Review: Before Manifest Destiny: The Contested Expansion of the Early United States, by Nicholas G. DiPucchio

Reviewed by: U.S. Women Writers and the Discourses of Colonialism, 1825-1861 Shelley Streeby U.S. Women Writers and the Discourses of Colonialism, 1825-1861. By Etsuko Taketani. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. 236 pp. $30.00. Etsuko Taketani's book foregrounds previously marginalized texts in order to argue for the significance of forms of antebellum U.S. colonialism that depart from "the historical model of Manifest Destiny and expansionism" (6). In her introduction, Taketani suggests that to overemphasize "operations of U.S. imperialism" that "were carried out under the rubric of 'Manifest Destiny'" in "Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, especially Cuba" forecloses "the probability of women creating alternative colonial and post-colonial visions—visions that were no less instrumental in the fabrication of the destiny of an American empire and foreign countries than the ideology of Manifest Destiny" (6). As a way of complicating such a model, Taketani focuses on a range of writing by white U.S. women that emphasizes different colonial and neocolonial settings such as China, Liberia, Burma, and the Middle East. The book is divided into two parts. In part one, "Pedagogies of Colonialism," Taketani [End Page 74] examines "women's interventions in child education" as "both conducive to and subversive of colonialism" (9, 10). The first chapter explores issues of childhood and domestic colonialism in Lydia Maria Child's Juvenile Miscellany. Through detailed close readings of a few of Child's short stories, Taketani calls attention to "the way (British) colonialism is at once overthrown and developed into the less overt (U.S.) colonialism that is difficult to discern and oppose" (18). Chapter two takes up the antebellum geography textbooks authored by Sarah Tuttle and Lydia Huntley Sigourney, and chapter three explores how Eliza Leslie's and Catharine Beecher's educational writings about the reform of cross-dressing children reveal "how hetero-normativity is constructed as a norm—a norm that ultimately supports the interests of a particular group ('U.S./us'), justifying their right to domesticate and reform the other whose 'different' sexuality is indicative of its degenerate culture" (81). In the second part of the book, entitled "An Alternative History of U.S. Imperialism," Taketani makes her most sustained and explicit efforts to show how "women's writings challenge the Manifest Destiny paradigm," which, she argues, assumes "binaristic and expansionist models that are quite different from the complexities of antebellum colonialism, particularly when colonialism involved a nexus of imperial powers (such as the United States and Britain)" (86). Chapter four, which focuses on Harriet Low's Macao journal, is perhaps the most interesting and successful chapter. Here, Taketani argues that Low's journal displays the complicity of the United States in the Chinese opium trade and thereby "[deconstructs] the official history of the United States as a heroic savior of China" (96). Other chapters in part two focus on Emily Judson's experiences as the wife of a missionary in Burma and her book, The Kathayan Slave, and Other Papers Connected with Missionary Life; Sarah Josepha Hale's vision of a postcolonial Liberia in her historical novel Liberia; or, Mr. Peyton's Experiments; and Maria Cummins's representations of diasporic whiteness in her Middle Eastern novel, El Fureidis. Taketani's emphasis on colonial and neocolonial sites other than Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean helps us to understand the reach and complexity of U.S. colonial projects in this era. Even as she complicates the "Manifest Destiny" model, however, she sometimes reifies it, or takes it at its word, in other contexts. When her analysis suggests that the only way to complicate such a model is to look elsewhere, she risks eliding the fact that the "complexities of antebellum colonialism" in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean are also flattened and reduced by "binaristic and expansionist models" of Manifest Destiny (85). In these places as well, "a nexus of imperial powers" (such as the United States, Spain, France, and England) were involved in colonial projects, and issues of neocolonialism were as pressing and relevant as they were in Macao, Burma, Liberia, and the Middle East. In other words, Taketani sometimes implies that the "Manifest Destiny" model works for Mexico...

