The Mexican and American War

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The Mexican and American War
“The United States had emerged as a modern capitalist nation, and the spirit of nationalism in the country was strong and growing” (Henderson 71). As tensions grew between the Unites States and Mexico, there was a thirst for war. The Unites States declared war with Mexico, because they owned land that Americans desired, resulting in America’s fulfillment of achieving their philosophy of “Manifest Destiny”. The blood boil of both countries caused a lot of bloodshed. The dispute lasted for a long two year battle which was for huge amounts of land. The Americans were victorious and claimed new territories from the conflict.
Manifest means obvious movement or expected movement. In the 1840’s, this philosophy of Manifest Destiny started from people believing that they must expand west to the Pacific Ocean. These people believed that this movement was predestined by God, which they must go from sea to shining sea. Americans did not just move because of this reason, there were other reasons that had contributed to their migration. “Manifest Destiny said that the Anglo-Saxon peoples of America had the right and indeed the duty to spread the blessings of freedom and civilization to those who dwelled in darkness” (Henderson 31).
Americans moved to the west for more practical reasons. One of them was to gain land. The southern land that Americans have been working on was overworked by crops such as cotton. Cotton was so profitable that farmers would just keep planting as fast as they could. Consequently, cotton crops destroyed the fertile land and made it very difficult to plant. As a solution, these farmers would gather their supplies and personal belongings and move west because the west had better pastur...

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Works Cited
Bauer, K. Jack. The Mexican War, 1846-1848. New York: Macmillan, 1974. Print.
Downey, Fairfax. Texas and the War with Mexico. New York: American Heritage Pub., 1961. Print.
Faber, Harold. From Sea to Sea: The Growth of the United States. New York: Scribner, 1992. Print.
Henderson, Timothy J. A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007. Print.
Meed, Douglas V. The Mexican War, 1846-1848. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.
"Mexican-American War". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2014. Web. 26 Jan. 2014
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Minster, Christopher. "The Mexican-American War." Latinamericahistory.about.com. N.p., n.d. Web.
Nevin, David. The Mexican War. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life, 1978. Print.

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