Libri di testo e discorso geopolitico negli Stati Uniti del primo Ottocento: alle origini del "Destino Manifesto"

In his excellent book on “Manifest Destiny” and American expansionism, the historian Albert K. Weinberg (1935) analyses a large amount of newspapers’ articles and official speeches. However important, this kind of formal and practical geopolitics were not the only relevant sources in the making of the narrative. Together with journalists and politicians, novelists such as James Fenimore Cooper, and other popular culture authors like folk writesr and singers offered an important contribution in representing the westward expansion as the most natural fate for the young nation. But also cartography and geography textbooks were very helpful in that sense. Indeed, many geographies of the time already dealt with the frontier, providing a vision of “Americans moving westward as a chosen people of God settling the land of Canaan” (Hauptman, 1978). They also supplied a visual model to the Manifest Destiny territorial perspective, sometimes suggesting United States’ expansion before it had actually taken place. Moreover, the cartographic representation of America as a separated hemisphere, highlighted supposed differences between the united States and other parts of the world, wehich could offer a good optical support to the Monroe doctrine.