In the late nineteenth century, American investors wanted to perpetuate an established frontier pattern: to find resources beyond the nation’s border, claim ownership, pocket the profits, and clamor for annexation should conflict arise. They faced a dilemma, though. With the United States having reached Pacific shores, what would be the next site for American expansion? Jessica Kim’s Imperial Metropolis shows how a number of connected elites in Southern California found their answer in Mexico, and in particular its North. The borderlands—and especially the region’s ties to Los Angeles—therefore occupied a unique place in the history of the United States. “Los Angeles’s proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border and borderlands,” the author writes, “along with networks of capital and the flow of people between the city and Mexico, placed the city at the fulcrum of empire and revolt at the dawn of the twentieth century” (8). In this region, Gilded Age capitalists used the neighboring country to transform American expansion, from a model of territorial conquest to one of resource extraction. Kim uses a core-periphery model to analyze the ties between Los Angeles financiers and their Mexican hinterland, while being mindful of Mexican political calculations, as well as the labor problems created, within this extractive historical worldview. Imperial Metropolis thereby places Mexico at the center of a conversation on the changing state of American expansion, a historical reality that scholars of American empire—drawn to Hawaii and the Philippines in the 1890s—have generally missed.

For the Americans, ‘Imperialism’ is other people’s history. It had nothing to do with a people who had fought a revolutionary war to gain their independence from an imperialist power, and whose leaders for a century and more had openly disclaimed any territorial ambitions in the world. Placing themselves outside history, they looked upon the earlier expansion of the mercantilist states of Europe, as well as their later ‘scramble’ for parts of Africa, Asia, and the islands of the Pacific Ocean, as evil; whereas their own conquest of a continent was the ‘Manifest Destiny’ of a people who had inherited ‘God’s country’.KeywordsSierra Nevada MountainWhite SettlerAmerican ArmyMississippi ValleyAmerican TerritoryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Reviewed by: Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands by William S. Kiser Ariel Kelley Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands. By William S. Kiser. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. Pp. 228. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) During the nineteenth century, exasperated soldiers and statesmen contended that the cost and effort required to garrison the New Mexico territory was more trouble than it was worth, so they suggested that the United States return it to Mexico. The region’s arid climate, isolated settlements, hostile indigenous tribes, and mixed-race inhabitants who resisted Americanization contrasted sharply with what was regarded as the obvious potential of California and the cotton fields of Texas. Why then did the federal government spend millions of dollars to acquire and develop it? In Coast-to-Coast Empire, William S. Kiser argues that New Mexico was a vital part of American expansionism, Manifest Destiny, and the sectionalism of the 1850s. As a conduit between Texas and California, New Mexico’s location was strategic and key to accessing the boon of Pacific trade and asserting dominance over the Southwest. Northerners and southerners alike, therefore, set their sights on controlling the territory and impressing their political and ideological views on the region’s inhabitants in a contest that eventually devolved into bloody warfare during the Civil War. Kiser opens by documenting how the Santa Fe Trail reoriented New Mexico’s economy toward the United States and paved the way for the territory’s conquest during the U.S. war with Mexico. In a series of thematic chapters, he delves into the military takeover of New Mexico and its later Indian Wars. Consistent with arguments made by Robert Wooster and other scholars who identify the U.S. Army as the most visible agent of empire, Kiser stresses that the federal government used substantial numbers of regulars to secure the territory, despite astronomical costs, because Americans believed that New Mexico was the most accessible path to the Pacific and achieving continental supremacy. In the 1840s, the military occupied Santa Fe and crushed the Taos Rebellion to establish a foothold. The territory’s military leadership then initiated various measures designed to ensure the area’s success as a migration route to California, including surveying potential railroad routes and pursuing hostile Navajos, Apaches, and Utes. Thus, the bluecoats stood as a testament to United States commitment to Manifest Destiny and New Mexico’s part in it. Symbolism was also important as North and South battled to impose hegemony over New Mexico. In a refreshing take on the well-trod topic of sectionalism, Kiser analyzes how New Mexico presented a thorny paradox for popular sovereignty because it nominally disavowed the peculiar institution, elsewhere even as it clung to coerced labor in the forms of debt peonage and Indian slavery. Free-soilers found little joy in New Mexico’s “anti-slavery” stance when it relied on unfree labor. On the other hand, southerners argued that laws sustaining the region’s traditional labor system [End Page 122] implicitly protected black chattel slavery. After disunion, the Confederacy