Manifest Destiny Research Paper

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The topic of our ethical reasoning and global solutions project is genocide. As student two I am focusing my research on a local form of genocide which is the Manifest Destiny. The manifest destiny occurred in the 19th century around the year of 1840. It is known as the American belief that the expansion of the United States westward was foreseeable. The term “manifest destiny” and the idea behind it first came from the annexation of Texas. Which led to an event that came to be know as The Mexican-American war in 1846. This brought on the sense of a duty to many Americans to “extend the ‘boundaries of freedom’” (PBS) by reaching out and spreading the use of democracy in order to “govern the North American continent” (denial). John Quincy Adams…show more content…
These frameworks are religion, government, social, and economic. Americans didn’t only desire the expansion into the west, they also saw it as “an endowment from God through which they could take their democratic republicanism across North America” (Dobson, 1). Religion played a very big part in the ideologies and objectives. The faith of the people who were invested in the westward expansion were Protestant Christians. According to a guy name Walter Russell Mead it was the religion of Americans that enabled the “institution of capitalist modernity” (Dobson, 3). Which ties in to the economic framework that relied around the idea of capitalism. This freedom allowed Americans to move up the social ladder by acquiring money while being able to also give back to others of the same religion and race. It was realized by Thomas Jefferson, our founding father, that “economic structure and the dream to own land were at American democracy’s core” (Dobson, 4). Owning lawn and being able to produce one’s own goods and control finances would allow for economic growth. I would say Democracy was the core of manifest destiny. Some of the economic factors that created a foundation for this objective was the “high birth rate and increases in population due to immigration” (PBS), economic depressions, and purchasing and resourcing of inexpensive

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