100 books like Agents of Manifest Destiny

Though he’s hardly a household name, William Walker, the most significant of the American filibusters, has been the subject of a surprising number of biographies. What is special about Michel Gobat’s book is his in-depth look at the actual government Walker set up to rule Nicaragua in the mid-1850s, the people he enlisted to run it, and his government’s ambitions and programs. Gobat suggests, importantly, that prior historians have underestimated Walker’s popular support in Nicaragua and overstated his ties to White southerners’ plans to expand U.S. slavery. 

What could be better, if you wish to learn about the U.S. filibustering adventurers who invaded Latin America in the 1850s, than to read an account by the most famous of them—William Walker, who left Gold Rush California in 1855 to participate in a Nicaraguan Civil War and rose to the presidency there? The War in Nicaragua is Walker’s own autobiographical account of his campaigns and experiences in Nicaragua. Pay attention, particularly, to what he says about slavery and White supremacy towards the end of the book. And remember that Walker conquered Nicaragua over a half-century before the Panama Canal was built. Did his intervention there have anything to do with how Americans got from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean during the Gold Rush?

Better than any other study on filibustering, Amy Greenberg treats it through the lens of gender, and she is particularly interested in public opinion about filibustering. Mass rallies in support of filibuster invasions of Cuba and Central America occurred in U.S. cities in the 1850s, providing funds, recruits, and moral support for criminal enterprises. What did gender have to do with who approved of filibustering, and who didn’t? What did filibustering have to do with ideas about what constituted proper masculinity? Did women participate in filibustering in any way, and did images of exoticized women in other parts of the world affect the attitudes of male filibusters?

Greenberg uses a fascinating variety of sources, including cartoons, poetry, travel accounts, and artwork, to convey the ambience of the filibustering world. Intriguingly, she both links and differentiates what she found about U.S. expansionist initiatives in Latin America before the Civil War to… show more.

Tom Chaffin is a great writer of narrative history, and this, his exciting first book, covers the daring filibuster attempts between 1849 and 1851 by a native Venezuelan to liberate Cuba from Spanish rule. López and many of his recruits died in two futile invasions of Cuba in 1850 and 1851, as his landings on Cuba’s shores were brutally repressed by Spanish military authorities. Lopez’s story fascinates on many levels, one of them being his contacts and intersections with key southern politicians of the time like John C. Calhoun, Jefferson Davis, and Mississippi’s radical secessionist governor John A. Quitman, as well as New Yorker John L. O’Sullivan, the newsman often credited with coining the famous term “manifest destiny.” The book is great on the nuts and bolts of mounting filibuster expeditions and how filibuster leaders managed to launch their expeditions from U.S. soil despite attempts by U.S. legal officers and… show more.

The epic, multi-volume work of one of America's great mid-century historians. An old-fashioned work of immense erudition, vivid narrative, decisive judgment. Never before or since have so many great and consequential speeches been delivered in Congress; Nevins furnishes every one of them with suitable embellishment. Vols. 2-4 (in the 8-volume version) offer wonderful set pieces on the great events of the time--the Kansas-Nebraska debate, the Dred Scott case, the rise and election of Abraham Lincoln.

Polk was one of the most important presidents, considered Top 10, and he only served one term. He didn’t set out to be president. He got nominated because the bigwigs at the time couldn’t win their party's votes. Polk kept getting more votes as the ballots were turned in and became his party’s nominee. He won the election and set out three goals; get rid of the bank of the US, which was ripping the country off, expand the country to the west coast, and get rid of tariffs, all three of which he accomplished. He did it all in four years, chose not to run again, went home, and died. Talk about logical? Get it done, get it over with, and leave the future to someone else. 

I hate books that make history bloodless and gloss over the often-ugly events that made the world what it is today. This is a short book with a lot of emotional energy, mostly in the form of burning outrage and irony.

I also really enjoyed how he made the voices of the American soldiers the central part of this book.

As a boy, I encountered Kit Carson via the Landmark Books, and I could not resist rediscovering him in juxtaposition with his friend but non-kindred spirit, John C. Frémont, who nearly became president in 1856. Although Roberts mercifully spares us from exposing Frémont’s Civil War blunders, his account of the disastrous 1848-49 expedition renders the “Pathfinder” in his grandiosity a less sympathetic figure than the laconic scout. As Roberts notes in his epilogue concerning the feats of his two flawed subjects, “pure heroes or villains do not exist outside the pages of bad literature.” He likens the evolution of Carson as “thoughtless killer of Apaches and Blackfeet” to “defender and champion of the Utes” to a similar reversal in the case of General George Crook.

The immediacy of Whit Taylor’s work and its accessible, urgent symbology is especially poignant in this diary of her Montana road trip with her husband.

Diary comics are one of my favorite genres of graphic storytelling for reasons exemplified here: you are engaging with Whit’s experience with this sprawling, beautiful land and its brutal history alongside her. Big sky, to her pen, to your eyes. It’s an intimate experience, one that comics do best.

Mixing Faulkner’s gothic language with McCarthy’s sense of history, Blake writes a story of two brothers torn apart by circumstance and their experiences in the Mexican-American War.  Blake captures that sense of aimless wandering that echoes Faulkner’s stories—the rootless characters meandering across the country, not only unsure of their destinations but maybe even indifferent to them. To me, one of the most profound twists in the book is that the brothers don’t seem to care which side of the war they participate in. They are itinerants whose purpose in the world is simply circumstantial; they are instruments of universal forces that they neither question nor understand.