Jointly presented by the American Studies Institute and Institute of Historical Research at Seoul National University:
"Manifest Destiny and its Limits in the Nineteenth-Century United States"
Andrew Isenberg
Hall Distinguished Professor of American History
University of Kansas
- 4pm, March 18 (Tue)
- Building 7, Room 308
Andrew Isenberg is author of numerous books and articles on environmental history, the history of the North American West and its borderlands, and nineteenth-century U.S. history. His talk at Seoul National University will be drawn from his recently published book, The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790-1850 (University of North Carolina Press, 2025). In this book, Professor Isenberg offers a new history of manifest destiny that breaks from triumphalist narratives of US territorial expansion. He takes readers to the contested borders of Spanish Florida, Missouri, New Mexico, California, Texas, and Minnesota at critical moments in the early to mid-nineteenth century, demonstrating that the architects of American expansion faced significant challenges from the diverse groups of people inhabiting each region. In other words, while the manifest destiny paradigm begins with an assumption of US strength, the government and the agents it dispatched to settle and control the frontier had only a weak presence.
Tracing the interconnected histories of Indians, slaves, antislavery reformers, missionaries, federal agents, and physicians, Professor Isenberg shows that the United States was repeatedly forced to accommodate the presence of other colonial empires and powerful Indigenous societies. Anti-expansionists in the borderlands welcomed the precarity of the government's power: the land on which they dwelled was a grand laboratory where they could experiment with their alternative visions for American society. Examining the borderlands offers an understanding not just about frontier spaces but about the nature of the early American state?ambitiously expansionist but challenged by its native and imperial competitors.
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