West from Appomattox The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War

And then you look at what's happening in the Gilded Age, the primary focus of expansion is the West. Well, sure. I mean, even by the time we get to World War I, we're still going to be trying in some ways to be inward. Oh, you don't feel that way. No, no, or trying. I think the key word there is trying. Right. Well, ebbs and flows. I mean, this is the thing is that the progressive era, I mean, you see, and you'll talk about this in upcoming episodes. You get to the point where you clearly see that in 1898, it's just, well, this is it. We've done this. And so there's going to be the Philippine War, which is going to last years and millions of lives. Philippines is going to be a United States territory till just after World War II. Right. You've got expansion. We de facto control Haiti from 1915, I believe it is, when we go in. Wilson orders the Marines to go in after a coup and then takes all their money, puts it in a bank in New York and says, you guys can have this back when you act the way we want you to. You've got Cuba. So what I'm saying is we back off from some of that later on, but it's that back and forth. Gilded Age is a time where the United States is primarily focused on trying to figure out how to heal these wounds between the North and the South. And the West, as Heather Cox Richardson argued very well in West for Mathematics, the West becomes the place where suddenly we're all Americans again, and that's the focus there.