As the population of the 13 colonies grew and the economy developed, the desire to expand into new land increased. Nineteenth-century Americans believed it was their divine right to expand their territory from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. "Manifest destiny," a phrase first used in 1839 by journalist John O'Sullivan, embodied the belief that God had given the people of the United States a mission to spread a republican democracy across the continent. Advocates of manifest destiny were determined to carry out their mission and instigated several wars, including the war with Mexico to win much of what is now the southwestern United States. In Manifest Destiny: Westward Expansion, learn how this philosophy to spread out across the land shaped our nation.
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
From Colonial times through the 19th century, European Americans advanced toward the west. This book explains the origins of territorial expansion and traces the course of Manifest Destiny to its culminating moment, the conquest of Mexico and the acquisition of the western territories. It also weighs major historical interpretations that have evolved over the years, from those praising expansionism to those condemning it as imperialistic and racist. A mixture of essays, biographical portraits, primary documents, a timeline, and an annotated bibliography gives students and researchers everything they need to begin their examination of this prominent and oft-disputed concept in American history. Manifest Destiny opens with an overview that traces the causes and consequences of American expansionism. Six subsequent chapters cover topics varying from Andrew Jackson's invasion of Spanish Florida and Indian removal to the settlement of Texas and the Oregon Question. Biographical portraits of Stephen Austin, James K. Polk, Osceola, Santa Ana, John O'Sullivan—the coiner of the phrase Manifest Destiny—and others provide personal glimpses of some of the era's major players. Primary documents such as the Oregon Treaty of 1846, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and the Polk's declaration of war against Mexico enable students to see actual historical evidence from the time period. A chronology, a glossary, and an index make this the most well-rounded and recent reference source on the topic.
A political history of how the fledgling American republic developed into a democratic state offers insight into how historical beliefs about democracy compromised democratic progress and identifies the roles of key contributors.
This new Seminar Study surveys the history of U.S. territorial expansion from the end of the American Revolution until 1860. The book explores the concept of 'manifest destiny' and asks why, if expansion was 'manifest', there was such opposition to almost every expansionist incident. Paying attention to key themes often overlooked - Indian removal and the US government land sales policy, the book looks at both 'foreign' expansion such as the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, and the war with Mexico in the 1840s and 'internal' expansion as American settlers moved west . Finally, the book addresses the most recent historiographical trends in the subject and asks how Americans have dealt with the expansionist legacy.
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.
