Manifest Destiny Research Articles

Locating the Dis(located) Voices

Locating the Dis(located) Voices Lydia Huerta Moreno (bio) Lxs academicxs del nort o leen las investigaciones locales, y la cosa es que hay una carencia de perspectiva—y luego se convierte en imperialismo academico. (Scholars of the north do not read the local scholarship, and the thing is that there is a lack of perspective—and then it becomes a practice of academic imperialism.) —Estefanía Bonilla Hernandez (translated by the author) In 1980 Toni Cade Bambara explained that it was time for women who were not included in conversations of feminism to find ways to build new connections, create a new set of recognitions, find new sources of power, and find new sites of accountability. Toni, along with Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, was extending us an invitation to come together against the barriers of inclusion that are erected against us to keep our voices contained or to silence.1 Women of color from the Global South have fought for decades to be included and to be located within academic conversations, to be cited, and to be credited as producers of knowledge. And while much has been achieved by the inclusion of women of color in academic discourse, there is still a lot of work to do to dismantle the structural dislocation of the voices of women of color, trans, and gender nonconforming people, both from the United States and the Global South (a term that in and of itself is quite exclusionary). The voices of these thinkers and their perspectives are invaluable and crucial for understanding transfeminist perspectives and global realities. The works in this issue aim to contribute diverse statements about positionalities, languages, and ways of knowing that are repeatedly undervalued, dismissed, essentialized, dislocated, and mislocated at conferences, in journals, and in spaces of conversations in and out of the academy. They also serve as a reminder of how ideologies like Manifest Destiny have adapted and transformed into the conquering of the legitimization and production of [End Page 28] knowledge. The philosopher Sayak Valencia explains in “Epistemopolíticas del Border” in this issue, “lxs Doctorxs Blancxs del Norte, quiénes no solo insisten en explicarnos nuestros mundos desde sus perspectivas, sesgos, y privilegios sino que además expropian y se apropian de nuestra producción de conocimiento y, tras blanquearlo, edulcorarlo, y despolitizarlo, nos devuelven nuestros conceptos en su idioma ‘sin acento,’ con copyright para citar según MLA o Chicago, como requisito principal para ingresar a un mundo de extractivismo académico que aún les rinde pleitesía.”2 Valencia’s critique embodies the extractive nature of the academe and scholars in the Global North as well as the ways in which publications, journals, and editors circulate specific types of knowledge by reproducing structural racists practices and xenophobic ideologies that reify American exceptionalism. They do this by entrenching the belief that in order for an idea to have value and legitimacy it must be written in English, and as a legitimate idea—it—cannot exist in the conceptual world of people outside the confines of the United States. For example, in November of 2019 I attended a session titled “Feminist Journal Editors’ Panel” at the National Women’s Studies Association’s (NWSA) annual conference in San Francisco. As a junior scholar it was alarming, if not anxiety inducing, to hear the editors of feminist-focused journals speak about their low acceptance rates, the process of publication, and the limitations of publishing texts in the original language. Some attendees asked questions about mentorship and how to engage in dialogues with other feminists transnationally and read feminists from other parts of the world in US journals. As I sat there I thought it was particularly ironic that these journals—which had been created as alternative spaces for publications that challenged the oppressive practices, and the xenophobic, patriarchal gatekeeping of top academic journals—had adopted the very same gatekeeping practices, often privileging learned experience over lived experience, and English and its writing structure over translated works or works in their original language. It was at this moment that I felt particularly grateful that a year before, at the 2018 NWSA conference at another panel on...

Breakaway Americas: The Unmanifest Future of the Jacksonian United States by Thomas Richards, Jr.

