Why is guam part of the united states

Politically, however, the chain is divided into two regions: The Commonwealth of the Mariana Islands and Guam. Archaeologists have found evidence of rice cultivation and pottery that dates before the first Europeans arrived on Guam in the 16th century. The Chamorros established a matrilineal society, which traces kinship through the female line. They relied on agriculture and fishing as the basis of their society.

The death of a Jesuit missionary who secretly baptized the infant daughter of a local chief touched off a new era of oversight by the Spanish. The Chamorros were herded into villages, each of which was supervised closely by a Spanish priest. As with many other colonized peoples, the Chamorros began to find their culture assimilated by the Spanish.

By the 19th century, the U. All of this activity occurred under the banner of the manifest destiny philosophy, an idea that it the United States was divinely ordained to expand, spreading democracy and capitalism across North America—and beyond.

In the late s, tensions began mounting with Spain. Nine hours after Japan attacked the territory of Hawaii, another set of Japanese planes came into view over another US territory, the Philippines.

As at Pearl Harbor, they dropped their bombs, hitting several air bases, to devastating effect. The attack on Pearl Harbor was just that — an attack. Not so in the Philippines. There, the initial air raids were followed by more raids, then by invasion and conquest. Sixteen million Filipinos — US nationals who saluted the stars and stripes and looked to FDR as their commander in chief — fell under a foreign power.

Yet Roosevelt toyed with that draft all day, adding things in pencil, crossing other bits out. At some point he deleted the prominent references to the Philippines. Why did Roosevelt demote the Philippines? Roosevelt was trying to tell a clear story: Japan had attacked the US.

But he faced a problem. Legally, they were indisputably US territory. But would the public see them that way? Polls taken slightly before the attack show that few in the continental US supported a military defense of those remote territories. Roosevelt no doubt noted that the Philippines and Guam, although technically part of the US, seemed foreign to many. Although it was a territory rather than a state, it was closer to North America and significantly whiter than the others.

Yet even when it came to Hawaii, Roosevelt felt a need to massage the point. So, on the morning of his speech, he made another edit. An American island, where American lives were lost — that was the point he was trying to make. The president spoke of Hawaii and the many lives lost there. This was not how it looked from the Philippines, where air-raid sirens continued to wail.

They were, as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson unabashedly called them, colonies. Within a decade or two, after passions had cooled, the c-word became taboo.

Better to stick with a gentler term, used for them all: territories. Yet a striking feature of the overseas territories was how rarely they were even discussed. Those mental maps imagined the US to be contiguous: a union of states bounded by the Atlantic, the Pacific, Mexico and Canada. That is how most people envision the US today, possibly with the addition of Alaska and Hawaii.

Most obviously, the logo map excludes Hawaii and Alaska, which became states in and now appear on virtually all published maps of the country. But it is also missing Puerto Rico, which, although not a state, has been part of the country since When have you ever seen a map of the US that had Puerto Rico on it? In , the year Japan attacked, a more accurate picture would have been this:. In this view, the place normally referred to as the US — the logo map — forms only a part of the country.

A large and privileged part, to be sure, yet still only a part. The tiny western Pacific island of Guam has been a U. Yet given its significance, the story of how an island 6, miles from California become an American territory is surprisingly short. The only reason America annexed Guam and its Chamorro inhabitants all those years ago was because the U.

When the Spanish-American War broke out in April of , Guam was under Spanish control as it had been since the s. The U. The Philippines and Guam are only 1, miles apart. In June of that year, the U. Now Baku wants to turn the fabled fortress town into a resort. Argument An expert's point of view on a current event. October 14, , PM. Tags: China , United States. The Cable Robbie Gramer. Argument Michael Deibert. Voice Salvatore Babones.

November 11, , AM. Trending 1. The U. Latest Analysis. Or are they? The Month in World Photos.