“Divine task! Immortal mission!” enthused one excited American politician in 1846. 

William Gilpin was promoting a doctrine that became known as Manifest Destiny – the idea that Americans were both divinely chosen and uniquely equipped to conquer new territory, and should do so without delay.

Urged on by exhortations “to animate the many hundred millions of its people, and to cheer them upward”, this would rapidly turn a collection of bickering coastal settlements into a continental empire.

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