Reviewed by: Breakaway Americas: The Unmanifest Future of the Jacksonian United States by Thomas Richards, Jr. Brandon Mills (bio) Manifest Destiny, Annexation of Texas, Cherokees, Upper Canada Breakaway Americas: The Unmanifest Future of the Jacksonian United States. By Thomas Richards, Jr. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2020. Pp. 332. Cloth, $49.95.) While historians of the early United States have increasingly questioned received narratives about U.S. expansion in recent decades, they have often continued to overlook how uncertain the geopolitics of North America remained throughout the early nineteenth century. This is the central historiographic challenge that animates Thomas Richards's excellent Breakaway Americas: The Unmanifest Future of the Jacksonian United States, which grapples with "a dizzying number of political formations between the years 1838 and 1846" (6), including Americans supporting republican rebellion in Upper Canada, Cherokee nationalists on Indian Territory, exiled Mormon dissidents in Mexico, and white settlers in Texas and on the Pacific Coast. While these short-lived efforts at political autonomy tend to be dismissed or ignored, Richards strives to evaluate them on their own terms and, in doing so, succeeds in striking a blow to the persistence of Manifest Destiny, an ideology that has caused historians, [End Page 308] wittingly or not, to retroactively assume the eventual incorporation of the republics into the United States' territorial empire. In defining the parameters of this wide-ranging study, Richards effectively frames his narrative around what he calls the "Texas Moment" (15): the decade between the establishment of the Republic of Texas and its annexation by the United States in 1846. On one level, he does this to show that the creation of this independent "sister republic" loomed large among U.S. audiences at the time, directly influencing or inspiring many of the events he explores in the book. On a deeper level, Richards uses the reverberations of Texan independence to suggest that the settlement and political structure of North America was far more open-ended than historians have often acknowledged. The reasons that each group sought to separate itself from the United States varied widely: Mormons aimed to establish a kind of American theocracy; removed Cherokees hoped to sustain their threatened sovereignty; white settlers in Texas, California, and Oregon sought more favorable political or economic conditions. Despite their differences, for Richards they were all seeking to found "colonies of Americans" (8) that were rooted in U.S. history and culture but distinguished by their unique political trajectories and aspirations. Participants in this diverse set of examples were characterized by their Americanness, but they also sought to define themselves both apart from, and in contrast to, the United States. While each of the book's chapters follows the distinct circumstances of each "breakaway America," Richards skillfully interweaves their stories to emphasize his fundamental argument that they were formed alongside, and in response to, each other during the decade of Texan independence. In sharply drawn portraits, Richards condenses the complex details of each breakaway America with great clarity and skill. He manages to both expertly zoom in on the individual cases and elegantly position each component within the larger narrative arc of the book. The expansive lens Richards uses to incorporate these diverse political formations into his analysis is the book's greatest strength as well as its greatest conceptual challenge. While the book's introduction carefully establishes a framework for uniting these breakaway Americas, Richards shows that they often shared as many differences as commonalities. For instance, the Americans who supported Upper Canadian rebels in large numbers through participation in pro-patriot societies shared a clear ideological affinity with advocates of Texan independence, but they lacked the same settler framework, with most choosing to remain in the United [End Page 309] States and few actually serving in the rebellion. Nevertheless, Richards makes a very strong case that such distinct movements were part of the tapestry of rich debates taking place during the "Texas Moment" and deserve to be considered alongside each other. Richards also persuasively argues that breakaway Americas were often driven by a desire to perfect or improve upon features of the United States. The cases he considers reflect this impulse to varying degrees, with the Cherokee-led...

“What’s on the earth is in the stars; and what’s in the stars is on the earth”: Lakota Relationships with the Stars and American Relationships with the Apocalypse

How is colonialism connected to American relationships with extraterrestrial beings? This commentary analyzes contemporary and founding US mythologies as constant, calculated attempts for settlers to obtain indigeneity in this land stemming from a fear of the “unknown.” From Columbus’s arrival to the Boston Tea Party, from alien and UFO fervor to paranormal experiences, spiritualism, New Age, and American Wicca, American mythology endlessly recreates conspiracy theories to justify its insatiable desire for resource extraction. I examine the US American mythology of extraterrestrials from two directions: the Oglala Lakota perspective of spirits born through a constellation of stars, and the “American” perspective of extraterrestrials born out of settler futurities. Manifest Destiny goes so far as to take ownership over time and reconfigure it into a linear, one-way street that is a progression towards apocalypse. For American Indians and other peoples targeted by the United States government, conspiracy theories prove true. Those who are targeted, Native and otherwise, understand as the violence of American mythology pours across the continent—abduction and assimilation, or death. How can Indigenous nonhuman ontologies orient settler ethics for the future?

