Download or read book Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History written by Frederick Merk and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book Manifest Destiny written by Shane Mountjoy and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Manifest Destiny a Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History written by Albert Katz Weinberg and published by . This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: High quality reprint of Manifest Destiny; A Study Of Nationalist Expansionism In American History by Albert Katz Weinberg.

Download or read book The Irony of Manifest Destiny written by William Pfaff and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-07-23 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For years there has been little or no critical reexamination of how and why the ultimately successful postwar American policy of 'patient but firm and vigilant containment of Soviet expansionist tendencies...and pressure against the free institutions of the western world' (as George Kennan formulated it at the time) has over six decades turned into a vast project for ending tyranny in the world. We defend this position by making the claim that the United States possesses an exceptional status among nations that confers upon it special international responsibilities, and exceptional privileges in meeting those responsibilities. This is where the problem lies. It has become somewhat of a national heresy to suggest the U.S. does not have a unique moral status and role to play in the history of nations and therefore in the affairs of the contemporary world. In fact it does not." Cogently, thoughtfully, powerfully, William Pfaff--whose columns and commentary over the past 40-odd years have given him the widest international influence of any American commentator--lays out the historical roots behind the American exceptionalism that has animated our politics and foreign relations for decades, and makes clear why it is flawed and bound to fail. Those roots lie in the secularization of western society brought about by the Enlightenment. "My proposition in this book is that the United States' spearation from 1800 to 1941 from the common history of the west has disqualified it from the mandate it has assumed as the society that embodies the future"...and in many ways is responsible for the impasse in which it finds itself at the end of the disastrous events of the last 8 years. "It has failed to learn from experience because it lacks the indispensable experience Europeans have acquired of modern ideological folly and national tragedy."

Download or read book Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History written by Frederick Merk and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Native America Discovered and Conquered written by Robert J. Miller and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2006-09-30 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Manifest Destiny, as a term for westward expansion, was not used until the 1840s. Its predecessor was the Doctrine of Discovery, a legal tradition by which Europeans and Americans laid legal claim to the land of the indigenous people that they discovered. In the United States, the British colonists who had recently become Americans were competing with the English, French, and Spanish for control of lands west of the Mississippi. Who would be the discoverers of the Indians and their lands, the United States or the European countries? We know the answer, of course, but in this book, Miller explains for the first time exactly how the United States achieved victory, not only on the ground, but also in the developing legal thought of the day. The American effort began with Thomas Jefferson's authorization of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, which set out in 1803 to lay claim to the West. Lewis and Clark had several charges, among them the discovery of a Northwest Passage—a land route across the continent—in order to establish an American fur trade with China. In addition, the Corps of Northwestern Discovery, as the expedition was called, cataloged new plant and animal life, and performed detailed ethnographic research on the Indians they encountered. This fascinating book lays out how that ethnographic research became the legal basis for Indian removal practices implemented decades later, explaining how the Doctrine of Discovery became part of American law, as it still is today.

Download or read book A Companion to U S Foreign Relations written by Christopher R. W. Dietrich and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-03-04 with total page 1542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covers the entire range of the history of U.S. foreign relations from the colonial period to the beginning of the 21st century. A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations is an authoritative guide to past and present scholarship on the history of American diplomacy and foreign relations from its seventeenth century origins to the modern day. This two-volume reference work presents a collection of historiographical essays by prominent scholars. The essays explore three centuries of America’s global interactions and the ways U.S. foreign policies have been analyzed and interpreted over time. Scholars offer fresh perspectives on the history of U.S. foreign relations; analyze the causes, influences, and consequences of major foreign policy decisions; and address contemporary debates surrounding the practice of American power. The Companion covers a wide variety of methodologies, integrating political, military, economic, social and cultural history to explore the ideas and events that shaped U.S. diplomacy and foreign relations and continue to influence national identity. The essays discuss topics such as the links between U.S. foreign relations and the study of ideology, race, gender, and religion; Native American history, expansion, and imperialism; industrialization and modernization; domestic and international politics; and the United States’ role in decolonization, globalization, and the Cold War. A comprehensive approach to understanding the history, influences, and drivers of U.S. foreign relation, this indispensable resource: Examines significant foreign policy events and their subsequent interpretations Places key figures and policies in their historical, national, and international contexts Provides background on recent and current debates in U.S. foreign policy Explores the historiography and primary sources for each topic Covers the development of diverse themes and methodologies in histories of U.S. foreign policy Offering scholars, teachers, and students unmatched chronological breadth and analytical depth, A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations: Colonial Era to the Present is an important contribution to scholarship on the history of America’s interactions with the world.

