After the Civil War Americans got busy expanding internally. With the frontier to conquer and virtually unlimited resources, they had little reason to look elsewhere. Americans generally had a high level of disdain for Europe, although wealthy Americans were often educated there and respected European cultural achievements in art, music and literature. Americans also felt secure from external threat because of their geographic isolation between two oceans, which gave them a sense of invulnerability. Until very late in the 19th century Americans remained essentially indifferent to foreign policy and world affairs.
What interests America did have overseas were generally focused in the Pacific and the Caribbean, where trade, transportation and communication issues commanded attention. To the extent that Americans wanted to extend their influence overseas they had two primary goals: pursue favorable trade agreements and alignments and foster the spread of Christian and democratic ideals as they understood them. The isolationism that seemed to work for America began to change late in the century for a variety of reasons. First, the industrial revolution had created challenges that required a broad reassessment of economic policies and conduct. The production of greater quantities of goods, the need for additional sources of raw materials and greater markets-in general the expansive nature of capitalism-all called for Americans to begin to look outward.
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America had always been driven by the idea of "manifest destiny," which was at first the idea that the U.S. was to expand over the whole continent of North America, "from the Isthmus of Panama to the Arctic Circle." While Canada and Mexico seemed impervious to further expansion by Americans, at least there had been the rest of the mainland to fill up. With the ending of the frontier and the completion of the settlement of the West the impulse to further expansion spilled out over America's borders.</span>
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A. The oil industry severely slowed down due to the impact of the two storms.
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In general the sociocultural process in which the sense and consciousness of association with one national and cultural group changes to identification with another such group, so that the merged individual or group may partially or totally lose its original national identity. Assimilation can occur and not only on the unconscious level in primitive societies. It has been shown that even these societies have sometimes developed specific mechanisms to facilitate assimilation, e.g., adoption; mobilization, and absorption into the tribal fighting force; exogamic marriage; the client relationship between the tribal protector and members of another tribe. In more developed societies, where a stronger sense of cultural and historical identification has evolved, the mechanisms, as well as the automatic media of assimilation, become more complicated. The reaction of the assimilator group to the penetration of the assimilated increasingly enters the picture.
Various factors may combine to advance or hinder the assimilation process. Those actively contributing include the position of economic strength held by a group; the political advantages to be gained from adhesion or separation; acknowledged cultural superiority; changes in religious outlook and customs; the disintegration of one group living within another more cohesive group; the development of an "open society" by either group. Added to these are external factors, such as changes in the demographic pattern (mainly migration) or those wrought by revolution and revolutionary attitudes. Sociologists have described the man in process of assimilation as "the marginal man," both attracted and repelled by the social and cultural spheres in which he lives in a state of transition.
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