Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire

Amy S. Greenberg is Associate Professor of History and Women's Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She is also the author of Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City (1998). She has served on the governing boards of the Urban History Association, and the Society for Historians of the Early America Republic, and on the editorial board of the Journal of Urban History. She is the recipient of the Pennsylvania State University George Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching, as well as numerous fellowships.

• Introduction; 1. The 'New Frontier' as safety valve: the political and social context of manifest destiny, 1800–60; 2. An American Central America: boosters, travelers, and the persistence of Manifest destiny; 3. American men abroad: sex and violence in the Latin American travelogue; 4. William Walker and the regeneration of martial manhood; 5. The irresistible pirate: Narciso López and the public meeting; 6. American womanhood abroad; 7. Manifest destiny and manly missionaries: expansionism in the Pacific; Conclusion: American manhood and war, 1860 to the present.

"Amy Greenberg's fascinating account casts new light on Manifest Destiny expansionism by showing how martial conceptions of manhood animated the enthusiasm for territorial annexation in the 1850s. Filibustering, she finds, stemmed not only from economic and political ambitions but from widespread male desires for adventure and romance. Although more restrained visions of manhood also influenced expansionist ambitions, particularly in Hawaii, Greenberg demonstrates that aggressive conceptions of manhood shaped foreign relations long before Theodore Roosevelt rallied the Rough Riders." -Kristin Hoganson, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign