I’m seeing a lot of information on Twitter today regarding manifest destiny. I wanted to do a brief thread to point those who are interested towards scholarship on the topic. A lot of the information I’ve seen posted has been ignoring recent scholarship, so a thread (1/18)

First, too many historians are attributing the phrase manifest destiny to John L. O’Sullivan. This is a matter of significant dispute. Julius Pratt argued (in 1927) that O’Sullivan coined the phrase. In 2001, however, Linda S. Hudson argued that he did not coin the phrase (2/18)

Hudson’s book Mistress of Manifest Destiny: A Biography of Jane McManus Storm Cazneau posited that Jane McManus Storm Cazneau created the phrase. As the article was unsigned, it might never be known who coined the phrase, but Cazneau should not be casually dismissed (3/18)

Cazneau was a far more significant player in U.S. expansion than O’Sullivan. See Hudson’s book, as well as Robert E. May’s “Lobbyists for Commercial Empire: Jane Cazneau, William Cazneau, and U.S. Caribbean Policy, 1846-1878” in the Pacific Historical Review (4/18).

The tweet released by the White House drew upon what had been a relatively common interpretation of manifest destiny (from roughly the 1920s through the 1970s). Historians during this time saw manifest destiny as a beneficent process, as the spreading of “civilization” (5/18)

Historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner, Ephraim Douglass Adams, and Bernard DeVoto introduced this interpretation. DeVoto, for instance, published The Year of Decision: 1846 in 1942, which can best be described as a paean to western expansion (6/18).

Beginning in the 1970s, however, historians began to take a more critical look at manifest destiny. Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, published in 1973, laid the groundwork for these new studies (7/18).

The key turning point came, however, in 1981 when Reginald Horsman published Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Horsman explored how racism undergirded the ideology of manifest destiny and explored what that meant for the 1850s (8/18).

Slotkin and Horsman hammered home the racist roots of the ideology. By 1985, therefore, historians had completely overhauled how they understood manifest destiny. Clearly, based upon recent events, this interpretation has struggled to filter down (9/18).

Historians, however, might want to take a bit longer of a look at our own profession and seriously question why it took until the 1980s to see manifest destiny as something that should not be glorified and admired. (10/18).

After all, it was not until the early twentieth century that historians began to explain westward expansion by using manifest destiny. Most nineteenth-century scholarship saw manifest destiny as a failed idea that faded away with the conclusion of the Civil War (11/18).

With that being said, I did want to highlight the work of scholars who have been rethinking manifest destiny. Amy S. Greenberg published Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire in 2005, exploring the connection between expansionism and gender (12/18)

In 2016, I published “Manifest Mirth: The Humorous Critique of Manifest Destiny” in the Western Historical Quarterly. Using cultural sources, I argued that manifest destiny was far from popular and was frequently derided by opponents throughout the nineteenth century (13/18).

A year later, Andrew C. Isenberg headlined a fantastic lineup of scholars in a special issue of the Pacific Historical Review in 2017. Isenberg’s introduction “Alternative Wests: Rethinking Manifest Destiny” is a must read. The entire issue is a game-changer (14/18).

Rachel St. John’s Contingent Continent: Spatial and Geographic Arguments in the Shaping of the Nineteenth-Century United States in that issue explored the theme of contingency. Her forthcoming book The Imagined States of America will be a must read (15/18).

More recently, is a book by Thomas Richards, Jr (published in 2020). I just had a chance to read Breakaway Americas: The Unmanifest Future of the Jacksonian United States. It’s a ridiculously good read. Should completely alter how we view continental expansion (16/18).

Put simply, scholars have been reexamining manifest destiny and rethinking the role it played in western expansion. These debates have moved far past “was manifest destiny racist,” which was conclusively answered by Horsman over forty years ago (yes, the answer is yes) (17/18).

If you need to understand manifest destiny, check out some of the works I mentioned. I’ll continue to add to the list as we go and will create a syllabus on the subject. Any other suggestions, please feel free to send me a message (18/18).