A Letter to an Emperor This source document basically shows how Americans came to Japan and practiced "gunboat diplomacy" on Japan to open up its country and abandon its closure. door policy. The writer wrote that America, back home, was overshadowed by the "horrors of the Civil War" and many other internal problems, such as the purchase of Native American lands in the North and dealings with Western nations such as the British to remove them from American lands. The term “manifest destiny” in the 1840s, based on the American perspective, refers to America's aspiration to assist countries elsewhere in the world to realize their full potential to become a modern, self-governing state (Merk, 1995). All in all, out of these unpleasant past experiences, America has begun to formulate policies that encompass the nationalism of American pride in nature, hence the birth of the term “manifest destiny.” Furthermore, pressures from other great Western powers that were asserting themselves in other parts of the world strongly influenced America to venture into expansionist movements “far west into Asia and the Pacific.” The writer systematically mentions how the Americans planned expansion towards Asia and the Pacific. America, as mentioned in the source, had Captain Alfred T. Mahan as the man behind the American Naval Expeditionary Force during that time. In a book about Captain Alfred, he was described as an intelligent expansionist interested only in expansion having "a strong navy would require island possessions to serve as naval bases" and was not concerned with providing welfare and development to the places America colonized ( Maha, 2004). Furthermore, Western countries are already venturing out and… middle of paper… influence. (1478 words) Bibliography • Beasley, W. G. (1972). The Meiji Restoration. California: Stanford University Press.• Cheng, P.-k. (1999). The search for modern China: a documentary history. Zhongli yamen document on unequal treaties. New York: Norton.• Gerstle, CA (2000). 18th Century Japan: Culture and Society. Routledge.• Mahan, A. T. (2004). The influence of sea power on history. Digital antiquarianism.• Mak, D. K. (2009). Solving everyday problems with the scientific method: thinking like a scientist. Singapore: World Scientific.• Merk, F. (1995). Manifest destiny and mission in American history: A reinterpretation. United States of America: Harvard University Press.• Tarling, N. (1992). The Cambridge history of south-east Asia: from the earliest times to c. 1800. Singapore: Cambridge University Press Sydicate.