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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Discusses the concept of manifest destiny and examines the diplomatic deals and wars that brought new territories under American control and allowed the country to expand westward to the Pacific Ocean.