The Worst Hard Time

The Worst Hard Time

by

Timothy Egan

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The idea that the United States was fated to extend its borders from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts and beyond. The term was first used in an editorial that was published in the July-August 1845 issue of the Democratic Review, a periodical published by John O’Sullivan, an editor who supported the annexations of Texas and of the Oregon Territory. The idea of Manifest Destiny also inspired the United States’ later acquisition of islands in both the Caribbean and the Pacific.

Manifest Destiny Quotes in The Worst Hard Time

The The Worst Hard Time quotes below are all either spoken by Manifest Destiny or refer to Manifest Destiny. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Westward Expansion and the Settlement of the Southern Plains Theme Icon
).
Chapter 3 Quotes

Of the roughly two hundred million acres homesteaded on the Great Plains between 1880 and 1925, nearly half was considered marginal for farming[...] people who had descended from a beaten-down part of the world, people whose daddy had been a serf, a sharecropper, a tenant, and even slaves, castaways, rejects, white trash, and Mexicans could own a piece of earth. “Every man a landlord” meant something. Historians had been herded into thinking the American frontier was closed after the 1890 census, that western movement had effectively ended just before the close of the last century, that settlement had been tried and failed in the Great American Desert. But they overlooked the southern plains, the pass-through country. In the first thirty years of the twentieth century, it got a second look.

Page Number: 56
Explanation and Analysis:
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