attempted to replicate Major General Stephen W. Kearny’s success during the war with Mexico by promising freedom and protection, but alienated New Mexicans resisted and dashed Confederate dreams of taking California. People resistant to joining the Union just fifteen years earlier had become citizens vested in the United States. Coast-to-Coast Empire is an excellent example of how combining multiple historical approaches and reexamining well-known events reshapes our understanding. What emerges from Kiser’s exhaustive research and skillful intertwining of the U.S. war with Mexico, the Indian Wars, popular sovereignty, and other topics is a nuanced argument that concretely establishes the significance of New Mexico within the discourse on Manifest Destiny, expansion, and sectional loyalty. This well-written and thought-provoking volume is sure to appeal to specialists interested in military, borderlands, western, and Civil War studies. Ariel Kelley University of North Texas Copyright © 2019 The Texas State Historical Association

Reviewed by: A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America by Claire M. Wolnisty Cane West A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America. By Claire M. Wolnisty. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Pp. xx, 159. $50.00, ISBN 978-1-4962-0790-6.) In the mid-nineteenth century, as Americans looked westward across the continent, many white U.S. southerners also pursued expansion projects southward into Central and South America. Southern commentators such as Matthew Fontaine Maury felt that the future of the slaveholding U.S. South rested on the success of this sectional expansion into Latin America. Claire M. Wolnisty highlights "multiple southern expansionistic ideologies" pursued by filibusterers, commercial expansionists, and southern emigrants who developed increasingly hemispheric formulations of manifest destiny (p. xiv). She argues that these southern expansionists created political and economic networks between the U.S. South and South America through which the U.S. South could serve as the model for an "expansionistic, proslavery, and modern power poised to dominate the Western Hemisphere" (p. xiii). A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America builds [End Page 382] on recent scholarship by historians such as Matthew Pratt Guterl, Brian Schoen, and Matthew Karp emphasizing southern slaveholders' engagement with other nineteenth-century slaveholding societies in the Western Hemisphere. Wolnisty's study into the various nation-state and non-nation-state formulations of power in Central and South America demonstrates the possibility of "far more fluid spatial concepts" of an independent South than the eventual Confederacy (p. xv). The book's three chapters follow distinct groups of southern expansionists, primarily between the 1850s and 1870s, as they responded to European imperial projects in the hemisphere and domestic tensions over slavery. Chapter 1 focuses on the shifting rhetoric among military filibusterers in Nicaragua. Wolnisty draws from the writings of leading filibusterers, particularly William Walker, who first appealed to widespread anti-European sentiment before shifting to explicitly proslavery arguments that drew more sectional support. In chapter 2, her strongest chapter, she discusses the "economic infiltration" of commercial expansionists in Brazil (p. 37). She draws on letters and business ledgers from Americans in Brazil who created nonterritorial economic networks as an alternative to more high-profile military-backed territorial annexations. In chapter 3, Wolnisty follows newspapers and diaries of former Confederates who emigrated to Brazil after the Civil War. She argues that these immigrant communities carried their proslavery southern identity beyond the borders of the United States by adopting prewar southern expansion models. Readers of the Journal of Southern History will be drawn to the implications of a much more geographically fluid southern identity. Wolnisty's border-transcending southerners "became proslavery, modern economists within southern–South American networks" (p. xvii). Whether in Brazil or Nicaragua, these southern expansionists tied their identity to the promise of modern slave labor societies and settler-colonial communities modeled after the U.S. South. Wolnisty's conclusions also decenter cotton as the source of U.S. southerners' power. Cotton rarely appears in the text as Wolnisty focuses on themes of anti-European sentiment, slavery-driven capitalism, and geographic mobility. Though the study ostensibly covers the time frame of 1808 to 1877, to examine nearly a century of southerners looking toward South America, the study is largely focused on the years 1850–1877. This narrower time frame leaves readers with a limited understanding of how "expansionistic visions adapted to the shifting hemispheric environments" of the nineteenth century, with the notable exception of the post–Civil War emigrants to Brazil (p. xv). Material fluctuations in the volume of U.S.-Brazilian trade or the number of postwar southern emigrants to Brazil might provide some understanding of changes in hemispheric relations, but much of this evidence is listed only in the endnotes. A Different Manifest Destiny is helpful for scholars interested in the international dimensions of the nineteenth-century U.S. South and hemispheric case studies of southern, proslavery manifest destiny. The forms of non-state expansion show how southerners sought to develop global trade networks in the nineteenth century, and the attempted settler-colonies in Nicaragua...