The Legacy of 1812: How a Little War Shaped the Transatlantic World

The War of 1812 may have been a small and inconclusive war, but it had a profound and lasting impact of all the belligerents. The war may be largely forgotten, but it left a huge legacy that is still evident today. Wars can best be measured by their consequences, and the legacy of this war was both multifaceted and lasting. The conflict shaped both the United States and Canada as well as their relationship with Great Britain for nearly a century thereafter. It helps to explain how the Anglo-American alliance originated and why the British welcomed the Pax Americana in the twentieth century, as well as why Canada never joined the American Union and why American expansion after 1815 aimed south and west rather than north. It was during the War of 1812 that the great Shawnee leader Tecumseh earned his reputation, Laura Secord became famous, and Andrew Jackson began his rise to the presidency. Its impact on American culture was also far reaching and produced ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, Uncle Sam and ‘Old Ironsides’, amongst other symbols of United States nationhood.

En la cima más alta de Nueva York: Federico de Onís, frontera y mercado

"En la cima más alta de Manhattan". Borders, the Market, and Onís's Hispanism In one of the several articles he devoted to discuss his concept of Hispanism, Federico de Onís represented Columbia as strategic location from which to rebuilt what he called "a Spain without Spain". Located between Riverside Drive and Broadway, the university would be the place to push forward the liberal political and cultural agenda brought to an end by the outbreak of the Civil War; furthermore, it would allow to develop new transnational economic alliances between Spain, Latin America and the United States. In this article, I will focus on this and other locations that Onís conceptualized as "border" sites, paying particular attention to the consequences that such a concept had for the constitution of Hispanism as a discipline. Key concept in Onís, the border is in his work the privileged location where Spain constituted itself as a transhistorical entity, particularly in times of imperial expansionism through warfare and commerce. A kind of parallel version of the Manifest Destiny doctrine, Onís's formulation is inextricably linked to the emergence of Pan Americanism, and like it, unthinkable outside the new place of Latin America in the post-1898 global networks.

The Worlds of James Buchanan and Thaddeus Stevens: Place, Personality, and Politics in the Civil War Era. ed. by Michael J. Birkner, Randall M. Miller and John W. Quist

