Search

The article explores the expansion of U.S. empire in the decade before the American Civil War to search for cheap access to guano fertilizers across the Pacific Ocean. It argues that the practices of southern cash crop cultivation that relied on soil mining contributed to the growth of domestic demand for imported guano fertilizers. It focuses on a region called the Chesapeake South as the primary leading force behind the expansionary policy of the U.S.

This article examines California Spanish-Mexican and Indigenous women's counternarratives and critiques of U.S. geopolitical conquest in the former Catholic Spanish and Mexican northwest. California women's testimonios (oral accounts) and written observations in the nineteenth century repudiated the notion that the West under Spanish and Mexican rule had not already undergone imperial projects of cultural civilization and political progress. They questioned the validity of Anglo assertions of cultural superiority, honor, and progress. While their testimonies reveal parallels between Anglo and Spanish-Mexican aims in colonizing California, these women offer unique perspectives of geopolitical conquest in the age of Manifest Destiny and U.S. imperialism. Furthermore, their accounts directly challenge Anglo American women's hagiographies of U.S. military men's exploits in California. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the first century of American Indian intellectual history, two points of view developed to define this unique community. First, as Indigenous people, each writer represented was concerned about a particular nation, usually their own, e.g. Boudinot and the Cherokee, Apess and the Marshpee. Moreover, they wanted the whites to see their faces, as Cherokee or Marshpee, as opposed to merely "Indians," which were despised in the white imagination. Secondly, as Indigenous Christians, some, like Copway, were ministers, they evoked their version of the Brotherhood of Man idea as a way of getting whites to see Indigenous people as fellow human beings and as rightful citizens of the U.S. In the end, as Vine Deloria J.r once stated stated publicly: "All we've ever wanted from Christians is for them to behave like Christians." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will present a historical and analytical analysis that inserts William H. Taft's ruling in Balzac within the debates that US policymakers and colonial functionaries had about US citizenship and territorial incorporation in Puerto Rico in the first two decades of the 20th century. Taft reiterated the view of these officials, that granting citizenship to the inhabitants of an unincorporated territory did not imply incorporation of the territory, with all the implications that this status had regarding citizenship rights. In Balzac, Taft sought to clarify the nature of US citizenship in Puerto Rico and presented it as one defined by the territory's unincorporated status. Taft also presented an argument that he and other American officials had previously advanced, that the citizenship granted to Puerto Ricans was formal in nature, that it did not grant any additional rights and that it was granted only to appease their yearning for said status. The article also studies the evolution of the jury trial in Puerto Rico prior to 1922 to challenge Taft's assertions as to why this institution should not be extended to Puerto Ricans by constitutional right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Balzac v. Porto Rico meant a before and after in the doctrine of territorial incorporation created by the Supreme Court of the United States. Their racially prejudiced legal reasoning determined that the Sixth Amendment protection does not apply to unincorporated territories. The Supreme Court concludes, ignoring its own precedents, that an affirmative expression on the part of the U.S. Congress is necessary to incorporate the territories. This essay questions both conclusions using a historical analysis of the jurisprudential development of the right to trial by jury and of Puerto Rico's relations with the United States over time. In light of that evaluation, similar to the one used in Ramos v. Louisiana, which revoked a legal doctrine because of its racist origins, it is proposed that Balzac became a dead letter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federal officials in the early United States built an empire by purchase. But rather than hand over lump sums for Native lands, officials offered annual payments, or annuities. This article traces annuities' material evolution from payments in goods to high-powered money—especially specie—and their financial evolution from straightforward congressional outlays to interest accrued on investments held in trust. Annuities originated as devices that could permit territorial expansion within considerable military-fiscal constraints. But once in use, they became potent instruments of federal power, shoring up officials' capacity to intrude on Native economies, wrench further territorial transfers, and channel Indigenous wealth as capital for the very infrastructural projects that spread US settlement. Overall, annuities and the trust funds into which they evolved anchored a strategy of dispossession I call fiduciary colonialism: a mode of territorial acquisition and population management carried out through the expansion of administrative control over Native peoples' wealth. In the face of federal claims to financial superiority, Indigenous peoples did not wither into wardship. Rather, they engaged trusteeship with their own futures in mind, applying annuities and trusts toward social institutions that would allow their nations to survive the ordeal of dispossession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The myth of Manifest Destiny is predicated on the successful annexation of lands desired by U.S. territorial expansionists, particularly during the James K. Polk's presidency (1845-849). But another myth, that Polk accomplished all four of the goals for his presidency, has obscured the fact that one of the biggest prizes desired by annexationists, Cuba, remained out of reach. This essay explores the close U.S.-Cuba relationship in the 1840s, revealing why both supporters and opponents believed Cuban annexation was eminent in the 1840s, even as the U.S. fought a war against Mexico. It also suggests how a more nuanced view of the course of U.S. territorial expansionism can counter the idea of American exceptionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article recovers a long-forgotten tradition of Canadian political thought – a Liberal idea of nation-building premised on the expansion and consolidation of an Upper Canadian empire. Combining a staunch imperial 'Britishness' with visions of western expansion and colonisation, Liberal politicians and intellectuals from the province of Ontario conceived Canada's vast North-West territory as an Upper Canadian colony – an Anglo-Saxon settler empire that linked Ontario and its metropolis, Toronto, by rail and settlement to the Prairie West, British Columbia, and beyond to Britain's Pacific empire. Between 1860 and 1914, this vision of western expansion underpinned Canada's political and economic development, bringing 'greater Ontario' Liberals into contact with a series of racial others who were either incorporated into the Dominion or else disenfranchised and excluded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the notions of distance and territorial extension in the processes of administration of the haciendas and the conformation of parishes in the archdiocese of Mexico during the second half of the 18th century. Based on documentary testimonies, it discusses the development of these concepts and how they were used in a variety of ways by the ecclesiastical authorities. The article poses the problem of the negotiation of space inside ecclesiastical jurisdictions and the establishment of territorial pacts between priests and landowners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a lesson plan on U.S. westward expansion during the American Civil War and Reconstruction.

