"Teaching Native American studies, I always begin with a simple exercise. I ask students to quickly draw a rough outline of the United States at the time it gained independence from Britain. Invariably most draw the approximate present shape of the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific-the continental territory not fully appropriated until a century after independence. What became independent in 1783 were the thirteen British colonies hugging the Atlantic shore. When called on this, students are embarrassed because they know better. I assure them that they are not alone. I call this a Rorschach test of unconscious 'manifest destiny,' embedded in the minds of nearly everyone in the United States and around the world. This test reflects the seeming inevitability of US extent and power, its destiny, with an implication that the continent had previously been a land without people"
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Original Language: English
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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, (2014)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Manifest_Destiny
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Manifest Destiny
Manifest Destiny was a widely held American imperialist cultural belief in the 19th-century United States that American settlers were destined to expand across North America. In contemporary culture many have condemned manifest destiny as an ideology that was used to justify genocide against Native Americans.
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