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“[This] new, magnificent account . . . is full of wonder even for seasoned students of U.S. history.” — The Dallas Morning News “A vivid, episodic pageant of westward-ho empire building. . . . This is narrative history writ large and vigorously—with foreshadowings of tragedy.” — Publishers Weekly “In this balanced political and military history, Woodworth tracks political tensions exacerbated by continental expansion. . . . Woodworth dramatically presages the collapse of political parties in the 1850s by his accessible account of the 1840s.” —Gilbert Taylor, Booklist Informationen zum Autor Steven E. Woodworth was born in Ohio and grew up in the Midwest. He earned his Ph.D. in history at Rice University in 1987, and is the author, coauthor, or editor of twenty-eight books on American history, including Nothing but Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861–1865 . He is currently a professor of history at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. Klappentext A sweeping history of the 1840s, Manifest Destinies captures the enormous sense of possibility that inspired America's growth and shows how the acquisition of western territories forced the nation to come to grips with the deep fault line that would bring war in the near future. Steven E. Woodworth gives us a portrait of America at its most vibrant and expansive. It was a decade in which the nation significantly enlarged its boundaries, taking Texas, New Mexico, California, and the Pacific Northwest; William Henry Harrison ran the first modern populist campaign, focusing on entertaining voters rather than on discussing issues; prospectors headed west to search for gold; Joseph Smith founded a new religion; railroads and telegraph lines connected the country's disparate populations as never before. When the 1840s dawned, Americans were feeling optimistic about the future: the population was growing, economic conditions were improving, and peace had reigned for nearly thirty years. A hopeful nation looked to the West, where vast areas of unsettled land seemed to promise prosperity to anyone resourceful enough to take advantage. And yet political tensions roiled below the surface; as the country took on new lands, slavery emerged as an irreconcilable source of disagreement between North and South, and secession reared its head for the first time. Rich in detail and full of dramatic events and fascinating characters, Manifest Destinies is an absorbing and highly entertaining account of a crucial decade that forged a young nation's character and destiny.chapter one -- The Log Cabin and Hard Cider Campaign Americans in 1840 felt confident that their country was on the verge of greatness. The young Republic might be only three score and four years old, but it was already the world's biggest and oldest land governed of, by, and for the people, a self-conscious beacon of freedom to the rest of the world. And the future seemed to stand open to the United States, just like the rest of the North American continent, beckoning bold Americans to stride forward and take possession and thus increase the power and expand the extent of what they liked to call the empire of liberty. America was growing. The census the government would conduct that year would reveal that the Republic's population, centered hypothetically on a point 260 miles west of Washington, D.C., numbered just over seventeen million, an increase of 32.7 percent in the past ten years. New states were joining the Union. Two had joined in the past decade (Arkansas in 1836 and Michigan a few months later in 1837), and more were all but certain to follow in the one now dawning. The Iowa and Wisconsin territories would likely be ready for admission inside the next ten years, and interesting prospects lay farther west, even beyond the broad expanse of the Louisiana Purchase lands that the explorer M...