Reviewed by: The Worlds of James Buchanan and Thaddeus Stevens: Place, Personality, and Politics in the Civil War Era. ed. by Michael J. Birkner, Randall M. Miller and John W. Quist David N. Gellman (bio) Keywords James Buchanan, Thaddeus Stevens, Sectional crises, Politics The Worlds of James Buchanan and Thaddeus Stevens: Place, Personality, and Politics in the Civil War Era. Edited by Michael J. Birkner, Randall M. Miller, and John W. Quist. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019. Pp. 288. Cloth, $47.50.) The instincts and alliances that propelled James Buchanan to the political apex also shredded the nation and his historical standing. Thaddeus Stevens left behind a more celebrated legacy by devoting his career not to sectional comity and white supremacy but to a new revolutionary foundation for the country’s future. Stephen A. Douglas, Buchanan’s Democratic Party rival and the third protagonist in this essay collection, lacked the imagination, moral or political, to find a viable path between the Democracy of the past and the Republicanism of the future. One of the striking takeaways from this compilation is how strongly conventional politicians clung to the assumption of continuity as the political world around them collapsed. Buchanan’s reputation as a northern political striver ever willing to serve the interests of the slaveholding South corresponds with aspects of his social life explored in this volume. Thomas J. Balcerski’s essay on the “Domestic Politics of Doughfacery” correlates the bachelor senator’s Washington boardinghouse friendships with southern colleagues to the votes Buchanan cast between 1834 and 1841. He saw the gag rule and slavery through the eyes of his friends. Joan E. Cashin digs deeper into gender in a brief, intriguing essay on Buchanan’s platonic friendship with Varina Davis, Jefferson Davis’s not-so-happily-married wife. The unionist-inclined spouse of the future president of the Confederacy conveyed her fondness for Buchanan as she left Washington—a dying ember of the intersectional warmth the northerner had long cultivated. Yet abiding personal loyalty to those who undertook political missions on his behalf does not appear to be a hallmark of Buchanan’s style, as William P. Mackinnon seeks to illustrate in a case study of Thomas L. Kane’s service to resolve the 1857 Utah War. The major crises of the 1850s revealed character and ideological commitments. Enter Douglas, whose presidential ambition matched Buchanan’s. The senator from Illinois shared not only a party with Buchanan but also the knowledge that a southern alliance required encouragement of territorial expansion. Managing to minimize political risk and sectional strife [End Page 519] was the tricky part. In an intriguing essay, Matthew Pinsker investigates an oft-cited 1857 exchange in which Douglas allegedly faced down Buchanan over the president’s accession to the proslavery Lecompton constitutional gambit in Kansas. When Buchanan claimed Andrew Jackson’s mantle of authority over the Democratic party, Douglas allegedly responded, “Mr. President, I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead, sir” (83). Pinsker believes historians have been too credulous. The story first emerged in 1858 and resurfaced during the waning days of the 1860 presidential campaign. Douglas wished to appear far more resolute in opposition to proslavery machinations in Kansas than he actually had been. If he could not win the presidency, he could at least inflict some rhetorical vengeance against his nemesis in the White House. Known for their ambition-driven political acumen, these men struggled to navigate a rupturing national landscape. Douglas R. Egerton dis-mantles Stephen A. Douglas’s judgment by exposing popular sovereignty as a colossal miscalculation. The midwesterner-who-would-be-president “crafted a policy that was despised by both free-soilers and fire-eaters” (72). Politically speaking, the Illinois senator would have been better off embracing a racist, whites-only free-soil approach to the Kansas territory that would have preserved the Missouri Compromise. Instead, he paved the way for the Republican Party to flourish in the North. Buchanan’s comprehension of what was possible proved just as hopeless. Amy S. Greenberg describes how President Buchanan hewed to the old pro-southern Democratic script of Manifest Destiny, as if bullying and buying the United States’ way to...

Afterword

Afterword Rodrigo Lazo Some years ago, before starting graduate school, I travelled to the Galápagos Islands. As someone originally from Ecuador, I was aware that the islands are a province of the "República del Ecuador" but also very far from the coastal and Andean regions that are the economic and political strongholds in my country of birth. Anyone who has managed to reach that archipelago knows that to experience the natural variety of the group it is necessary to navigate from one enchanting island to another. Galápagos tourism has always relied on local small boats and yachts taking tourists to the different islands, and it was aboard the appropriately named Albatross that I stumbled on a collection in the ship's tiny library containing "The Encantadas; or, Enchanted Isles." The sketches offered Galápagos lore shared by guides as part of the visit—stories of buccaneers and castaways. It also became quickly apparent that the sketches did not seem to be about the islands before me. As I stared at the volcanic formations and contemplated the friendly animal-life, the Galápagos looked nothing like "five-and-twenty heaps of cinders dumped here and there in an outside city lot" (Piazza Tales 179). Nor were they as elusive as Salvator R. Tarnmoor's delusional account conveys. While I do not regularly look for veracity in fiction—and Melville's invocation of sites and references in South America are not always invested in accuracy—the difference between what I apprehended in the Galápagos and the sketches prompted questions that continue to hang like an albatross around my neck: Why was a writer associated with US literary nationalism engaging with locations that were distant to his New England home and also distant from the part of Ecuador where I had been born? And what kind of referential weight did these sketches carry for Melville's work and, more generally, the way people in the United States view Latin America? With those questions foremost, I note that three of the five pieces in this special issue on Melville and the region we are calling "Spanish America" place "The Encantadas" at the center of their arguments and take a variety of approaches: philosophy and epistemology, questions of allegory, and a US-centric historicism. Those very different critical directions appear to pull away [End Page 103] from Spanish America and remind us of the complicated relationship of "The Encantadas" to the geographic destination that inspires its organization. Anna Brickhouse, for example, argues that the sketches dwell in "a space of philosophical rupture, a vantage point for meditation on the West: its enduring problem of evil, its invention of the human, and its perpetual creation of theodicies that justify the world's racial and geographical apportionment of suffering" (37–8). In connecting her interpretation to Western thought more generally, Brickhouse offers a more ample terrain than the very geographic location that draws the sketches. Taking a different approach, Yoshiaki Furui reads "The Encantadas" in relation to the temporality of the discourse of Manifest Destiny and the teleology of Euro-American modernity. These types of shifts should be no surprise given that, as I have noted, the Galápagos themselves are geographically and culturally distant from the mainland. Long uninhabited by humans, the islands are "Spanish" only in the poetry of colonial assumption. Both historically and in Melville's sketches, the Galápagos are distant geographically from the area we associate with Spanish America. As such, "The Encantadas" offers a series of literary and cultural dislocations and critical navigations that send readers in a variety of directions. The contributors to this special issue follow that spirit and see "Spanish America" as an opportunity for departure as much as a necessary critical stopping point when reading Melville. The special issue makes a convincing case for the importance of "Spanish markers" as a set of referents in Melville's writing. As Emilio Irigoyen shows in his textually attentive introduction, some of Melville's Spanish American images, words, and motifs return from one text to another. These range from humorously off-handed remarks by narrators to more serious contemplation about the implications of a hemispheric American...