Download or read book A Different Manifest Destiny written by Claire M. Wolnisty and published by University of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-10-01 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The South possessed an extensive history of looking outward, specifically southward, to solve internal tensions over slavery and economic competition in the 1820s through the 1860s. Nineteenth-century southerners invested in their futures, and in their identity as southerners, when they expanded their economic and proslavery connections to Latin America, seeking to establish a vast empire rooted in slavery that stretched southward to Brazil and westward to the Pacific Ocean. For these modern expansionists, failure to cement those connections meant nothing less than the death of the South. In A Different Manifest Destiny Claire M. Wolnisty explores how elite white U.S. southerners positioned themselves as modern individuals engaged in struggles for transnational power from the antebellum to the Civil War era. By focusing on three groups of people not often studied together—filibusters, commercial expansionists, and postwar southern emigrants—Wolnisty complicates traditional narratives about Civil War–era southern identities and the development of Manifest Destiny. She traces the ways southerners capitalized on Latin American connections to promote visions of modernity compatible with slave labor and explores how southern–Latin American networks spanned the years of the Civil War.

Download or read book Manifest Destiny written by Anders Stephanson and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 1996-01-31 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book To Lead the Free World written by John Fousek and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-06-20 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this cultural history of the origins of the Cold War, John Fousek argues boldly that American nationalism provided the ideological glue for the broad public consensus that supported U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War era. From the late 1940s through the late 1980s, the United States waged cold war against the Soviet Union not primarily in the name of capitalism or Western civilization--neither of which would have united the American people behind the cause--but in the name of America. Through close readings of sources that range from presidential speeches and popular magazines to labor union debates and the African American press, Fousek shows how traditional nationalist ideas about national greatness, providential mission, and manifest destiny influenced postwar public culture and shaped U.S. foreign policy discourse during the crucial period from the end of World War II to the beginning of the Korean War. Ultimately, he says, in the atmosphere created by apparently unceasing international crises, Americans rallied around the flag, eventually coming to equate national loyalty with global anticommunism and an interventionist foreign policy.

Download or read book Race and Manifest Destiny written by Reginald HORSMAN and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American myths about national character tend to overshadow the historical realities. Mr. Horsman's book is the first study to examine the origins of racialism in America and to show that the belief in white American superiority was firmly ensconced in the nation's ideology by 1850. The author deftly chronicles the beginnings and growth of an ideology stressing race, basic stock, and attributes in the blood. He traces how this ideology shifted from the more benign views of the Founding Fathers, which embraced ideas of progress and the spread of republican institutions for all. He finds linkages between the new, racialist ideology in America and the rising European ideas of Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, and scientific ideologies of the early nineteenth century. Most importantly, however, Horsman demonstrates that it was the merging of the Anglo-Saxon rhetoric with the experience of Americans conquering a continent that created a racialist philosophy. Two generations before the new immigrants began arriving in the late nineteenth century, Americans, in contact with blacks, Indians, and Mexicans, became vociferous racialists. In sum, even before the Civil War, Americans had decided that peoples of large parts of this continent were incapable of creating or sharing in efficient, prosperous, democratic governments, and that American Anglo-Saxons could achieve unprecedented prosperity and power by the outward thrust of their racialism and commercial penetration of other lands. The comparatively benevolent view of the Founders of the Republic had turned into the quite malevolent ideology that other peoples could not be regenerated through the spread of free institutions.

