#Manifest destiny definition series#

This is in contrast to a variety of racialized narratives of white settlers and immigrants that highlight their rugged individualism and persistence in overcoming the seemingly natural brutality and savagery of the frontier. These studies highlight earlier stereotypical accounts such as the ”disappearing Indians,” ”dirty Mexicans,” and ”little brown brothers” (to refer to Filipinos). These studies also delve into the new expressions of racial and cultural superiority proliferated as white settlers moved westward. This belief and set of conflicts shifted political and economic power among racial groups and altered racialized residential patterns (such as through extermination, forced removals, and relocation), territorial sovereignty, and everyday ways of life. Racial and ethnic studies and the sociology of racism explore the racialized making of economic, cultural, gender, and sexual subordination and the related demo graphic changes in racial composition as another direct impact of the manifest destiny belief and the conflicts over land and resources.

#Manifest destiny definition series#

The second series of sociological inquiries follows from the first. Theoretically, they provide new ways to understand power, imperial ism, gendered nationalism, states and legal sovereignty, and colonial and postcolonial wars. They delve into the cultural and economic relationships among frontier violence, shifts in rural land ownership, and subsequent growth of industrial capitalism. World historians and historical sociologists examine the social processes by which white settlers (such as in South Africa and the US), explorers, and soldiers annexed land, acquired property rights, and dispossessed indigenous and other non white communities. These economic, political, and racialized struggles transformed an early nineteenth century semi slavery and semi feudal society into a global capitalist super power after 1945. Neo-Marxist sociology focuses on the class struggles and property conflicts entrenched in the earlier US economy. Sociological inquiries examine closely two major impacts of the manifest destiny belief and related narratives of ”white men’s burden” and their ”civilizing mission.” First, they predominantly explore conflicts over land tenure. After World War II, the US continued to view as its ordained mission the promotion of US styled democracy and ways of life as it fought wars and occasion ally provided peacekeepers in Korea, Vietnam, and other countries in Central America, Northern Africa, and the Middle East.

Moreover, it served as a major reason why the US sought to enter the Chinese market, coerced Japan to open its doors to US commerce and ”friendship,” purchased Alaska from Russia, and forcibly acquired northern Mexico, Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and other territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific. It is also associated with US colonialism, military interventions, and economic imperialism in Mexico and Latin American countries. Manifest destiny is not discussed only in relation to continental expansion. Significant to US history and con temporary life, it is a nationalist ideology that combines distinct forms of racial and religious thoughts to produce particular state, economic, and cultural forms of genocide, assimilation, and other racial projects. While influential newspaper editor John O’Sullivan coined this term in 1839, Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny (1981) reminds us that the white supremacist narrative of manifest destiny had already justified earlier acts related to expansionism and explorations of US colonial settlements. Accordingly, this manifest destiny belief conveys the idea that expansion and possession were ordained by God, fulfilled by Christian settlers, and not established by rifles, soldiers, and atrocities. This remarkably masculinist mission as the ”Great Redeemer” provided for the western expansion across the lands of North American indigenous people (such as the Seminoles, Cherokees, Siouxs, Comanches, Pawnees, Apaches, Poncas, Arapahos, and Cheyennes) into Mexico and toward the Pacific frontier, bringing industrial and national prosperity. Many white settlers with Northwestern European heritage believed that it was their dutiful mission to remake the ”New World” in their image and spread confidently US styled liberty and democracy.