Imagining the Post-American World War: Geopolitics, Technology, and the Representation of Chinese and Chinese Americans in Singer and Cole's <em>Ghost Fleet</em>

Field Trip 13 Imagining the Post-­ American World War: Geopolitics, Technology, and the Representation of Chinese and Chinese Americans in Singer and Cole’s Ghost Fleet Yuan Shu If Chinese invasion fiction as a literary genre has been grounded in what Edlie Wong calls “counterfactual histories” and has served as a part of the Yellow Peril discourse,1 which historically informed and reshaped U.S. immigration laws and policies concerning ethnic Chinese exclusively, then Peter Singer and August Cole’s (2015) speculative fiction on the Third World War between the United States and China, Ghost Fleet, defines a new moment in the genre evolvement. Not only has the novel been noted for the two authors’ background and connection to the military, the intelligence , and Hollywood, particularly their “thorough research in defense technology with ongoing geopolitical developments” (Bearden 2015) but it has also been praised for its inclusion of nonconventional combatants for military leadership, such as women and LGBTQ individuals.2 However, while celebrating the vision of the authors on future wars and military technology, which encompasses utilization of rail guns and incorporation of cyberspace and outer space into war as new battlegrounds, even the most favorable book reviews cannot help raising questions on “why the war started” in the first place (Freeman 2015). And its detractors simply dismiss the novel as “another fearmongering piece written by another advocate for a bigger defense budget” (Frizzell 2016, 160) because the archipelago of U.S. military bases in the Asia Pacific is not even mentioned in the text: “If it is a plea for the administration to sit up and take notice of China as a threat, it does not do a good enough job of explaining why all the elements of U.S. national power supposedly are completely defunct” (160). Indeed, why would the Chinese military emulate the Imperial Japanese Army of the 1930s and launch a similar sneak attack upon Pearl Harbor after its discovery of a gas field in the Mariana Trench? Why does the novel render into oblivion the so-­ called hub-­ and-­ spoke system of bilateral military alliances between the United States and its allies, which has been implemented and sustained for more than seventy years (Twining 2007, 79), and the forward-­ deployed capabilities of the U.S. military installations in a region reconfigured as the “Indo-­ Pacific”?3 In this contribution, I read Ghost Fleet against what media critic Fareed Zakaria calls the “post-­ American world,” by which he means the “rise of the rest” vis-­à-­vis the West, and explore how the authors appropriate the 14 Field Trip historical interregnum in terms of a military threat posed by the rest—­in this case, embodied and exemplified by China in its technological advancement and military investment. Specifically, I argue that the two authors, by imagining the “aggressive act” of China as the logical consequence of its forty-­ year phenomenal economic development and as the effect of its possibly modeling on nineteenth-­ century American expansionism epitomized by Alfred Mahan’s notion of sea power, conflate the Chinese military with the Japanese war machinery of the 1930s, the first rise of a non-­Western power in human history, which failed because of its military aggressiveness,4 to highlight a possible similar fate awaiting the Chinese in their challenge to the U.S.-­ centered global order. What enables a defensive United States to triumph over an offensive China in the fiction is more than American cutting-­ edge technology and strategic alliances in the Indo-­ Pacific but the fundamental American values of individualism, innovativeness, and democracy compounded by the notions of diversity and multiculturalism. If the novel concludes with maintenance of status quo antebellum to nobody’s satisfaction, it affirms what I call a paradigm shift in the representation of Chinese and Chinese Americans from “cheap labor” to “high-­ tech” spies. 6 The Post-­American World: The Rest and the West In his 2008 book ThePost-­AmericanWorld, Fareed Zakaria announces from the outset that his work is “not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else” (Zakaria 2008, 1) and then articulates the present moment in terms of “the third great power shift of the modern...