The article examines the New York City press' coverage of the United States' acquisition of Mexican territory as a result of the Mexican-American War. Debates over acquisition revolved around the expansion of the Southern U.S. slave system into newly acquired territories. While the Whig Party opposed the war in general and supported deliberate territorial growth, the Democratic Party promoted slavery and rapid expansion.

In the nineteenth century, both railroad expansion and photography influenced relations between the United States and Native peoples in powerful ways. Scholars have often dealt with these two technological developments separately, but photographs and railroads have a shared history. Throughout the mid-to-late nineteenth century railroad companies engaged with photographs and photographers to promote travel on their lines. This article evaluates the production and circulation of transcontinental railroad photographs, and it concludes that the so-called golden age of landscape photography was built on the suppression of peopled scenes in the West. Images of Indians and trains that reached broad audiences placed Indigenous peoples in opposition to the modern forces cast in steel and running on steam. Picturing an unpeopled West and anti-modern Indians brightened business prospects for those investing in the promise of U.S. expansion beyond the 100th meridian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the absence of Great Britain's military power during the time when the U.S. started to achieve massive territorial expansion in North America between 1836 and 1848. Topics discussed include Britain's responses to the U.S. during the period of the U.S. acquisition of Louisiana from France in 1803, concern about the shifting balance of power in North America including the security of the British possessions in the region, and factors which sharply limited Great Britain's ability to enforce its military power including its distance from the Western Hemisphere, the large population of the U.S., and the lack of industrial and human resources in Canada.

