A doctor's plight. Exciting suspense set in the Southwestern U.S.

Tracing the sectionalization of American politics in the 1840s and 1850s, Michael Morrison offers a comprehensive study of how slavery and territorial expansion intersected as causes of the Civil War. Specifically, he argues that the common heritage of the American Revolution bound Americans together until disputes over the extension of slavery into the territories led northerners and southerners to increasingly divergent understandings of the Revolution's legacy. Manifest Destiny promised the literal enlargement of freedom through the extension of American institutions all the way to the Pacific. At each step--from John Tyler's attempt to annex Texas in 1844, to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to the opening shots of the Civil War--the issue of slavery had to be confronted. Morrison shows that the Revolution was the common prism through which northerners and southerners viewed these events and that the factor that ultimately made consensus impossible was slavery itself. By 1861, no nationally accepted solution to the dilemma of slavery in the territories had emerged, no political party existed as a national entity, and politicians from both North and South had come to believe that those on the other side had subverted the American political tradition.

"An exhibition at the Newberry Library November 3, 2007-February 16, 2008"

"Aligning Emerson and Thoreau with exploration narratives by Lewis and Clark, Pike, and others, West of Emerson realigns the standard map of regional American literature. Focusing on New England, it reorients our understanding of the literature of the west. Fresonke writes with grace and wit and sees the rhetoric of both manifest destiny and New England Transcendentalism with new eyes."—Brook Thomas, author of American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract

This thoughtful examination of a century of travel writing about the American West overturns a variety of popular and academic stereotypes. Looking at both European and American travelers’ accounts of the West, from de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, David Wrobel offers a counter narrative to the nation’s romantic entanglement with its western past and suggests the importance of some long-overlooked authors, lively and perceptive witnesses to our history who deserve new attention. Prior to the professionalization of academic disciplines, the reading public gained much of its knowledge about the world from travel writing. Travel writers found a wide and respectful audience for their reports on history, geography, and the natural world, in addition to reporting on aboriginal cultures before the advent of anthropology as a discipline. Although in recent decades western historians have paid little attention to travel writing, Wrobel demonstrates that this genre in fact offers an important and rich understanding of the American West—one that extends and complicates a simple reading of the West that promotes the notions of Manifest Destiny or American exceptionalism. Wrobel finds counterpoints to the mythic West of the nineteenth century in such varied accounts as George Catlin’s Adventures of the Ojibbeway and Ioway Indians in England, France, and Belgium (1852), Richard Francis Burton’s The City of the Saints (1861), and Mark Twain’s Following the Equator (1897), reminders of the messy and contradictory world that people navigated in the past much as they do in the present. His book is a testament to the instructive ways in which the best travel writers have represented the West.

As the population of the 13 colonies grew and the economy developed, the desire to expand into new land increased. Nineteenth-century Americans believed it was their divine right to expand their territory from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. "Manifest destiny," a phrase first used in 1839 by journalist John O'Sullivan, embodied the belief that God had given the people of the United States a mission to spread a republican democracy across the continent. Advocates of manifest destiny were determined to carry out their mission and instigated several wars, including the war with Mexico to win much of what is now the southwestern United States. In Manifest Destiny: Westward Expansion, learn how this philosophy to spread out across the land shaped our nation.

In Manifest Destinations, J. Philip Gruen examines the ways in which tourists experienced Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco between 1869 and 1893, a period of rapid urbanization and accelerated modernity. Gruen pays particular attention to the contrast between the way these cities were promoted and the way visitors actually experienced them.