Search Results

This chapter shows how throughout American history that the United States government, state governments, and U.S. citizens relied on Discovery principles to claim and acquire the lands and rights of the native governments and peoples who owned the lands that now comprise the United States.

Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis became a significant force in shaping the national identity of the U.S. The ideologies incorporated into Turner's frontier thesis were not only meant to provide a historical interpretation of how the U.S. came into being but also satisfied the national need for a “usable past.” This frontier thesis was able to transmit a series of symbols that became imbedded in the nation's self‐perception and self‐understanding: Virgin land, wilderness, land and democracy, Manifest Destiny, chosen race. Race must be understood as an important piece of this developing national identity because the idea of “purity” of race was used as a rationalization to colonize, exclude, devalue, and even exterminate the native borderlands people.

This chapter discusses the efforts of James Buchanan to meet the challenge of rising sectional tensions by diverting the nation’s focus to foreign affairs. He planned to rejuvenate Manifest Destiny-advancing the traditional Democratic vision of America-by expanding the commercial and physical boundaries of the country, and to save the Union and perhaps his presidency. Buchanan aggressively sought additional land and commercial opportunity for U.S. farmers through the annexation of Cuba, Alaska, and northern Mexico. Merchants and shippers would benefit from new trade opportunities in Central America and the Orient. Buchanan cited the Monroe Doctrine and defended the national honor, challenging Great Britain in remote places throughout the Western Hemisphere. He promoted these causes with some success, but his strategy failed to trump the unrelenting demand to resolve the issue of the expansion of slavery into the federal territories.

This chapter examines the connection between frontier forts and the ideology of Manifest Destiny by focusing on the role of Fort Lane in the cultural landscape of the Oregon Territory in the years 1853–1929. It considers the ambiguities of a colonial frontier and how they condition a more complex phenomenology for fortifications. More specifically, it describes fortifications as powerful but ambiguous signifiers of new concepts, precedents, and identities. It also shows how such ambiguities influenced the social experiences of officers, dragoons, pioneer families, gold miners, and local indigenous people that intersected at Fort Lane. Finally, it explores frontier fortifications in relation to frontier localisation and globalisation.

This epilogue assesses the nature of the American Red Cross's (ARC) civilian aid as an integral part of U.S. foreign relations. More specifically, it considers ARC's international humanitarianism as a reflection of a new Manifest Destiny for the United States and the infusion of the ideal of “indefinitely expanding brotherhood” into U.S. foreign policy. It places the history of ARC's foreign relief efforts within a larger process of American political and cultural expansion in the early twentieth century. It also explains how ARC's humanitarian assistance gave Americans the opportunity to forge cooperative, collaborative, and mutually beneficial relationships with civilians from other parts of the world. The chapter concludes by arguing that ARC's humanitarian interventions rationalized U.S. global expansion in a way that was viable, less violent, and potentially more cosmopolitan.

The Monroe Doctrine unilaterally set an enduring executive branch foreign policy. President Andrew Jackson increased presidential control of the executive by rotating officers and by dismissing a Treasury Secretary who would not accept his statutory interpretation. Jackson also transformed the veto when he used it to destroy the Bank of the United States, an action that presaged routine presidential participation in legislation. His Indian removal policy showed that neglect of the faithful execution duty can harm the powerless. His refusal to accept nullification held the Union together. The Whig presidencies showed that incentives require presidents to be strong even when the party’s political theory resists. John Tyler’s decision to assume the full powers of the presidency when he succeeded to office set another enduring precedent. James Polk promoted Manifest Destiny with strong executive actions, including provocative use of the military that led to the Mexican War.

If the assertion that parody is one of the most pervasive enunciative modalities of art in the twentieth century proves viable, then the role of parody for cultural, self-reflexive critique provides a key to comedic film’s efficacy, or not, for engaging cultural relations. Such would be the case especially as it pertains to cinema’s own role within the generation and constitution of the cultural as it relates to technology, the senses, the Real, and the status of the art / visual object. This chapter considers whether or not parody overturns the power and authority of the logos (of the Law), or if it merely reinscribes this authority by drawing attention to the centrality of the main text (or ode) that the parody (para- and ode combined) addresses. These are central concerns to the comedic film tradition in relation to cultural critique.

This chapter focuses on the Knights of the Golden Circle. George Washington Lafayette Bickley became one of the most famous members of the Brotherhood of the Union after he founded his own Knights of the Golden Circle. In a nation of “self-made men,” the founder of the Knights of the Golden Circle so persistently and frequently remade himself that many contemporaries remained at a loss as to who he actually was. Nevertheless, by any measure, the Knights of the Golden Circle became much more well known and accorded vastly greater importance than the organizations of George Lippard or Hugh Forbes. While Giuseppe Mazzini's idea of a mystic national destiny rested, in part, on the cooperation of nations, Bickley worked where nationhood grew pure without feudal or monarchist constraints. In his mind, an American “Manifest Destiny” unfolded in an unbounded fashion that would be not only unique but exceptional.

This chapter explores how Los Angeles’s imperial aspirations at the end of the nineteenth century originated with figures such as Civil War veteran and diplomat William Rosecrans, who campaigned vocally for investors in Southern California to invest in Mexico and to tie the two regions together through financial networks. For context, it gives an overview of the Spanish empire in Los Angeles as well as the American ideology of Manifest Destiny that prompted the Mexican-American War. It then explores early investment connections between Los Angeles and Mexico through the figures of Rosecrans, Mexican president Porfirio Díaz, Mexican diplomat Guillermo Andrade, and Mexican American Ignacio Sepúlveda. These individuals were instrumental in creating an investment and trade network based in Los Angeles and extending into Mexico as early as the 1870s. Many of these individuals also advocated for the creation of an “informal” American empire to facilitate investment in Mexico and the growth of Los Angeles.