Arrowsmith Goes Native: Medicine and Empire in Fiction and Film

This essay examines how evolving perceptions of America's role as a world power in the interwar period affect representations of medical research and practice. It argues that Sinclair Lewis's novel Arrowsmith, and the film based on that novel, construct imperial role for the United States in their depictions of American scientific medicine. In recent years, scholars of American literature and culture have applied insights from the study of European colonial discourse to their analyses of American texts written during the heyday of empire. As Amy Kaplan notes in her introduction to the anthology Cultures of United States Imperialism, this investigation of the project of American empire seeks to correct the tendency to treat American expansionism as an entirely separate phenomenon from European colonization of the nineteenth century rather than interrelated form of imperial expansion (11). In a similar vein, historians of American medicine have begun to identify the influence of the racial ideologies of nineteenth-century European tropical medicine on American scientific medicine of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Works such as Warwick Anderson's Immunities of Empire have demonstrated that the transition from climatological to germ-based understandings of disease in American medicine did not change the imperial role played by medical researchers in tropical countries: in fact, new understandings of disease transmission resulted in calls for greater intervention into the lives of colonial subjects. Both these recent fields of postcolonial inquiry have begun to have effect on the study of the relationship between medicine and American literature, enabling new understandings of how American literature engages the vexed dynamic between medicine and empire. There has, however, been little examination of colonial rhetoric in perhaps the most well-known work of American literature focussed on medicine, Sinclair Lewis's 1925 novel, Arrowsmith. In what is clearly the most dramatic portion of the novel, Martin Arrowsmith journeys to the fictional West Indian island of St. Hubert to test the effectiveness of his newly developed plague vaccine. Martin succeeds in establishing a controlled experiment, but a series of events--including the death of Martin's wife from plague--lead him to sabotage his own work. By focussing on the collapse of Martin's greatest scientific project, the St. Hubert chapters of Arrowsmith call into question the novel's otherwise unflappable faith in scientific medicine, thus compromisi ng what medical historian Charles Rosenberg has described as the moral (47) of the novel. More than that, the ruined experiment seems specifically to represent the failure of Western reason in the tropics: there is a suggestion, in Arrowsmith, that Martin Arrowsmith goes at the end of his stay in St. Hubert. In this essay, which is a reading of Lewis's Arrowsmith as well as the 1931 film based on Lewis's novel, I argue that the West Indies episodes in both texts are best understood by examining how Arrowsmith positions itself in respect to contemporary debates about the international role of American scientific medicine. I begin by considering a paradox in the structure of the Lewis's St. Hubert chapters. The novel's description of St. Hubert--blighted by British colonial rule as well as by plague--establishes Martin, a scientist and American, as the hero the island desperately needs. However, Martin does not plan to save St. Hubert; rather, he wants to perfect a vaccine for future use. When Martin's experiment is performed on the black bodies of the island's native population, the novel is unable to contain the contradictions between narrative expectations and diagetic action: in a sense, the novel collapses at the same time as does Martin. After considering the implications of this collapse for the novel, I show how the film version of Arrowsmith replaces the tension between Martin's experiment and St. …

