“America is back,” reads a footnote to a video segment of President Donald Trump reposted this week on the Guadalajara U.S. Consulate General’s Facebook page.
Is that irrelevant?
In addition to renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” this slogan sets the tone for what many observers predict will be a refocused “imperialistic” narrative in a second Trump administration—especially regarding the American continent.
Most U.S. citizens today are unaware that the abbreviated term “America” was never used by the Founding Fathers and only began to gain widespread popularity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This shift largely coincided with the period of U.S. imperialistic expansion. Before Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, U.S. leaders rarely referred to the nation simply as “America.”
The term’s broader usage gained traction after the U.S. annexed the Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, along with the non-Spanish territories of American Samoa and Hawaii, following the Spanish-American War in 1898.
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