In this way, Europeans used a strong racist bias to dominate and enslave peoples of other ethnicities, promoting imperialism while claiming that this was the role that God had assigned to whites in this world.