Seneca Conceptions of Land Use and Value: Debates over Land Sovereignty, 1797–1848

Settler groups characterized Seneca political disputes that developed throughout the nineteenth century as “factions,” which are typically viewed as signs of societal disintegration for Native communities. This essay instead views Seneca political disagreements as a single narrative of alternate solutions to the advancement of American expansion. The Senecas experienced three distinct disputes over the course of the nineteenth century, and each side used their awareness of American expectations for Seneca society to protect Seneca interests. The Senecas forced the United States to reflect on the extent of American expansion and interrupted settler constructs such as sovereignty, jurisdiction, and property law by defining those ideas for themselves.

"Almost as it is Formulated in the So-Called 'Homestead Act'": Images of the American West in French Settlement of French Algeria

Nineteenth-century American expansion has been shown as a type of Anglo-American "settler revolution," but the United States was also connected with France in France's ideas for the imperial development of Algeria. The two countries alike were ambitious empires, their leaders committed to expansion as a means of political and economic regeneration. More than this, the French empire "borrowed" images from its republican cousin to help incorporate Algeria. Writers during the July Monarchy saw American Indians' decline as a forerunner to white settlement's consequences in North Africa, although they rationalized how Algerians might be treated more benevolently. Napoléon III vowed to prevent an American analogue by setting aside Arab tribal land. Liberal reformers during the early Third Republic, however, called for assimilation of Algerians through land privatization, hailing the U.S. Homestead Act for how it could facilitate egalitarian, private land ownership, and thus help establish what Michel Chevalier had earlier imagined as the French "West."

William S. Kiser. Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands.

W<scp>illiam</scp> S. K<scp>iser</scp>. <i>Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands</i>.

Settle and conquer: the ultimate counterinsurgency success

ABSTRACT American westward expansion so thoroughly undermined Native people and cultures that it has earned a place in history as the ultimate counterinsurgency success. The creation of a new American reality did not arise from a punitive act of waging war on an adversary so much as from an unkept promise of assimilation of the Native culture into the new nation. This process left all parties swapping missions of insurgent and counterinsurgent, until the young nation no longer needed Natives to enable settlement. Then, conquest arose as an inaccurate label masking a failed military effort to wage ‘total war.’ That narrative was established when the civilian tide of frontiersmen, militia, explorers, and pioneers teamed with soldiers to control ‘Indian country.’ That demographic end state became a broken analogy that dictates American efforts at counterinsurgency today.

Visual Allusions to the Mexican-American War

The Mexican-American War (1846-48) is often described as the first major war in US history inspired by the idea of Manifest Destiny. The significance of this war, however, has not been matched by a rigorous scrutiny of its representation in contemporary visual culture. This study hopes to contribute to filling this void through an iconological investigation of three American paintings made in the Düsseldorf Academy, by now canonized and perceived as ultimate visual treatments of the topic. The paper first discusses the war and the public debates surrounding it in the US, then turns to the visual scene and introduces how the war was portrayed in various art forms. Next, it touches upon the artistic milieu of the Düsseldorf Academy in preparation for the analysis of the three paintings to follow. The study argues that these images depart from the American tradition of depicting war through concrete battle scenes. Instead, they offer symbolic representations or allusions, approaching the war in terms of morality, political philosophy and its potential social and economic consequences, while also employing ambiguity to urge viewers to contemplate on the implications of the war. In the meanwhile, they seem to express little if any consideration for the impact of the war on Mexico, its culture, and people.