Journal Article A Failed Vision of Empire: The Collapse of Manifest Destiny, 1845–1872. By Daniel J. Burge Get access A Failed Vision of Empire: The Collapse of Manifest Destiny, 1845–1872 By Daniel J. Burge. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. xi + 246 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $60.00) Maria Angela Diaz Maria Angela Diaz Utah State University Logan, Utah, USA angela.diaz@usu.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 54, Issue 2, Summer 2023, Page 166, https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/whad010 Published: 20 February 2023

ISABELLA FÜRTH Manifest Destiny, Manifest Domesticity, and the Leaven of Whiteness in Onde Tom's Cabin Another glow than sunset's fire Has filled the west with light, Where field and garner, barn and byre, Are blazing through the night. John Greenleaf Whittier, "At Port Royal" The west that glows so in John GreenleafWhittier's "At Port Royal" signifies more than the scorched-earth retreat of Southerners in the face of the Union army's occupation of the town. Coming as it does in the midst of a poem that celebrates the liberation of the local slave population and the commencement of "that work of civilization which was accepted as the grave responsibility of those who had labored for freedom," the glow in the west marks not only the rout of a confederacy "wild with fear and hate," but also the light of the nation's progress towards the day "ob jubilee."1 As such, it functions as a sign among signs in keeping with the abolitionist movement's traditional reliance on typological exegesis. The millennium of freedom has been foretold by God sing the "dusky gondoliers" of the poem, and all of nature concurs in pronouncing its inevitable arrival: "De norf-wind tell it to de pines, / De wild-duck to the sea. . . . / De rice-bird mean it when he sing, / De eagle when he scream" (lines 61-68). That a glow in the west should stand among these signs as harbinger of emancipation is Arizona Quarterly Volume 55, Number 2, Summer 1999 Copyright © 1999 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 32Isabella Fürth hardly surprising, but it does raise questions as to the extent and nature of the "progress" heralded by the poem, for Whittier's light-filled west also invokes the golden West, rich in natural resources and "luminous with the accumulated lights of European and American civilization" that is one of manifest destiny's signal promises (Benton 46). As political ideologies, the predominantly Republican espousal of abolitionism and the predominantly Democratic invocation of manifest destiny display some striking convergences. Each doctrine was indebted to a sense of the United States as a chosen land and Americans as chosen people, and adherents of each tended to present their mission as an inexorable progress mandated by God, a progress that would culminate in the conversion of the entire country into a redeemed nation —one free of slavery or one that would extend republican institutions across the American continents. Just as John O'Sullivan declares that the United States is driven by "our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence" and prophesies the day when "two hundred and fifty, or three hundred millions—and American millions —[are] destined to gather beneath the flutter of the stripes and stars, in the fast hastening year of the Lord 1945!" (28, 30; emphasis added), for Harriet Beecher Stowe emancipation serves as a sign of the millennium. It is, she says, "one of the predicted voices of the latter day, saying under the whole heavens, 'It is done: the kingdoms of the world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and ofhis Christ'" ("Reply" 285). Likewise, both the discourse of abolition and that of manifest destiny emphasize the link between physical migration across the landscape and spiritual migration towards a perfected nation. In Stowe's account , the nation's movement towards perfection would have been an unstoppable progress if not for Southern extremism. In her defense of Union policy, she recounts the Republican rationale for prohibiting slavery's expansion rather than eliminating it altogether as based on a teleological evolutionary logic: "They reasoned thus: Slavery ruins land, and requires fresh territory for profitable working. Slavery increases a dangerous population, and requires an expansion of this population for safety. Slavery, then, being hemmed in by impassable limits, emancipation in each State becomes a necessity" (274-75). hn this optimistic view, both territorial expansion and emancipation are presented more as divinely ordained forces of nature than as matters requiring direction through policy. The most telling congruence of all, however, is that by ?a??/est Destiny, Manifest Domesticity33 the 1850s proponents of both ideologies, both manifest destiny's boosters and abolitionist...

