Presentation Transcript
Slide 1:Manifest Destiny
Why Go West? Manifest Destiny held the key :Why Go West? Manifest Destiny held the key “[it is] the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”
John L. O’Sullivan, “The New York Morning Post”
1845, describing attitude of Anglo-Americans
toward Westward Expansion
“American Progress” (next slide) discussion :“American Progress” (next slide) discussion This painting (circa 1872) by John Gast is an allegorical representation of Manifest Destiny. The white woman floating above the people is “Columbia”, the symbol of white Euro-American civilization. American settlers follow her as she strings telegraph wire while holding a book – school book, law book, Bible – they all symbolize American culture. The pioneers are hard at work “taming the wilderness”, as modern systems of transportation move across the land. The Native Americans and wild animals are fleeing into the darkness – symbolic of their unenlightened state and their doomed fate.
White Americans used the popular belief of Manifest Destiny as proof of their racial and cultural superiority that justified taking land from Indians and Hispanics. Also included was the belief that these “inferior” people were destined to die off because they could not adapt to a “civilized” world, therefore absolving American immigrants and settlers of any guilt connected with their demise.
John Gast’s American Progress (1872) :John Gast’s American Progress (1872)
Across the Continent (next slide) discussion :Across the Continent (next slide) discussion This painting also illustrates the philosophy of Manifest Destiny, depicting the western “wilderness” as empty land waiting to be “tamed” by American civilization and technology. Notice the Native Americans watching passively in the lower right, helpless to stop “progress.”
The village in the lower left clearly shows a schoolhouse with children playing, a church building, several white men hard at work, a train full of people going west, plus a wagon train starting down the trail.
The symbols of American culture revealed in these two paintings are the embodiment of the world view of the women on the Overland Trails from the first wagons that set out with Narcissa Whitman in 1836 to the last creak of the wagons in the 1870s.
Slide 6:“Across the Continent the Course of Empire Takes its Way”
Francis Palmer, 1868