Frontiers of American Vengeance: The Frontier Thesis, the Zero Tolerance Policy, and the Interpersonal Process of Creative Shame

During the Spring of 2018, the United States Federal Government, in accordance with its new Zero Tolerance immigration policy, separated at least 2,654 infants and children from their parents at its southern border. This was done with no plans for reuniting these families which, in many cases, has proven extremely difficult if not impossible. These acts echo the vengeance that occurred on the original American Frontier and included the Native-American genocide. Although the specifics and severities greatly differ, the psychodynamics and related processes are similar. Also, certain associated national foundational myths of American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny 1 are manipulated and exploited in similar ways. Unlike with the genocide, however, these acts are occurring in the present day and offer an opportunity for Americans to engage in the interpersonal, potentially remedial, process of creative shame. The author’s experience of this generative process is presented, including an example from his clinical work.

Sanín Cano y España: antiimperialismo, americanismo y las tesituras de un congreso frustrado

Baldomero Sanín Cano es, sin lugar a dudas, uno de los eruditos más relevantes de la intelectualidad latinoamericana contemporánea. Sus múltiples inquietudes hicieron que dejase una huella transversal en campos tan diversos como el ensayo, el periodismo, la crítica literaria, la educación o la política. Este artículo indaga en el ámbito ideológico del autor y, más concretamente, en su vertiente unionista continental, manifiesta en sus constantes críticas al expansionismo estadounidense. Partiendo de una prospectiva sobre la personalidad, formación y experiencia política de Sanín, el trabajo incide en lo que fue la manifestación de su antiimperialismo militante dentro de los medios españoles y, en particular, durante su corresponsalía en Madrid, de 1922 y 1924, para el diario argentino La Nación. Finalmente pasaremos a analizar el impacto que tuvo su propuesta para celebrar un congreso iberoamericano con el que aunar posturas frente a las resoluciones de la Conferencia de Génova.

“Scandalously bifurcated garments”: Ecocriticism, American Pioneers, and Novelizing Women of the West

While the Western novel is typically associated with cowboys and overarching masculine accomplishments of “settling,” the representation of women’s work beyond narratives of being “tamed” and the settling-down of motherhood has been overlooked by writers and ecocritics alike. Ecofeminist scholarship of the late 1980s and ‘90s, primed to take up such questions, focused primarily on the relationship between women and nature in abstract terms rather than on regionally-specific interpretations. This thesis, therefore, examines the representation of female-identifying protagonists in pioneer narratives of North America in three popular novels of the last century: Zane Grey’s posthumous Woman of the Frontier (1940/1998), Mrs. Mike (1947) by Benedict and Nancy Freedman, and the Oregon-specific Little Century (2011) by Anna Keesey. Using principles from feminist and ecocritical literary theory in combination, I consider the ways in which landscape is conscripted to convey a character’s interiority—an anthropocentric tactic that ultimately equates the objectification of women with the conquest of territory. As a twenty-first century pioneer woman born and raised on a rural Oregon ranch, identifying the significance of pioneer women and interrogating their representations beyond being extensions of the tamed landscape helps rewrite the conventional masculine lens of Manifest Destiny and the “West.”

Michel Gobat, Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2018), pp. 367, £28.95, hb.

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A Most Splendid Company: The Coronado Expedition in Global Perspective

A Most Splendid Company: The Coronado Expedition in Global Perspective

Samuel Joseph Smith and the Formerly Anthologized

ABSTRACT Samuel Joseph Smith (1771–1835) created poetry brightened by a generally humorous, light, and melodic style. Yet he was, far more often than not, able to avoid trite, forced didacticism, providing us with poetry that truly both teaches and delights. Despite his life as a recluse at Hickory Grove, his family farm, Smith engaged effectively in resisting the early national inebriate character. His “Eulogium on Rum” is one of only six poems to appear in all three of the new nation's first poetry anthologies—The Beauties of Poetry, British and American (1791); American Poems (1793); and The Columbian Muse (1794). It additionally appeared in several periodicals, as did his later poem “The Indian Boy,” an excerpt of which even appeared in the Cherokee Phoenix in 1829 and which dissents from the national notions of the Christian nation and Manifest Destiny, myths that still haunt our politics and conservative media today.