When the Eagle Screamed: The Romantic Horizon in American Expansionism, 1800-1860. By William H. Goetzmann. (Norman: University Oklahoma Press, 2000. Pp. xvii, 146. Maps. $11.95.) Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology the American Frontier, 1600-1860. By Richard Slotkin. (Norman: University Oklahoma Press, 2000. Pp. 669. $24.95.) The language the Cold War dominates William H. Goetzmann's When the Eagle Screamed, breezy account American expansionism between the Revolution and the Civil War that originally published in 1966. Goetzmann writes about British policy containment and zealously justifies the importance the role played by the United States in international politics. Realizing that he is running against the current recent historiography, he notes in brief preface the new edition that he portrays many, though not all, Americans in positive terms and describes a period . . . when Americans invited other nations follow their example (x). The intellectual purpose When the Eagle Screamed, Goetzmann explained in 1966, is to place mid-nineteenth century American expansionism in its proper context-that worldwide confrontation with exotic lands, alien peoples, and foreign governments which marked the self-conscious emergence America on the romantic horizon global diplomacy (xiii). This, Goetzmann argues, was not the work nation that sought or needed comfortable existence. It the missionary impulse individuals who had fought their way freedom or independence, and therefore appreciated their virtues (20). Regeneration Through Violence first appeared in 1973, just seven years after When the Eagle Screamed. But, ah, how much had changed. Richard Slotkin's brilliant book glosses on mostly familiar works early American literature (by authors ranging from Mary Rowlandson John Filson Herman Melville), resolutely unmasking the dark underside American expansionism. Far from triumph democracy and civilization, in Slotkin's account, the conquest North America bloody and nasty business transformed by writers into myth regeneration, story of self-renewal or self-creation through acts (556). Englishspeaking peoples from the settlement New England in the 1630s defined themselves against others(to use more recent terminology), especially American Indians, turning the victims conquest into demons who were responsible for their own eradication. Americans appropriated more than their enemies' land; they appropriated their bodies, their cultures, and their existence in order rationalize their own violence and savagery. Writing in the 1970s, Slotkin explicitly linked his argument with the Vietnam War. Americans were once again fighting war aggression under the guise self-protection while many their leaders argued that fighting made them better people. Violence against those who threatened what Americans valued about themselves more than necessary; it ennobling. The fact that Regeneration through Violence anticipated many the themes the new Western and new Indian histories in no way undermines its impact. Slotkin's book is still as eloquent as it is thoughtful. His America Goetzmann's America turned upside down. Look under the rock romantic, democratic imperialism and find vanished whales, bison, and bears; Indians debased, impoverished and killed; warfare between man and nature, between race and race, exalted as kind heroic ideal; [and] the piles wrecked and rusted cars, heaped like Tartar pyramids death-cracked, weather-browned, rain-rotted skulls, signify our passage through the land (565). Both Goetzmann and Slotkin wrote before the social history revolution the past third century had transformed American history. Neither author deals with gender, something that Annette Kolodny, using similar sources and methodology, would seek rectify in the case Slotkin with The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (1984). …

Reluctant Pioneers describes the migration of Chinese to Manchuria, their settlement there, and the incorporation of Manchuria into an expanding China, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. The expansion of Chinese state and society from the agrarian and urban core of China proper to the territories north and west of the Great Wall doubled the size of the empire, forming the "China" now so prominent on the map of Asia. The movement and settlement of people, clearing and cultivation of land, invasions of soldiers, circulation of merchants, and establishment of government offices extended the boundaries of China at the same time that the American expansion westward and the Russian expansion eastward created the other great landed empires that dominated the twentieth century and persist today. The chief purpose of this book is to describe the Chinese experience and what it tells us about the expansion of states and societies, drawing comparisons with Russia and America, and reflecting on the nature of what scholars since Frederick Jackson Turner have called "frontiers" and what Turner's critics now call "borderlands" or "middle ground." In addition, the book touches on several other issues central to our understanding of modern China, such as the development of the Chinese economy and the nature of Chinese migration.