During the 19th century the American West played host to the colonial expansion of the United States. This period saw an attempt by the federal government to balance the westward expansion of White settlement spurred, in part, by ideas of Manifest Destiny, with what was then believed to be a humane solution to the "Indian problem." What resulted from these attempts was the reservation system, where native peoples were relocated to reservations to be kept separate from White settlement and guarded by a system of U.S. Army forts. These forts became liminal environments in which the army operated both as the oppressors and protectors of indigenous peoples and lifeways, and also as stages for the display and transmission of European American ideas of social class and personal identity. Commissioned officers at these posts played an important role as actors in the drama of colonial westward expansion, holding identities as both frontiersmen and as bastions of 19th-century American sociocultural norms of social inequality and their expression through material culture. This article examines the material expressions of class represented by artifact assemblages recovered from six commissioned officers' houses at Fort Yamhill and Fort Hoskins. The artifact assemblages from these posts suggest that these army officers not only brought the sociocultural norms of materialism and conspicuous consumption with them to the frontiers, but that they were also highly competitive individuals who were interested in displaying and affirming their identities as colonizers and as members of the sociocultural elite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Major-General Sir Sam Steele and due to logistical congestion of the immediate postwar situation and critical moment would affect course of events in an almost supernatural fashion. It mentions historical imagination the difference between the policies guiding western expansion in Canada and conscious attempt at self-promotion. It also mentions element of a distinctly political nature and brought order to a waging colonial wars and racist policing of indigenous people.

Discusses the political urgency behind the formation of Western policy during Grover Cleveland's presidency. Populating the great expanses of the West; Problems of Western development; Protection of the homesteader; The Dawes Act; Cleveland's Progressive view of executive power as a hedge against capitalistic excesses; The Land Revision Act; Setting up a forest policy; The issue of federal Indian policy; The eviction of cattlemen from the Cheyenne and Arapaho lands; More.

Discusses United States President James K. Polk's policies towards the West. The Oregon boundary question; The acquisition of California; US control of important West Coast ports; The Slidell mission to Mexico; The war with Mexico; The Bear Flag affair; The question of slavery left by Polk for his successors; More.

Discusses Andrew Jackson's attitudes and actions toward the West. Involvement with the activities of former Vice-President Aaron Burr and the Burr Conspiracy; Becoming a US Army brigadier general; Jackson as a product of his time; The story of the removal of the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeast; Long-range plans concerning internal improvements and states' rights; More.

Asserts that Westerners misjudge John Quincy Adams' contributions to the creation of the continental empire that they were so eager to exploit. Adams' diplomatic accomplishments from 1814 to 1828, the Era of Good Feelings in United States politics; Background; Early life and career; Adams' greatest achievement as Secretary of State; Adams' agenda.

Asserts that the concept of Thomas Jefferson as a Westward-looking president is misleading; rather, Jefferson's course of empire ran in fits and starts, more sideways--crablike--than straight-on through the mountains to the sea. Examination of Jefferson's supposed lifelong interest in the West; Jefferson's correspondence and presidential actions; More.

Discusses the reasons for James Monroe's questionable statement about the `miserably poor' area of the West. Background; Failures encountered in solving the problems of an emerging West; The final Ordinance of 1787; The conflict during the summer of 1786; Disunity in Congress; The American occupation of Amelia Island; The Monroe Doctrine; More.

Following the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States invented a new tradition of territorial expansionism with a corresponding constitutional doctrine to rule Puerto Rico and other unincorporated territories. For more than a century, the United States has relied on this racist constitutional interpretation to legitimate the separate and unequal rule of Puerto Rico. Drawing on an analysis of the Congressional Research Index for all legislative sessions between 1898 and 2018, this note describes all the territorial government and incorporation bills introduced in Congress throughout this period. Although upward of 134 status bills for Puerto Rico were introduced, and in some cases debated, in Congress, only eleven provide for the creation of a territorial government or the incorporation of Puerto Rico. All but one of these bills were introduced prior to the enactment of the Puerto Rican Constitution of 1952. For more than a century, Congress has refused to enact territorial legislation that expressly incorporates Puerto Rico and repudiates the racist doctrine of territorial incorporation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

The article explores the impact of the U.S.-Mexican War on the population living in the U.S. Southern Plains in the 19th century. It presents a case study of the operation of Bent, St. Vrain & Co., a fur trading and Indian trading business, during the period. The effect of the ideology of Manifest Destiny on some residents of the region is discussed, as well as the implications of the collapse of the company for the territorial expansion.

