Book Review: West of Emerson: The Design of Manifest Destiny

Authors

Charles W. Mignon, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Date of this Version

2004

Document Type

Article

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly 24:3 (Summer 2004). Copyright © 2004 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Abstract

This book might find a place on the bookshelf between Sacvan Bercovitch's The Rites of Assent and Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land, perhaps next to Robert Hurlbutt's Hume, Newton, and the Design Argument, and at least near Saul Alinsky's Reveille for Radicals. The book's critical purposes are "to describe the theological lineage of manifest destiny, or the quasi-sacred explanation for the way America looked to Americans in the nineteenth century" and "to see key texts of our nature canon, Nature and Walden, in this new line of descent."