Reviewed by: Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America by Michel Gobat Matthew J. Clavin Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America. By Michel Gobat. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. [x], 367. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-674-73749-5.) Though contemporaries of slave owners, slave traders, and secessionists, filibusters still stand out for their negative portrayal in the historiography of antebellum America. Dedicated to spreading slavery beyond the borders of the U.S. South, they waged violent wars against foreign people and nations, [End Page 442] imperiled freedom throughout the Americas, and brought the United States to the brink of civil war. The reputation is hard to refute. But in this important study, Michel Gobat shows that in the case of William Walker's infamous conquest of Nicaragua in the 1850s, Central Americans invited filibusters to their shores and then assisted the invaders in toppling the government. According to Gobat, whose first book on the United States' occupation of Nicaragua in the early twentieth century similarly exploited Spanish and English sources to great effect, William Walker and the filibusters he commanded were "liberal imperialists" fighting to bring American business and technology, along with a free and democratic political system, to a region in desperate need of assistance (p. 156). With northern Free Soilers, free black emigrationists, and European revolutionaries composing a portion of Walker's army, it is no surprise that native Nicaraguans—from elite white landowners to dark-skinned farmers, shopkeepers, and soldiers—saw in these filibusters an opportunity to remake their young nation into a miniature version of the United States. The experiment was, for a brief moment, successful. After disembarking on Nicaragua's west coast in the summer of 1855, Walker and his followers brought peace to a war-torn nation and instituted a series of reforms that resulted in the creation of a fully functioning nation-state. In collaboration with countless native Nicaraguans, including lowly peasants, powerful property owners, and Catholic priests, Walker and his filibusters established a court and tax-collection system, an all-volunteer army, a customhouse, and a post office. The objective at all times was clear: "Americanization" (p. 5). More than a brief chapter in the long history of manifest destiny, Walker's Nicaraguan conquest, according to Gobat, was a pivotal moment in the history of the Americas. Building on an idea he first articulated in the American Historical Review, Gobat considers the episode crucial in the "invention of Latin America" ("The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism, Democracy, and Race," American Historical Review, 118 [December 2013], pp. 1345-75). After several months of Walker's rule, Central Americans united in an armed revolt against the filibusters and expelled them from the region. "The idea of Latin America," Gobat boldly contends in this book, "was the most enduring outcome of the anti-U.S. moment" (p. 96). Desperate to reclaim his position of power, Walker returned to the United States. While northerners had grown suspicious of his enterprise and withdrew their support, white southerners who were hell-bent on spreading their peculiar institution to the tropics continued to rally behind his cause. By insisting that Walker's proslavery position emerged only at this moment, Gobat takes his biggest swing at the conventional wisdom regarding filibusterism. In so doing, he erroneously paints the adventurer—who in 1856 infamously re-legalized slavery in Nicaragua—as an antislavery activist. With freedom and slavery often serving as two sides of the same coin, Walker ultimately strove to spread both—far beyond the United States' southern border. That being said, Gobat should be commended. He has produced an outstanding transnational history that, because of its originality and style, will appeal to scholars and students alike. [End Page 443] Matthew J. Clavin University of Houston Copyright © 2019 Southern Historical Association

Book Review| May 01 1989 Review: United States Expansionism and British North America, 1775-1871, by Reginald C. Stuart United States Expansionism and British North America, 1775-1871Reginald C. Stuart Paul A. Varg Paul A. Varg Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (1989) 58 (2): 243–244. https://doi.org/10.2307/3639854 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Paul A. Varg; Review: United States Expansionism and British North America, 1775-1871, by Reginald C. Stuart. Pacific Historical Review 1 May 1989; 58 (2): 243–244. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3639854 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1989 The Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

As founding editor of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, John L. O’Sullivan (1813–1895) preached a particular form of Christian nationalism that centered on expansionist fever occurring during the 1830s and 1840s. O’Sullivan’s Christian nationalism was known as “Manifest Destiny”. He famously coined the term in 1845 while defending the right of the United States to annex the Republic of Texas. The central argument of this essay is that Manifest Destiny, as O’Sullivan articulated it in the pages of the Democratic Review, follows the contours of the innovative and heterodox political religion developed by Elie Kedourie and expounded upon by Anthony D. Smith. O’Sullivan’s Manifest Destiny was a conglomerated nationalistic paradigm consisting of elements from Protestant theology, Lyman Beecher’s vision for civilizing the West, and German idealism via George Bancroft’s use of historicism in his History of the United States of America, from the Discovery of the American Continent. As a form of Christian nationalism located in the context of antebellum America, Manifest Destiny is helpful to historians as they trace both continuity and change over time in how Americans have self-identified in religious terms since their origin as a collection of colonial, and later independent, polities.