The article discusses the history of U.S. foreign relations between 1750 and 1850, focusing on aspects of commerce and conquest. Topics include western expansion and manifest destiny, British colonialism, imperialism, free trade, the Enlightenment, both the causes and influence of the American Revolution, and the early republic period.

The article discusses the U.S. President Andrew Jackson's Indian removal policy during the 1830s, U.S. President Donald J. Trump's perspective on American exceptionalism and Nazi German dictator Adolf Hitler's admiration for the U.S.'s territorial expansion during the 19th century. An overview of the relationship between race and U.S. Manifest Destiny is provided.

Industrial decentralization in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth century is usually presented as a straightforward process in which central city firms built new factories on suburban greenfield sites. The conventional wisdom is that these sites were located just beyond the central city, or adjacent built up areas, on the urban fringe. The essay argues that this view of industrial growth on Chicago’s periphery fails to capture important nuances of capital flow and suggests expanding the current industrial decentralization models to include outlying industrial settlements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mid-nineteenth century territorial growth of the United States was complex and contradictory. Not only did Mexico, Britain, and Native Americans contest U.S. territorial objectives; so, too, did many within the United States and in some cases American western settlers themselves. The notion of manifest destiny reflects few of these complexities. The authors argue that manifest destiny was a partisan idea that emerged in a context of division and uncertainty intended to overawe opponents of expansion. Only in the early twentieth century, as the United States had consolidated its hold on the North American West and was extending its power into the Caribbean and Pacific, did historians begin to describe manifest destiny as something that it never was in the nineteenth century: a consensus. To a significant extent, historians continue to rely on the idea to explain U.S. expansion. The authors argue for returning a sense of context and contingency to the understanding of mid-nineteenth-century U.S. expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights how Americans used intertwined arguments about space and geography to justify and denounce different territorial configurations from the late eighteenth century through the Civil War. These arguments wove together ideas about geography (a set of physical, topographical features) and space (the human constructs that shape movement and human relations) in everything from theoretical arguments about the ideal size of republics to specific ideas about how rivers, mountains, oceans, and other features related to the proper shape of the nation. Americans evoked a variety of assumptions about how the physical landscape shaped human activity. They also made arguments about space and the ways that places were physically, and thus should be politically, connected. Highlighting an underappreciated current of manifest disunion, this article illustrates how different factions used geographic and spatial arguments not only to support and condemn varied expansionist visions, but also to justify disunion and secession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1908–1909, maritime commerce, fishing and traffic in the Sulu Archipelago in the southern Philippines almost came to a standstill due to a surge in piracy and coastal raids that challenged US colonial rule in the area. The leader of the outlaws was a renegade subject of the Sultan of Sulu, a Samal named Jikiri. Together with his followers, Jikiri was responsible for the murders of at least 40 people in numerous raids on small trading vessels, pearl fishers, coastal settlements and towns throughout the archipelago. In spite of the concerted efforts of the US Army, the Philippine Constabulary and private bounty hunters, Jikiri was able to avoid defeat for more than one and half years, before he was eventually killed in July 1909. His decision to take to piracy was triggered by the failure of the US authorities to pay compensation for the loss of the traditional claims that many families in the Sulu Archipelago had to the pearl beds of the region, as stipulated by a law on pearl fishing adopted in 1904. The law was in several respects disadvantageous to the native population of Sulu and this – together with the high-handed behaviour of the local officers in charge of the Sulu district from 1906 – fuelled widespread discontent with colonial rule and led several of the leading headmen of Sulu covertly to sympathize with, and protect, Jikiri and his followers. This sponsorship combined with the general reluctance of the population to cooperate with the US military explains why Jikiri was able to defy the vastly superior US forces for so long. American officers at the time tended to attribute the depredations to the allegedly piratical nature of the Sulus, but this article argues that the so-called ‘decay theory’, first proposed by Raffles a century earlier, is a more appropriate explanation of this surge in piracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to examine how Americans wrote and debated the wisdom of expanding into California during the first half of the nineteenth century through the lens of print media. Doing so divulges that American attitudes regarding territorial expansion were exceedingly multifaceted and nuanced. The lively public discourse over California also moves far beyond partisan rhetoric, for each author had a distinct opinion and viewpoint that offers candid insight into the acrimonious debate over territorial expansion. Although there were a vast multitude of viewpoints and ideas being debated, nearly all Americans were unified in their opposition to what they perceived to be European style politics and insisted that the United States should find its own unique place among the world community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Roberts Court has recently begun reviving a long-latent structural constitutional principle--that some unenumerated powers are too important to be inferred through the Necessary and Proper Clause. Under this abstractly sensible theory, some powers are too "great" to have been conferred by implication alone. This structural logic seems poised to command majority holdings in the Supreme Court. But it is largely unclear what results so undertheorized a concept might dictate. Now is the time to survey the domain of "great powers" in service of developing an appropriately modest and judicially enforceable great-powers doctrine. This Note argues that a power to annex foreign territory is too important to be inferred through the Necessary and Proper Clause. Because the Constitution does not enumerate a territorial-acquisition power, Congress therefore disregarded great-powers limitations in annexing Texas and Hawaii through joint resolution. Congressional Globe debates from 1845 reveal that opponents of annexing Texas boldly anticipated this very argument. This Note explores their forgotten constitutional claim in the course of highlighting annexation's historical pedigree as a great power. Rethinking the constitutional basis for territorial expansion demonstrates that judges cannot apply great-powers principles consistently. And previously overlooked congressional annexation rhetoric supplies fresh diagnostic tools for identifying other great powers, allowing scholars to escape deceptively stale search terms. In fact, this Note marks the first attempt to identify a federal statute struck down on great-powers grounds: the Court's decision in Afroyim v. Rusk can be fairly read as holding that involuntary expatriation is too important a power to be inferred through the Necessary and Proper Clause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including manifest destiny of the U.S. expansion, the Texas Revolution, and U.S. foreign relations with Mexico.

