A People's History of the United States Lesson Plan

Discuss the role of "manifest destiny" in the thinking of those who supported a war with Mexico in the years before the Mexican-American War.

Zinn quotes several newspaper articles from this time period, but it is John O'Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, who actually uses the phrase "manifest destiny": "Our manifest destiny is to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." Zinn's primary point is that members of the already-corporatized media were begging for war at the behest of the moneyed interests that owned them, using their power to invent and otherwise give credit to the opinion that...