IntroductionLaws denying and limiting the participation of African Americans in educational advancement have represented a complex convergence of deeply held political, economic, and social beliefs in America. From the beginning, American slavery of Africans emerged from the economic need for cheap labor. Slave codes and state statutes such as those of Georgia (Gee & Daniel, 2014) conferred on them the status of'property' to achieve this end, and social attitudes-emerging from a platform of'Manifest Destiny'-rationalized this dehumanization. From this 'foundation' came the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and later, Black Codes: laws passed in the southern United States, mostly after the Civil War, mandating the segregation of Blacks in all public places and conveyances (Gossett, 1997; Takaki, 1992; Winthrop, 1968). Such laws prescribed community conduct, protected economic interests, and further inculcated a view of African Americans as being 'inferior' and, thereby, socially undesirable while providing the precursor for racism as experienced in the modem era (Jordan, 1968; Marable, 1983).Moreover, structurally representative of comingling political, economic, and social interests, it was also the case that at the beginning of the 20th century, the infrastructure for a viable system of education for Black children did not yet exist. A lack of school buildings and seating, as well as resources, to accommodate the new influx of students predominated, most acutely in the South, further complicated by political roadblocks and social disinterest on the part of a majority of Whites (Anderson, 1988). Additionally, only long after common schools had been made available for other school children in America, during the first third of the 20th century, did public elementary schools become available for the majority of African American children in the South. At the secondary level this dearth was even more pronounced such that four-year public high schools for White students in Georgia increased from 4 to 122 between 1904-1922 but at that same time Georgia had no four-year public high schools for African American students who constituted 46 percent of the secondary school aged population in the state (Anderson, 1988; see also Trigg, 1934). This lack of access was further compounded by poor quality of schooling in that high schools for Black students, if they existed, did not possess the rigor of curriculum on par with the common schools attended by Whites (Du Bois, 1973).With this in mind, the authors assert that the potency of any remedy for educational disenfranchisement is dependent on its ability to address the political, economic, and social aspects of education for African Americans. In effecting these policies, the awareness must be two-fold: we must ensure that (a) policy formation appropriately reflects African Americans' political, economic and social interests; and (b) the stated goals and delivery mechanisms of any policy are satisfactorily aligned to achieve desired outcomes. When law and policy do not meet these criteria, we must demand redress. This is, in effect, policy pragmatism, emerging from the authors' belief that there exists, despite perverse incentives, linear policy progression (Ball, 1994; Bell, 1992).A review of the judicial history of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) is explored to ascertain its probable impact on the current aggregate population of African Americans students. This analysis is followed by an examination of evolving educational policy efforts, foremost the Elementary Secondary Education Act (ESEA, 1965) which has sought, with much controversy, to fulfill Brown's promise of an equal education. Finally, a plausible 'next step' framework for achieving education equity is suggested, illuminating comprehensive initiatives that have shown potential as effectual remedies, albeit not without remaining challenges.A Brief History of the Road to Brown and its Judicial AftermathThe Black Codes and Jim Crow Laws: Setting the GroundworkIn the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, former slaves found themselves continued victims in the former Confederate states. …

Reviewed by: Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire Gerhard Grytz Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire. By Amy S. Greenberg. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pg. 342. Acknowledgments, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 0521840961. $75.00 , cloth. ISBN 0521600804. $25.99, paper.) Amy Greenberg's study Manifest Manhood provides an intriguing new interpretation of the meaning of Manifest Destiny and the discourse of American expansionism during the middle part of the nineteenth century. Reversing commonly held historical interpretations, Greenberg convincingly shows that Manifest Destiny continued to hold its appeal to Americans after the Mexican-American War. Proponents of aggressive expansionism viewed the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Central America as the "new frontiers" in need of conquering. Between the conclusion of the Mexican-American War and the outbreak of the Civil War, the practice of filibustering, the invasion of foreign territory by private American mercenaries without official government approval, rose to epidemic proportions. Based on the investigation of an array of written documents, letters, journals, political cartoons, and newspapers, Greenberg analyzes the meaning of Manifest Destiny for American men and women during the 1840s and 1850s in the context of gender. She contends that radical changes in American society, economy, and culture during the 1830s and 1840s challenged ideals and practices of manhood and womanhood, and that the discussions over territorial expansion in the following decade provided the discourse in and through which these gender roles could be reformulated. During these times of domestic change, according to Greenberg, competing models of manhood appealed to American men and the discussion over expansionism "provided one important stage on which [the] battle [between the competing ideals] was waged" (p. 14). By the time the Mexican-American War concluded, two major ideals of masculinity had evolved: "restrained manhood