This is the eBook of the printed book and may not include any media, website access codes, or print supplements that may come packaged with the bound book. Bridging the present to the past. American Destiny’s mission is to show readers how history connects to the experiences and expectations that mark their lives. The authors pursue that mission through a variety of distinctive features, including American Lives essays and Re-Viewing the Past movie essays. This book is the abridged version of The American Nation, 14th edition. Note: MyHistoryLab does not come automatically packaged with this text. To purchase MyHistoryLab, please visit www.MyHistoryLab.com or use ISBN: 9780205216550.

Contains thirty-one essays in which the authors, all historians, discuss specific, under-recognized events they believe helped shape America and the world.

The belief that America has been providentially chosen for a special destiny has deep roots in the country's past. As both a stimulus of creative American energy and a source of American self-righteousness, this notion has long served as a motivating national mythology. God's New Israel is a collection of thirty-one readings that trace the theme of American destiny under God through major developments in U.S. history. First published in 1971 and now thoroughly updated to reflect contemporary events, it features the words of such prominent and diverse Americans as Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Jefferson, Brigham Young, Chief Seattle, Abraham Lincoln, Frances Willard, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Ralph Reed, and Rosemary Radford Ruether. Neither a history of American religious denominations nor a history of American theology, this book is instead an illuminating look at how religion has helped shape Americans' understanding of themselves as a people.

When John O'Sullivan wrote in 1845, "...the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of Liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us", he coined a phrase that aptly describes how Americans from colonial days and into the twentieth century perceived their privileged role. Anders Stephanson examines the consequences of this idea over more than three hundred years of history, as Manifest Destiny drove the westward settlement to the Pacific, defining the stubborn belief in the superiority of white people and denigrating Native Americans and other people of color. He considers it a component in Woodrow Wilson's campaign "to make the world safe for democracy" and a strong factor in Ronald Reagan's administration.

Before this book first appeared in 1963, most historians wrote as if the continental expansion of the United States were inevitable. "What is most impressive," Henry Steele Commager and Richard Morris declared in 1956, "is the ease, the simplicity, and seeming inevitability of the whole process." The notion of inevitability, however, is perhaps only a secular variation on the theme of the expansionist editor John L. O'Sullivan, who in 1845 coined one of the most famous phrases in American history when he wrote of "our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." Frederick Merk rejected inevitability in favor of a more contingent interpretation of American expansionism in the 1840s. As his student Henry May later recalled, Merk "loved to get the facts straight." --From the Foreword by John Mack Faragher

In this final work of his American trilogy, Nicholas Hagger focuses on the unified World State it is America's secret destiny to create, and on the world's divided culture that impedes its creation. Throughout world culture there are conflicting and entrenched metaphysical and secular approaches that permeate all its main disciplines, including history, philosophy and science, literature and comparative religion. In each discipline there is a tussle between the traditional religious view, which is supported by the 4.6 billion of the world's 7.3 billion population that follow a religion, and the secular and social approach associated with humanism and the scientific reductionism of Hawking and Dawkins, which sees the universe as a random accident. Hagger argues that it is America's secret destiny to bring in a democratic, UN-based, partly federal World State that can unify humankind. The conflict between metaphysical and secular approaches can be healed within a new reconciling philosophy that unites both outlooks, Universalism, which is already making an impact in the US. The key to this reconciliation is focusing on the scientific view of the order in the universe, and on the experience of the common essence which resides in all religions (the belief in the ordering Light), and on the traditional view of order in the seven disciplines of world culture. This reconciliation can reunify each discipline and therefore world culture, and create world unity. Restoring the metaphysical vision of order in world culture can strengthen Americ's harmonizing of humankind within a World State based on political Universalism.

Discusses the concept of manifest destiny and examines the diplomatic deals and wars that brought new territories under American control and allowed the country to expand westward to the Pacific Ocean.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

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