The focus here is on the political relationship between the USA and the Hispanic countries to its south. US victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898 provided an obvious turning point, but the defeat of Mexico in 1848 had alerted the rest of the continent to US ambitions, territorial as well as commercial, buttressed by the Monroe Doctrine and the ideology of Manifest Destiny. Of particular importance was the presidential recognition of William Walker’s filibustering regime in Nicaragua, which prompted the elaboration of a common Latin American identity in opposition to the USA. Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policy is sketched, particular attention being paid to Venezuela, Panama, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. Consideration is given both to the official Pan-American movement and to the Latin American response to the southern extension of US interests. Against this background Salomón de la Selva developed his own pan-American ideas for meaningful cultural exchange.

This book examines the role of humanitarian assistance in American foreign relations. It documents the history of American foreign aid intended to guide the international community in peaceful cooperation and modernization towards greater stability and democracy in the early twentieth century. Focusing on the American Red Cross, it considers how the United States used overseas relief as a tool of statecraft and diplomacy and the ways that private organizations have served the diplomatic needs of the government. The book also looks at the emergence of voluntary humanitarian interventionism as the basis for a new set of American civic and political obligations to the international community. Overall, it tells the story of how Americans in the early twentieth century embraced a new Manifest Destiny for their country and strove to infuse the ideal of “indefinitely expanding brotherhood” into U.S. foreign policy.

The introduction establishes the theoretical and historical context for Sacred Interests. It explores how European enlightenment theories and nineteenth-century religious, intellectual, and political trends—including the Second Great Awakening, Manifest Destiny, premillennial thought, the Social Gospel movement, and Social Darwinism—contributed to American beliefs about Islam and Muslims. This opening chapter also places “American Orientalism” within a larger global and transnational context by focusing on American discussions of empire, civilization, international law, ethnic nationalism, the “Jewish Question,” race, and humanitarian intervention with their European counterparts. The introduction traces American beliefs and interactions with Islam and the Muslim world from the colonial period through the Barbary Wars of 1812. It also features a short historical overview of American theological understandings of Islam, its role in prophetical thought, captivity narratives of American and British sailors seized by Muslim Barbary pirates, and the impact European texts about Islam that crossed the Atlantic had on American perspectives.

Historians have tended to ignore the importance of religion to nativism and the Mexican-American War, and have played down the relationship among anti-Catholicism, republicanism, and race. This book shows that as Catholic immigration to the United States increased and Americans embarked on the era of Protestant revivalism that became known as the Second Great Awakening, anti-Catholicism emerged as integral to Americans’ understanding of how best to preserve their liberties in a more diverse country. Constituent to this future prosperity was the American republic’s seemingly inexorable expansion westward. Within two decades, this popular drive for territorial aggrandizement became known as “Manifest Destiny.” What was United States of America? An increasingly common answer by the 1840s was that the United States was all of those things that Mexico was not: free, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, republican, and prosperous. During the Texas annexation debates anti-Catholic themes foundational to American republicanism and Anglo-Saxonism incorporated a growing literature on Mexico that highlighted its religion, helping to form in the American mind a monolithic picture of Roman Catholicism.

1. With Congress unable to decide on Texas annexation before its summer recess, the elections of 1844 promised to double as a referendum on Texas. Whigs and Democrats realized they would have to choose carefully their positions and presidential candidates. This was less true of the new group of anti-slavery advocates: the Liberty Party. Democrat James K. Polk barely won the election, pledging to “reannex” Texas (which was accomplished before he took office), purchase California, and abrogate the Oregon treaty with Great Britain. Americans now recognized that any expansion outside of Oregon would come at the expense of Catholic Mexico. By 1845 the literature had shaped American views of their southern neighbor as a decrepit pseudo-republic cursed by despotism and superstition, complementing extant stories involving priests, nuns, and confessionals and fitting older ecclesiastical and theological arguments against the Catholic Church. By the time war erupted, Americans were accustomed to a rhetoric of anti-Catholicism and Anglo-Saxonism that had become inseparable from Manifest Destiny sentiment, while giving them the most effective means of understanding their role in advancing republican principles. This rhetoric soon proved flexible enough both to support military conquest, the denigration of the enemy, and annexation and to oppose them.

The wealth of the United States, and the power that flows from it, makes it hard for Americans to understand the perspectives and objectives of those in less powerful countries. It also leads to excessive American optimism about what the United States is capable of accomplishing abroad.

The “landmark” status of Oklahoma! prompts examining it through a series of case studies in terms of how musicals work in dramatic terms (not least given their inherent lack of verisimilitude); the problems of reconciling convention with innovation; the way the show plays with pastoral tropes; its connection with notions of Manifest Destiny; the treatment of characters according to gender and ethnicity; the role of Oklahoma! as wartime propaganda; and the question of how close the Broadway musical might come to being a form of “American opera.” These issues reveal the cultural work that the show did in 1943, and still does today.

This book considers citizenship not as a right (although it is that) but in political terms. To be a citizen in America requires meeting a set of criteria that vary over time; depending on multiple factors. These criteria can be either acquired or natural. This understanding is contrasted to several standard understandings of America: Hartzian liberalism; the frontier thesis; American exceptionalism; civic republicanism; communitarianism and the minimalist thesis of Judith Shklar.