and martial manhood" (p. 11). The restrained men, guided by morality, reliability, and bravery, staunchly supported female domesticity and opposed aggressive expansionism. Men subscribing to this mode of manhood wanted to fulfill America's Manifest Destiny through peaceful means by spreading allegedly superior American social, cultural, and religious institutions. In contrast, martial men, the precursors of the "manly man" of the turn-of-the-century "primitive masculinity," rejected the moral standards of restrained men and supported forceful expansionism. They were in particular drawn to the expansionist agenda and discourse of the Democratic Party. These martial men were on the forefront of supporting the further forceful expansion of the United States in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Pacific, and they dominated the defense of filibustering expeditions into these regions. Manifest Manhood eloquently makes the case that aggressive expansionism in the decades prior to the Civil War, exemplified by numerous filibustering expeditions, was partly driven by domestic discourses of the appropriate roles of American men and women in a changing national environment. Manifest Destiny was gendered and a martial vision of manhood began to dominate its implementation. Greenberg's study greatly enhances our understanding of the dynamics behind American expansionism during the nineteenth century and should become a standard feature on the reading lists of university courses dealing with the topics [End Page 554] of American imperialism and Manifest Destiny. Furthermore, Greenberg's current work opens the door to a more detailed analysis of how gender and the discourses of American manhood and womanhood prevented a peaceful compromise in the sectional conflict leading up to the Civil War. Gerhard Grytz University of Texas at Brownsville Copyright © 2007 The Texas State Historical Association

Reviewed by: Kentucky's Joseph C. S. Blackburn: Soldier, Statesman, and a Friend of All by Elizabeth Rouse Fielder Stefano Tijerina (bio) Kentucky's Joseph C. S. Blackburn: Soldier, Statesman, and a Friend of All. By Elizabeth Rouse Fielder. (Morley: Acclaim Press, 2018. Pp. vii, 384. $29.95 cloth) Having researched the Joseph Clay Stiles Blackburn papers at the Kentucky Historical Society in search of primary sources that would shed light on his work as Civil Governor of the Panama Canal Zone, it is evident that Elizabeth Rouse Fielder's depiction of the life of Blackburn is idyllic. This does not demerit the fact that in Kentucky's Joseph C. S. Blackburn: Soldier, Statesman and a Friend of All, Fielder is able to effectively describe the dynamics of local politics and culture, and its impact on nation-building, as the United States moved past the Civil War and toward the unification of the national market. Fielder's objective was to describe the trajectory of the political career of Joseph Blackburn, while drawing parallels to the economic development of Kentucky and the consolidation of the nation-state, contributing to the historiography of the Reconstruction era from a southern lens. Blackburn's political life, as described by Fielder, reveals that the vision of nation-building and the realization of "Manifest Destiny" was not only the intellectual product of the North but also of the South. Her book is broken down into six parts. The first part describes the emergence of the Blackburn family in Kentucky, emphasizing their generational trajectory in the economic, political, and cultural spheres. This is followed by a section that gives agency to Blackburn's role in the American Civil War and that served as a means to connect him to the Reconstruction era and its impact on Kentucky's post–Civil War economic development. The third part contains the core of the development of Blackburn's political career, his vision as a Democrat, and his numerous battles, on the debate floor, in defense of a balance between state and federal powers, always placing country first (pp. 258–94). Part four of Fielder's work focuses on his years as Governor of the Panama Canal Zone (1907–1909), connecting Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine with nation-building [End Page 323] overseas, as the power of the United States expanded beyond its borders, threatening the interests of other superpowers of the time. This is followed by parts five and six which depict the concluding years of Blackburn's career, emphasizing the life of the Southern Democrat whose political trajectory was driven by the conviction that the United States was destined to a growing and influential role on the international stage (p. 315). Although lacking clarity, the concluding remarks let the reader know that without the conviction and dedication of Southern Democrats like Blackburn, the nation-state project would have been impossible to achieve. Perhaps Fielder's work will inspire scholars to move past the classical historical analysis, unveiling new local historical narratives that may shed light on the political, economic, cultural, social, and business history that shaped the nation during the first era of globalization. Ultimately, as shown by Fielder, Blackburn was face-to-face with the challenges of nation-building, juggling local interests and national interests, as the United States transformed into a regional power. Fielder's work is lacking in-depth historical analysis and only touches the surface in many instances. Nevertheless, it illustrates why it is important to move beyond the status quo of history, encouraging scholars to return to the archives, dust away old collections, and revise the narrative through new stakeholders that impacted the local, federal, and international trajectories of our nation-building process. Many questions remained unanswered: what were the worldviews of pro-federalists like Blackburn? What were his views on American expansionism? What were his views on Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine? What role did he see the state of Kentucky play as the first era of globalization unfolded? Perhaps some of these answers would explain why his political rivals back home would repudiate his "inconsistency" when it came to casting a vote in Washington, according to an op-ed piece...