“Farewell to America”

2017 ◽  
Vol 86 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-152
Author(s):  
Thomas Richards
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
Near Future

Historians have long tethered American overland migration to U.S. westward expansion, and they have presumed that Americans who left U.S. borders for Oregon and California in the early 1840s desired—and even assumed—that the United States would soon conquer the Far West. This article examines the words and actions of western migrants before U.S. expansion in 1846. It argues that, in fact, migrants left U.S. borders because their economic prospects were poor in the United States and thus that most migrants cared little whether the United States conquered the West in the near future. Indeed, some of the more ambitious migrants were even hostile to U.S. expansion, for they longed for a western republic of their own. Ultimately, Americans who traveled west did not ascribe to the idea of the United States’ Manifest Destiny but instead were seeking their own individual destinies.

4. A Constabulary Navy

2018 ◽  
pp. 34-44
Author(s):  
Craig L. Symonds
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Lakes ◽  
United States Navy ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Southern Border

After 1820, the day-to-day duties of the United States Navy involved dealing with smugglers, pirates, and the illegal slave trade and so deploying the large ships of the line was deemed unnecessary. Also, the successful completion of treaties with both England and Spain demilitarized the Great Lakes and stabilized the country’s southern border, easing concerns about a future foreign war. ‘A constabulary navy: pirates, slavers, and manifest destiny (1820–1850)’ describes the peacetime navy activities carried out by small squadrons of sloops and schooners acting as a constabulary force on distant stations abroad, mainly in the Mediterranean, but also in the West Indies, off Africa, in the Pacific, off Brazil, and in the East.

How the West Was Fun: Children’s Literature and Frontier Mythmaking toward the Turn of the Twentieth Century

2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-74
Author(s):  
Brian Rouleau
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
The United States ◽  
Juvenile Literature ◽  
The West ◽  
Western History ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
History Of Childhood ◽  
History Of

Abstract This article discusses the important role that juvenile literature played in creating America’s frontier mythos. It argues that children were a crucial audience for adult authors seeking to justify and normalize settler colonial policies. But, more importantly, young people themselves were active participants in the perpetuation of a popular culture that glorified westward expansion and the eradication of Indigenous peoples. In acknowledging as much, we arrive at a richer understanding of the important intersections between western history and the history of childhood in the United States.

Panoramic Vision, Telegraphic Language: Selling the American West, 1869–1884

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-520
Author(s):  
JENNIFER RAAB
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American West ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
The United States ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
The West ◽  
Panoramic Vision ◽  
Modes Of Representation ◽  
Double Transition ◽  
Endless Frontier

Along with Appleton and Rand McNally, George A. Crofutt helped to establish and popularize the genre of the general traveller's guidebook in the United States. From 1869 to 1884, Crofutt would sell millions of his guides to the American West, which he distinguished from the competition by including copious illustrations. Although the guidebooks claim to arrange and order the West for easy, and almost passive, consumption – to “tell you what is worth seeing” – this article argues that there are two different yet also complimentary modes of representation operating in these popular works. While the images express a “panoramic” mode of vision, evoking the mythology of the endless frontier and a divinely inspired manifest destiny, the text exemplifies a “telegraphic” language based on instantaneity, fragmentation, and velocity – the thrilling, and disorienting, compression of time and space made possible by the railroad and the telegraph. Crofutt's railroad guidebooks mark a double transition: a historical shift in the concept of the West as a limitless, undefined frontier to a region of commerce and culture, and a corresponding aesthetic shift from a mode of representation based upon mythic expansiveness to one that mimics discrete aspects of modernity.

scholarly journals Securing Manifest Destiny

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-34
Author(s):  
Steven Osuna
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Free Market ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Crime Legislation ◽  
Political Economic

This article argues Mexico’s war on drugs was a tactic by elites in both the United States and Mexico to legitimate the Mexican neoliberal state’s political, economic, and ideological governance over Mexican society. Through tough on crime legislation and maintenance of free market policies, the war on drugs is a “morbid symptom” that obfuscates the crisis of global capitalism in the region. It is a way of managing a crisis of legitimacy of Mexico’s neoliberal state. Through arguments of Mexico as a potential “failed state” and a “narco-state,” the United States has played a leading role by investing in militarized policing in the drug war and securitization of Mexico’s borders to expand and maintain capitalist globalization. In the twenty-first century, the ideology of manifest destiny persists, but instead of westward expansion of the U.S. state, it serves as the maintenance and expansion of global capitalism.

