Diego Zavala
History 17A
“California and The Expansionist Dream.”
California is a place of invention, of new beginnings, and opportunities for those willing to seek it and work for it. Its history is rich with a wide assortment of characters, who seeking success helped it become what it is today. Among those characters we meet Thomas Larkin and Juan Bautista Alvarado; both individuals played a pivotal role in California entrance to the United States in the mid 19th century. Each one played a different role, always striving to benefit their community and as well as their own interests first; however, regardless of their own personal goals, their decisions ultimately collaborated with California’s incorporation to the United States. Alvarado
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Alvarado, as did many of his predecessors, granted land to Yankees who became naturalized citizens, but the newcomers were different from previous Americans. They were rough frontiersmen, who worked their way to California through land, had little respect for authority, and harbored no intention of becoming Mexican citizens. Alvarado realized that these people came from a country, whose creed was “time is money”, and California for them was a well-worth investment of time and money. At the time, none of Alvarado’s American friends made him think that it was otherwise, not even Thomas Larkin, who became seminal to the integration of California into the United …show more content…
But this time Larkin interests were affected since he had loaned the deposed governor a large sum of money. For Larkin this further cemented the idea that Yankee interest in California, and California itself had to be secured by the United States, an idea that countless Americans shared by the 1840s. Americans believed that they had a god-given duty to spread from coast to coast, an assumption encapsulated in the term manifest destiny, which was by then an old idea that could be traced to seventeenth century Puritans. However, now it was reinforced by eighteenth century political and racial assumptions of superiority, and gave Americans a powerful justification to get Indians, British, and Mexicans out of their way. Californians would not be the
America’s Manifest Destiny first surfaced around the 1840’s, when John O’Sullivan first titled the ideals that America had recently gained on claiming the West as their ‘Manifest Destiny.’ Americans wanted to settle in the West for multiple reasons, from the idea that God wanted them to settle all the way to the West co...
California Secretary of State, 2014. Web. The Web. The Web. 27 Feb. 2014. http://www.sos.ca.gov/archives/collections/1879/archive/1879-constitution.pdf>. "
Stacey Smith draws from research that involves the issues of California’s statehood, her book Freedom’s Frontier (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2013), Smith states that the events leading up to the California’s state
The term “Manifest Destiny” was never actually used until 1845, but the idea was always implied from the Doctrine of Discovery. Without understanding the Doctrine, it is impossible to understand the reasons and fundamentals behind why Manifest Destiny began.This Doctrine was a set of ten steps and rules that European nations followed in order to avoid conflict over land holdings, created in the early 1400s. The first few steps give the discovering country full rights to buy the land from the native peoples. This is important, since it gave the discovering country the power of preemption. Conquered Indian peoples lose sovereign powers and the rights to free trade and diplomatic relations, and the land they occupy is said to be vacant. Religion played a massive role in the regulations of the Doctrine, since “non-Christian people were not deemed to have the same rights to land, sovereignty, and self determination as Christians”(Miller 4). These rules were all meant to favor the ethnocentric, with full understanding of the repercussions on those who lived in the places being conquered.
In the 1830’s America was highly influenced by the Manifest Destiny Ideal. Manifest Destiny was the motivating force behind the rapid expansion of America into the West. This ideal was highly sponsored by posters, newspapers, and various other methods of communication. Propaganda was and is still an incredibly common way to spread an idea to the masses. Though Manifest Destiny was not an official government policy, it led to the passing of the Homestead Act. The Homestead Act gave applicants freehold titles of undeveloped land outside of the original thirteen colonies. It encouraged Westward colonization and territorial acquisition. The Homestead Act was signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862. To America, Manifest Destiny was the idea that America was destined to expand across the North American continent, from the Atlantic, to the Pacific Ocean. Throughout this time Native Americans were seen as obstacles because they occupied land that the United States needed to conquer to continue with their Manifest Destiny Ideal. Many wars were fought between the A...
Weber, David J. Foreigners in Their Native Land: The Historical Roots of Mexican Americans. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973.
John L. O’Sullivan, an editor, coined the term “Manifest Destiny” and gave the expansionist movement its name in 1845. The “Manifest Destiny” was the belief that Americans had the divine right to occupy North America. The Americans believed they were culturally and racially superior over other nations and other races such as the Native American Indians and Mexicans. The notion of the ‘Manifest Destiny’ was that the Americans were morally superior and therefore morally obligated to try to spread enlighten and civilization to the less civilized societies. According to World History Group, “The closest America came to making ‘Manifest Destiny’ an official policy was The Monroe Doctrine, adopted in 1823, it put European nations on notice that the U.S. would defend other nations of the Western Hemisphere from further colonization” (World History, 2015). This divine American mission caused Anglo-Saxon Americans to believe they had the natural right to move west and bring blessings of self-government and religion, more specifically-
The Manifest Destiny was a progressive movement starting in the 1840's. John O'Sullivan, a democratic leader, named the movement in 1845. Manifest Destiny meant that westward expansion was America's destiny. The land that was added to the U.S. after 1840 (the start of Manifest Destiny) includes The Texas Annexation (1845), The Oregon Country (1846), The Mexican Cession (1848), The Gadsden Purchase (1853), Alaska (1867), and Hawaii (1898). Although this movement would take several years to complete, things started changing before we knew it.
In 1839 a man by the name of John Sutter arrived in California. Sutter appeared to be somewhat of a drifter, and had failed to establish himself before arriving in California. However, in the land of great promise, he planned to establish an empire for himself. Sutter was granted eleven square leagues, or 50, 000 acres, in the lower Sacramento area. This was a common land grant for the times. Sutter got to work and began to improve his land. He went on to build a fort, accumulated over 12,000 cattle and hired hundreds of workers to hel...
Monroy, Douglas. Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California . 1990.
Many Americans packed few belongings and headed west during the middle to the late nineteenth century. It was during this time period that the idea of manifest destiny became rooted in American customs and ideals. Manifest Destiny is the idea that supported and justified expansionist policies, it declared that expansion was both necessary and right. America’s expansionist attitudes were prominent during the debate over the territorial rights of the Oregon territory. America wanted to claim the Oregon territory as its own, but Great Britain would not allow that. Eventually the two nations came to an agreement and a compromise was reached, as seen in document B. The first major party of settlers that traveled to the west settled in Oregon.
For centuries, California has captivated many people with its promise of a new life. The California dream was the obtainable American dream. It represented the chance to start over and begin again without the fear that one’s past would come back to harm them. It was as if coming to California and crossing its threshold meant life, liberty and pursuit of happiness for everyone. But in reality, the dream California offered wasn’t one meant for everyone. On the outside, the California dream offered bountiful opportunities and rapid success. Masked with a false representation, California carries deceit, despair and disappointment, failing in its promise of a new life.
Steltzer, Ulli, “The New Americans: Immigrant Life in Southern California.” Kiniry and Rose 346-347. Print.
Rawls, James J., and Walton Bean. California: An Interpretive History. 10th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968. Print.
Although capitalism still exists in the greater Los Angeles, its influence is not as great as it was fifty years ago. Los Angeles continues to serve as the breeding ground for new cultures, ideologies, and alternative lifestyles. The pursuit of the American Dream has become a reality for most immigrants in LA. LA is a great place to live, party, and be. I knew little about the history of Los Angeles prior to this course, but now I am well prepared to answer the question of, “What makes Los Angeles, Los Angeles?”