Was Westward Expansion Manifest Destiny or a Hostile Takeover?

The years surrounding the origins of the term “Manifest Destiny” were a transitional period in the history of industrialization. Historians have done much to analyze the impact of major technological shifts on business structure and management, and to connect eastern markets and westward expansion. They have paid less attention, however, to the relationship among continental geopolitics, industrial development, and frontier warfare. This article uses War Department papers, congressional reports, and manufacturers’ records to examine how the arms industry developed in response to military conflict on the frontier. As public and private manufacturers altered production methods, product features, and their relationships to one another, they contributed to the industrial developments of the mid-nineteenth century.

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Securing Manifest Destiny

Journal of World-Systems Research ◽

10.5195/jwsr.2021.1023 ◽

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.

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“Farewell to America”

Pacific Historical Review ◽

10.1525/phr.2017.86.1.114 ◽

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.

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Pioneers of Inner Space: Drug Autobiography and Manifest Destiny

PMLA ◽

10.1632/pmla.2007.122.5.1531 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 122 (5) ◽

pp. 1531-1547 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

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.

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The Manifest Destiny of the Hypomanic Immigrant

PsycCRITIQUES ◽

10.1037/051542 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 50 (22) ◽

Author(s):

Dean Keith Simonton

Keyword(s):

Manifest Destiny

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Book Review: Wrobel, Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression, by Ian Tyrrell

Pacific Historical Review ◽

10.1525/phr.2015.84.2.268 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 84 (2) ◽

pp. 268-269

Author(s):

Ian Tyrrell

Keyword(s):

Great Depression ◽

Manifest Destiny ◽

American Frontier ◽

The Great Depression

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“The Greatest Nation on Earth”

Pacific Historical Review ◽

10.1525/phr.2017.86.1.50 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 86 (1) ◽

pp. 50-83 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

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.

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Building an American Empire

10.23943/princeton/9780691166056.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Paul Frymer

Keyword(s):

The United States ◽

American Empire ◽

Close Attention ◽

Population Movements ◽

Westward Expansion ◽

White Settler ◽

Settlement Policies ◽

Federal Land ◽

The Government ◽

Land Policies

This book examines the politics of the United States' westward expansion, showing how the government's regulation of population movements on the frontier, both settlement and removal, advanced national aspirations for empire and promoted the formation of a white settler nation. The book details how a government that struggled to exercise plenary power used federal land policies to assert authority over the direction of expansion by engineering the pace and patterns of settlement and to control the movement of populations. At times, the government mobilized populations for compact settlement in strategically important areas of the frontier; at other times, policies were designed to actively restrain settler populations in order to prevent violence, international conflict, and breakaway states. The book examines how these settlement patterns helped construct a dominant racial vision for America by incentivizing and directing the movement of white European settlers onto indigenous and diversely populated lands. The book pays close attention to the failures as well, from the lack of further expansion into Latin America to the defeat of the black colonization movement. It reveals the lasting and profound significance government settlement policies had for the nation, both for establishing America as dominantly white and for restricting broader aspirations for empire in lands that could not be so racially engineered.

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