Pioneers of Inner Space: Drug Autobiography and Manifest Destiny

PMLA ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 122 (5) ◽  
pp. 1531-1547 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Zieger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
The United States ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
Cultural Ideals ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Addiction Drug ◽  
As If

The drug autobiography emerged as a genre in the United States primarily through imitations of Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). For De Quincey, the intoxicating consumption of opium and print was linked to imperial mastery. Texts such as Fitz Hugh Ludlow's Hasheesh Eater (1857) adapted this association to suit the westward expansion of the United States and its accompanying ideology of manifest destiny. Under the influence of hashish, Ludlow explored his inner psychic space as if it were the United States frontier. As nineteenth-century Romantic models of intoxicated dreaming gave way to early-twentieth-century theories of addiction, drug autobiographies such as D. F. MacMartin's Thirty Years in Hell (1921) readapted the genre, representing the disappointments of manifest destiny as addicted exile. While drug autobiographies accrued countercultural authority, appearing to signify the irrational underside of Enlightenment modernity, their fantasies of esoteric exploration derived from broader cultural ideals of imperial power and knowledge.

“The Greatest Nation on Earth”

2017 ◽  
Vol 86 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah K.M. Rodriguez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
The United States ◽  
Northern Mexico ◽  
Texas Revolution

Between 1820 and 1827 approximately 1,800 U.S. citizens immigrated to northern Mexico as part of that country’s empresario program, in which the federal government granted foreigners land if they promised to develop and secure the region. Historians have long argued that these settlers, traditionally seen as the vanguard of Manifest Destiny, were attracted to Mexico for its cheap land and rich natural resources. Such interpretations have lent a tone of inevitability to events like the Texas Revolution. This article argues that the early members of these groups were attracted to Mexico for chiefly political reasons. At a time when the United States appeared to be turning away from its commitment to a weak federal government, Mexico was establishing itself on a constitution that insured local sovereignty and autonomy. Thus, the Texas Revolution was far from the result of two irreconcilable peoples and cultures. Moreover, the role that these settlers played in the United States’ acquisition of not just Texas, but ultimately half of Mexico’s national territory, was more paradoxical than inevitable.

Mafias on the Move

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Varese
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Organized Crime ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
Market Expansion ◽  
The North ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
At Will

Organized crime is spreading like a global virus as mobs take advantage of open borders to establish local franchises at will. That at least is the fear, inspired by stories of Russian mobsters in New York, Chinese triads in London, and Italian mafias throughout the West. As this book explains, the truth is more complicated. The author has spent years researching mafia groups in Italy, Russia, the United States, and China, and argues that mafiosi often find themselves abroad against their will, rather than through a strategic plan to colonize new territories. Once there, they do not always succeed in establishing themselves. The book spells out the conditions that lead to their long-term success, namely sudden market expansion that is neither exploited by local rivals nor blocked by authorities. Ultimately the inability of the state to govern economic transformations gives mafias their opportunity. In a series of matched comparisons, the book charts the attempts of the Calabrese 'Ndrangheta to move to the north of Italy, and shows how the Sicilian mafia expanded to early twentieth-century New York, but failed around the same time to find a niche in Argentina. The book explains why the Russian mafia failed to penetrate Rome but succeeded in Hungary. A pioneering chapter on China examines the challenges that triads from Taiwan and Hong Kong find in branching out to the mainland. This book is both a compelling read and a sober assessment of the risks posed by globalization and immigration for the spread of mafias.

The Rise and Fall of Great Powers

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geir Lundestad
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Foreseeable Future ◽  
The West ◽  
Economic Modernization

There are no laws in history. Realists, liberals, and others are both right and wrong. Although no one can be certain that military incidents may not happen, for the foreseeable future China and the United States are unlikely to favor major war. They have cooperated well for almost four decades now. China is likely to continue to focus on its economic modernization. It has far to go to measure up to the West. The American-Chinese economies are still complementary. A conflict with the United States or even with China’s neighbors would have damaging repercussions for China’s economic goals. The United States is so strong that it would make little sense for China to take it on militarily. There are also other deterrents against war, from nuclear weapons to emerging norms about international relations. It is anybody’s guess what will happen after the next few decades. History indicates anything is possible.

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