Manifest Destiny

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• 4/2/2023
  

  Learning from Historical Fiction: A Family Tale Reveals a Brief Multicultural Moment of the American West

  by Alix Christie

  One novelist's work adapting the story of her 19th century forebears (the last Hudson's Bay Company trader in the US, his Nez Perce wife, and the family that they raised) led her to archives, historians, and the challenge of narrating the complexities of the period when conquest supplanted a hybrid indigenous-European society between the Rockies and the Pacific. 

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  11/2/2022
  

  The Past and Present of Christian Nationalism in America

  by Eric McDaniel

  "Christian nationalism is a religious and political belief system that argues the United States was founded by God to be a Christian nation and to complete God’s vision of the world. In this view, America can be governed only by Christians, and the country’s mission is directed by a divine hand."

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
  2/9/2022
  

  Crossing the Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy as an American Historian

  by Bennett Parten

  "One of the most striking things about reading Blood Meridian now, almost 40 years since its release, is that it anticipates some of the major historical turns of the past decades."

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  4/21/2021
  

  Racism Has Always Been Part of the Asian American Experience

  by Mae Ngai

  Anti-Asian racism draws from different historical origins than Jim Crow, but their histories are part of the same conflict: whether White Americans are entitled to rule over other people, domestically or globally. 

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• SOURCE: The New Republic
  3/5/2021
  

  The Manifest Destiny Marauders Who Gave the “Filibuster” Its Name

  by John Pat Leary

  The original "filibusters" were mercenaries who invaded multiple Latin American nations in the interest of subverting their governments and establishing slaveholding colonies. Today the name is tied to procedural efforts to subvert democracy and impose minority rule. 

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• SOURCE: Public Books
  2/9/2021
  

  The Never-Ending Frontier?

  by Karl Jacoby

  Karl Jacoby reviews Benjamin Hopkins's "Ruling the Savage Periphery" and traces a history of practices of imperial control from the American conquest of Native peoples, through the British Empire, to the 19-year-old US war in Afghanistan.

• 
• 7/19/2020
  

  Trump Made it Manifestly Clear: The Discussion of National Destiny is Ongoing

  by G.W. Gibson

  We can take heart that our country and our discipline have come a long way from the nadir and Frederick Jackson Turner. Somewhere between Teddy Roosevelt and Colin Kaepernick, we have managed to pick up a few yards as Americans and as American Historians.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  7/3/2020
  

  It is Time to Reconsider the Global Legacy of July 4, 1776

  by Elizabeth Kolsky

  American independence unleashed a hemispheric conquest by the United States and a renewed commitment to empire by Great Britain. Both projects relied on racism, violence, and the devaluing of black and indigenous lives. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  5/17/2020
  

  The West Is Relevant to Our Long History Of Anti-Blackness, Not Just The South

  by Walter Johnson

  The Missouri Compromise paved the path to the Civil War. But it also signaled what would follow: western settlement driven by the idea of expanding a country of, by, and for white men.

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• SOURCE: The Michigan Daily
  2-5-16
  

  Juan Cole says America’s inclination to turn to the military started with Manifest Destiny

  The new frontier of today is no longer the American Southwest but the Middle East, Cole believes.