Download or read book Manifest Destinies written by Laura E. Gómez and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2008-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Watch the Author Interview on KNME In both the historic record and the popular imagination, the story of nineteenth-century westward expansion in America has been characterized by notions of annexation rather than colonialism, of opening rather than conquering, and of settling unpopulated lands rather than displacing existing populations. Using the territory that is now New Mexico as a case study, Manifest Destinies traces the origins of Mexican Americans as a racial group in the United States, paying particular attention to shifting meanings of race and law in the nineteenth century. Laura E. Gómez explores the central paradox of Mexican American racial status as entailing the law's designation of Mexican Americans as &#;“white” and their simultaneous social position as non-white in American society. She tells a neglected story of conflict, conquest, cooperation, and competition among Mexicans, Indians, and Euro-Americans, the region’s three main populations who were the key architects and victims of the laws that dictated what one’s race was and how people would be treated by the law according to one’s race. Gómez’s path breaking work—spanning the disciplines of law, history, and sociology—reveals how the construction of Mexicans as an American racial group proved central to the larger process of restructuring the American racial order from the Mexican War (1846–48) to the early twentieth century. The emphasis on white-over-black relations during this period has obscured the significant role played by the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the colonization of northern Mexico in the racial subordination of black Americans.

Download or read book Empire on the Pacific written by Norman Arthur Graebner and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-12 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this stimulating volume, which was originally published in 1955, Professor Norman A. Graebner argues that historians have exaggerated the role played by the spirit of manifest destiny in the expansionism of the 1840s. In his view, neither the overland migrations nor eastern public opinion had any direct bearing on the diplomacy that won Oregon and California for the United States. Instead, the principal objective of every statesman from Jackson on was maritime: the acquisition of the harbors at San Diego, San Francisco, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca as gateways to the trade of the Orient. “Land was necessary to them merely as a right of way to ocean ports—a barrier to be spanned by improved avenues of commerce.” This diplomacy reached a climax under Polk and triumphed with the Trist mission and the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, giving America “its empire on the Pacific.” It is upon this premise that Professor Graebner has built a reinterpretation of the diplomacy of the 1840s. An invaluable addition to any American History library.

Download or read book Manifest Destiny and American Territorial Expansion written by Amy S. Greenberg and published by Macmillan Higher Education. This book was released on 2017-12-05 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new edition of Amy Greenberg's Manifest Destiny and American Territorial Expansion continues to emphasize the social and cultural roots of Manifest Destiny when exploring the history of U.S. territorial expansion. With a revised introduction and several new documents, this second edition includes new coverage of the global context of Manifest Destiny, the early settlement of Texas, and the critical role of women in America's territorial expansion. Students are introduced to the increasingly influential transnational concept of settler colonialism, while maintaining a central focus on the ideological origins, social and economic impetus, and territorial acquisitions that fueled U.S. territorial expansion in the nineteenth century. Readers of the revised edition will also find an updated bibliography reflecting both the historiography of American expansion and its transnational context, as well as updated questions for consideration.

Download or read book Why You Can t Teach United States History without American Indians written by Susan Sleeper-Smith and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-04-20 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A resource for all who teach and study history, this book illuminates the unmistakable centrality of American Indian history to the full sweep of American history. The nineteen essays gathered in this collaboratively produced volume, written by leading scholars in the field of Native American history, reflect the newest directions of the field and are organized to follow the chronological arc of the standard American history survey. Contributors reassess major events, themes, groups of historical actors, and approaches--social, cultural, military, and political--consistently demonstrating how Native American people, and questions of Native American sovereignty, have animated all the ways we consider the nation's past. The uniqueness of Indigenous history, as interwoven more fully in the American story, will challenge students to think in new ways about larger themes in U.S. history, such as settlement and colonization, economic and political power, citizenship and movements for equality, and the fundamental question of what it means to be an American. Contributors are Chris Andersen, Juliana Barr, David R. M. Beck, Jacob Betz, Paul T. Conrad, Mikal Brotnov Eckstrom, Margaret D. Jacobs, Adam Jortner, Rosalyn R. LaPier, John J. Laukaitis, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Robert J. Miller, Mindy J. Morgan, Andrew Needham, Jean M. O'Brien, Jeffrey Ostler, Sarah M. S. Pearsall, James D. Rice, Phillip H. Round, Susan Sleeper-Smith, and Scott Manning Stevens.

Download or read book The Significance of the Frontier in American History written by Frederick Jackson Turner and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2008-08-07 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This hugely influential work marked a turning point in US history and culture, arguing that the nation’s expansion into the Great West was directly linked to its unique spirit: a rugged individualism forged at the juncture between civilization and wilderness, which – for better or worse – lies at the heart of American identity today. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves – and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives – and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Download or read book U S History written by P. Scott Corbett and published by . This book was released on 2024-09-10 with total page 1886 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most introductory courses. The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.