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This article discusses how the Jewish painter and daguerreotypist Solomon Nunes Carvalho produced one of the more ambiguous accounts by a photographer of the early phase of westward expansion during the mid-nineteenth century. Topics covered include Carvalho's participation in war veteran John Charles Frémont's survey of the Santa Fe route, Carvalho's boxes of supplies which he called Pandora's box, and his narrative of the expedition.

While many populations have suffered unique forms of colonial oppression, what these varying populations seem to share is an understanding of the importance of community support and cultural continuity in the face of struggle. Drawing on notions of differential oppositional consciousness and decolonization, this article examines the US National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC in light of its efforts to represent a hemispheric indigeneity. The Our Lives gallery exhibit co-curated by the Campo Band of Kumeyaay Indians (whose aboriginal lands straddle the border between the US and Mexico) is analyzed alongside the author's personal reflections of her encounters with the NMAI as a US Chicana/Latina subject. The article urges scholars to recognize how they have been differ entially positioned against power and, furthermore, to acknowledge how and when efforts to decolonize may result in the re-colonization of another already marginalized group. This project asserts that the strength of alliances may not always be built on sameness, but perhaps can be built out of differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

De Bow's Review was the leading magazine of the South during the antebellum period. This historical study examines the journal's meaning-making about Mexicans and reveals how the magazine, as the principal voice of the section's plantation, commercial, banking, and mining interests, promoted the image of a broken, degenerate Mexico and proclaimed that only the "Anglo-Saxon race" was capable of bringing progress amid the American project of empire-building. Though Mexicans' racial status was unresolved in the 1840s, De Bow's Review correspondents later assigned to them the status of non-masters unit to self-govern and, therefore, fit only to serve and to be ruled by their Anglo-American conquerors. The context of the correspondents' claims of Mexican inferiority suggests that they simultaneously engaged in an unspoken struggle to differentiate the South from the North by defining Mexican inferiority in relation to Southern values of bravery, honor, and dominance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even before the founding of the Republic, Americans desired to expand Westward taking with them their unique civilization across the continent. By the 1840s this idea of the United States extending its boundaries was encompassed by the phrase Manifest Destiny. Americans not only considered Westward expansion a desirable objective but an endowment from God through which they could take their democratic republicanism across North America. The purpose of this article is to explore American interpretations of Manifest Destiny in the 1840s and 1850s and its environmental impacts on the Western territories, specifically the role which democratic society, Christianity, and capitalism played in transforming the land, nature, and relationships with Native peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Following a discussion of the concept of war – its definitions, historical origins, 20th–21st century examples, and immediate and legacy costs and consequences – the question of the United States as an empire is explored. The evidence indicates the United States meets all qualifications to be considered an “empire,” specifically a global empire seeking hegemonic economic, political, and cultural control of the world. This evidence includes a worldwide system of military bases, an extensive military–industrial–congressional complex that shapes domestic and foreign policies and actions, and an extensive national security system that now endangers and threatens the legal rights of its own citizens. At the core of U.S. pursuit of empire is a historic commitment to the beliefs in “manifest destiny” and American “exceptionalism.” It is proposed that the process and consequences of much of this are rooted in the existence of a U.S. “culture of war” that dominates U.S. domestic and foreign policies, and their destructive implementation across the world. A “culture of war” is an interlocking system of national meanings, beliefs, behaviors, institutions, and identities that consider violence and war necessary and justifiable in the pursuit of U.S. hegemonic global interests. Given the continuous pursuit of violence and war by the U.S. in the clear absence of security and survival threats, popular views that human beings are instinctually programmed to engage in war appears untenable. A general systems model of the socialization of a “culture of war” in the United States is presented to demonstrate the critical elements and processes involved in its development. The possibility of countering the building of a “culture of war” with building a “culture of peace” is shared in the article''s closing section. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The Minnesota Dakota Conflict in 1862 was among the bloodiest American Indian wars. One of its last events took place in Mankato on December 26, 1862, when 38 Dakota men were hanged in the largest mass execution in US history. This work examines the coverage of the war and the hanging by frontier editor John Wise's weekly newspaper, the Mankato Record. This research contributes to the history of US Indian-white relations and the frontier press, and it adds evidence to the guard-dog theory of the press. The idea is that mainstream media personnel will tolerate those outside the dominant group, but only until external threats appear. Thus, ultimately, a " free" press serves to perpetuate the status quo, not challenge it. This was especially true in 1860s frontier America, when newspapers, written by whites for whites, were key promoters of manifest destiny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]