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Editor: Seth Ford,
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Web pages maintained by pricel@grinnell.edu
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High
Praise for
"Manifest Design"
By: Bill
Patch
In a major
address recently on current trends in western American history,
Patricia Nelson Limerick offered the following commentary on
the significance of the research of a Grinnell historian:
In tying
to understand this persistent American yearning to be removed
from, declared innocent of, exonerated from the big patterns
of history, I have been tremendously helped by a book that I
did not read until fifteen years after its publication. Thomas
R. Hietala's Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late
Jacksonian America provides the foundation of the study
of westward expansion as a variant on empire. And yet it has
been inexplicably neglected and under-recognized in western
history. In it, Hietala tracks the way in which political leaders
of the 1840s, especially Democrats, at once created an empire
and denied that what they had created bore any resemblance to
the empires held by European nations. As
Hietala says, forcefully and clearly, "The fact that the United
States acquired contiguous rather than noncontiguous territory
makes American aggrandizement no less imperial than that of
other empires of the mid-nineteenth century." "The idealism
of westward expansion embodied in the concept of manifest destiny,"
Hietala declares, "persists because it helps to reconcile American
imperialism with an extremely favorable national image. The
assumed benevolence and supposedly accidental nature of American
expansion are convenient evasions of the past."
Source:
"Farewell Address" of the President of the Western Historical
Association, Patricia Nelson Limerick, published in the Western
Historical Quarterly, Spring 2001.
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