Manifest Destiny and Empire

Manifest Destiny and Empire PDF Author: Robert Walter Johannsen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781603440479
Category : Manifest Destiny
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Six scholars consider important aspects of American antebellum expansion in these studies based on talks originally prepared for the Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures. Robert W. Johannsen of the University of Illinois at Urbana offers fresh insight into the meaning of the term "manifest destiny," arguing for a broader definition. John M. Belohlavek of the University of South Florida takes a close look at the expansionist attitudes of Caleb Cushing, a Massachusetts politician, diplomat, reformer, and intellectual. Cushing's life and controversial career, Belohlavek argues, mirror a young republic as it began to transform itself from "union" to "nation." Thomas R. Hietala of Grinnell College examines the complicated clash of culturesthe result of Manifest Destinyand how it was viewed by observant individuals such as George Catlin, a painter who traveled and lived among Native Americans just prior to the expansionist surge of the 1840s and who opposed the destruction of Native Americans in the wake of the Anglo westward movement. Winner of the Webb essay competition for 1996, Samuel J. Watson of Rice University studies U.S. Army officers' responses to territorial expansionism between 1815 and 1846. He argues that officers' views on Manifest Destiny were far more nuanced than conventional models of romantic nationalism suggest. Sam W. Haynes uncovers the social and political complexities, including a widespread fear of Great Britain, that made Texas' annexation the most divisive issue of its day. Robert E. May of Purdue University offers a compelling examination of American filibustering during the Manifest Destiny era.

Manifest Destiny and Empire

Manifest Destiny and Empire PDF Author: Robert Walter Johannsen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781603440479
Category : Manifest Destiny
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
Six scholars consider important aspects of American antebellum expansion in these studies based on talks originally prepared for the Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures. Robert W. Johannsen of the University of Illinois at Urbana offers fresh insight into the meaning of the term "manifest destiny," arguing for a broader definition. John M. Belohlavek of the University of South Florida takes a close look at the expansionist attitudes of Caleb Cushing, a Massachusetts politician, diplomat, reformer, and intellectual. Cushing's life and controversial career, Belohlavek argues, mirror a young republic as it began to transform itself from "union" to "nation." Thomas R. Hietala of Grinnell College examines the complicated clash of culturesthe result of Manifest Destinyand how it was viewed by observant individuals such as George Catlin, a painter who traveled and lived among Native Americans just prior to the expansionist surge of the 1840s and who opposed the destruction of Native Americans in the wake of the Anglo westward movement. Winner of the Webb essay competition for 1996, Samuel J. Watson of Rice University studies U.S. Army officers' responses to territorial expansionism between 1815 and 1846. He argues that officers' views on Manifest Destiny were far more nuanced than conventional models of romantic nationalism suggest. Sam W. Haynes uncovers the social and political complexities, including a widespread fear of Great Britain, that made Texas' annexation the most divisive issue of its day. Robert E. May of Purdue University offers a compelling examination of American filibustering during the Manifest Destiny era.

Manifest Destiny

Manifest Destiny PDF Author: Anders Stephanson
Publisher: Hill and Wang
ISBN: 0809015846
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
When John O'Sullivan wrote in 1845, "...the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of Liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us", he coined a phrase that aptly describes how Americans from colonial days and into the twentieth century perceived their privileged role. Anders Stephanson examines the consequences of this idea over more than three hundred years of history, as Manifest Destiny drove the westward settlement to the Pacific, defining the stubborn belief in the superiority of white people and denigrating Native Americans and other people of color. He considers it a component in Woodrow Wilson's campaign "to make the world safe for democracy" and a strong factor in Ronald Reagan's administration.

A Failed Vision of Empire

A Failed Vision of Empire PDF Author: Daniel J. Burge
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496228073
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
"A Failed Vision of Empire examines Manifest Destiny over the nineteenth century by challenging contested moments in the continental expansion of the United States to show that the ideal was not wildly popular, nor did it typically succeed in unifying expansionists"--

Coast-to-Coast Empire

Coast-to-Coast Empire PDF Author: William S. Kiser
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806162392
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
Following Zebulon Pike’s expeditions in the early nineteenth century, U.S. expansionists focused their gaze on the Southwest. Explorers, traders, settlers, boundary adjudicators, railway surveyors, and the U.S. Army crossed into and through New Mexico, transforming it into a battleground for competing influences determined to control the region. Previous histories have treated the Santa Fe trade, the American occupation under Colonel Stephen W. Kearny, the antebellum Indian Wars, debates over slavery, the Pacific Railway, and the Confederate invasion during the Civil War as separate events in New Mexico. In Coast-to-Coast Empire, William S. Kiser demonstrates instead that these developments were interconnected parts of a process by which the United States effected the political, economic, and ideological transformation of the region. New Mexico was an early proving ground for Manifest Destiny, the belief that U.S. possession of the entire North American continent was inevitable. Kiser shows that the federal government’s military commitment to the territory stemmed from its importance to U.S. expansion. Americans wanted California, but in order to retain possession of it and realize its full economic and geopolitical potential, they needed New Mexico as a connecting thoroughfare in their nation-building project. The use of armed force to realize this claim fundamentally altered New Mexico and the Southwest. Soldiers marched into the territory at the onset of the Mexican-American War and occupied it continuously through the 1890s, leaving an indelible imprint on the region’s social, cultural, political, judicial, and economic systems. By focusing on the activities of a standing army in a civilian setting, Kiser reshapes the history of the Southwest, underlining the role of the military not just in obtaining territory but in retaining it.

Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire

Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire PDF Author: Amy S. Greenberg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521840965
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
This book documents the potency of Manifest destiny in the antebellum era.

The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture

The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture PDF Author: Amy Kaplan
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674264932
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The United States has always imagined that its identity as a nation is insulated from violent interventions abroad, as if a line between domestic and foreign affairs could be neatly drawn. Yet this book argues that such a distinction, so obviously impracticable in our own global era, has been illusory at least since the war with Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century and the later wars against Spain, Cuba, and the Philippines. In this book, Amy Kaplan shows how U.S. imperialism--from "Manifest Destiny" to the "American Century"--has profoundly shaped key elements of American culture at home, and how the struggle for power over foreign peoples and places has disrupted the quest for domestic order. The neatly ordered kitchen in Catherine Beecher's household manual may seem remote from the battlefields of Mexico in 1846, just as Mark Twain's Mississippi may seem distant from Honolulu in 1866, or W. E. B. Du Bois's reports of the East St. Louis Race Riot from the colonization of Africa in 1917. But, as this book reveals, such apparently disparate locations are cast into jarring proximity by imperial expansion. In literature, journalism, film, political speeches, and legal documents, Kaplan traces the undeniable connections between American efforts to quell anarchy abroad and the eruption of such anarchy at the heart of the empire.

Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History

Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History PDF Author: Frederick Merk
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674548053
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Before this book first appeared in 1963, most historians wrote as if the continental expansion of the United States were inevitable. "What is most impressive," Henry Steele Commager and Richard Morris declared in 1956, "is the ease, the simplicity, and seeming inevitability of the whole process." The notion of inevitability, however, is perhaps only a secular variation on the theme of the expansionist editor John L. O'Sullivan, who in 1845 coined one of the most famous phrases in American history when he wrote of "our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." Frederick Merk rejected inevitability in favor of a more contingent interpretation of American expansionism in the 1840s. As his student Henry May later recalled, Merk "loved to get the facts straight." --From the Foreword by John Mack Faragher

Manifest Destiny

Manifest Destiny PDF Author: Albert Katz Weinberg
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781839744808
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Building an American Empire

Building an American Empire PDF Author: Paul Frymer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691191565
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
How American westward expansion was governmentally engineered to promote the formation of a white settler nation Westward expansion of the United States is most conventionally remembered for rugged individualism, geographic isolationism, and a fair amount of luck. Yet the establishment of the forty-eight contiguous states was hardly a foregone conclusion, and the federal government played a critical role in its success. This book examines the politics of American expansion, showing how the government's regulation of population movements on the frontier, both settlement and removal, advanced national aspirations for empire and promoted the formation of a white settler nation. Building an American Empire details how a government that struggled to exercise plenary power used federal land policy to assert authority over the direction of expansion by engineering the pace and patterns of settlement and to control the movement of populations. At times, the government mobilized populations for compact settlement in strategically important areas of the frontier; at other times, policies were designed to actively restrain settler populations in order to prevent violence, international conflict, and breakaway states. Paul Frymer examines how these settlement patterns helped construct a dominant racial vision for America by incentivizing and directing the movement of white European settlers onto indigenous and diversely populated lands. These efforts were hardly seamless, and Frymer pays close attention to the failures as well, from the lack of further expansion into Latin America to the defeat of the black colonization movement. Building an American Empire reveals the lasting and profound significance government settlement policies had for the nation, both for establishing America as dominantly white and for restricting broader aspirations for empire in lands that could not be so racially engineered.

Building the Continental Empire

Building the Continental Empire PDF Author: William Earl Weeks
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
ISBN: 1461733200
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
In this fresh survey of foreign relations in the early years of the American republic, William Earl Weeks argues that the construction of the new nation went hand in hand with the building of the American empire. Mr. Weeks traces the origins of this initiative to the 1750s, when the Founding Fathers began to perceive the advantages of colonial union and the possibility of creating an empire within the British Empire that would provide security and the potential for commercial and territorial expansion. After the adoption of the Constitution—and a far stronger central government than had been popularly imagined—the need to expand combined with a messianic American nationalism. The result was aggressive diplomacy by successive presidential administrations. From the acquisition of Louisiana and Florida to the Mexican War, from the Monroe Doctrine to the annexation of Texas, Mr. Weeks describes the ideology and scope of American expansion in what has become known as the age of Manifest Destiny. Relations with Great Britain, France, and Spain; the role of missionaries, technology, and the federal government; and the issue of slavery are key elements in this succinct and thoughtful view of the making of the continental nation.