Manifest Destiny

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. 

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."

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."

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.