Manifest Destiny

"A short yet powerful synthetic treatment of a fundamental though misunderstood theme in U.S. history. Stephanson's accent on the religious component of the ideology of Manifest Destiny is superb and relevant to our times."—Cornel West, author of Race Matters

"A fresh, imaginative, and stimulating look at a theme that has been important in American history from the Puritans through Reagan."—Walter LaFeber, Cornell University

"In this concise essay, Stephanson explores the religious antecedents to America's quest to control a continent and then an empire. He interprets the two competing definitions of destiny that sprang from the Puritans' millenarian view toward the wilderness they settled (and natives they expelled). Here was the God-given chance to redeem the Christian world, and that sense of a special world-historical role and opportunity has never deserted the American national self-regard. But would that role be realized in an exemplary fashion, with America a model for liberty, or through expansionist means to create what Jefferson called 'the empire of liberty'? The antagonism bubbles in two periods Stephanson examines closely, the 1840s and 1890s. In those times, the journalists, intellectuals, and presidents he quotes wrestled with America's purpose in fighting each decade's war, which added territory and peoples that somehow had to be reconciled with the predestined future. A sophisticated analysis of American exceptionalism, for ruminators on the country's purpose in the world."—Gilbert Taylor, Booklist