The article focuses on the popularity of stories of individuals being buried alive throughout America between 1820 and 1860. The author explores what these false reports reveal about the concerns and fears of American society, examines how the expansion of the United States influenced the stories, and argues that the fear of premature death correlates with the preoccupation of success and failure.

The article presents chapter two of the journal "Review of Research in Education." Topics discussed include the status of the Spanish language and its consideration to become the second national language in the U.S., the initial incorporation of Spanish speakers through war, territorial expansion and conquest in 19th century, and the issues on the jurisdiction territories after the gaining the independence of U.S from Great Britain.

William Eleroy Curtis was central to the creation of the Pan-American movement in the United States. As a lobbyist and bureaucrat, he helped organize the first Inter-American Conference in 1889–1890. As a journalist he became a leading “expert” on Latin America. This article uses Curtis to explore the relationship between Pan-Americanism and empire. Before 1898, Curtis sought only expanded trade, not territory for the United States. However, to explain why the country would “naturally” come to dominate Latin American markets, he depicted Latin Americans as backward yet capable of uplift through the infusion of U.S. knowledge and capital. He thus justified hemispheric control and helped U.S. Americans envision empire as a tutelary imperative. When Curtis supported territorial expansion in 1898 he did so in the language of civilizing mission rather than market aggrandizement. In combining narratives of difference and equality, Pan-Americanism served Curtis as a transitional imperial ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the history of Tucumcari, New Mexico and how it was founded in the early 1900s by a group of Jewish merchants, including Alexander D. Goldenberg, Max. B. Goldenberg, and Jacob Wertheim. The author discusses the history of Jews migrating to the western U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, explores why the Goldenberg family settled in New Mexico, and examines how the family of Jewish merchant Howard Louis Kohn overshadowed the Goldenbergs.