Manifest Destiny

American Progress (1872) by John Gast is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west. Columbia, a personification of the United States, is shown leading civilization westward with the American settlers. She is shown bringing light from east to west, stringing telegraph wire, holding a school book, and highlighting different stages of economic activity and evolving forms of transportation.^[1] On the left, Indigenous Americans are displaced from their ancestral homeland.

Manifest destiny was the belief in the 19th-century United States that American settlers were destined to expand westward across North America, and that this belief was both obvious ("manifest") and certain ("destiny"). The belief is rooted in American exceptionalism, Romantic nationalism, and white nationalism,^[2][3][4] implying the inevitable spread of republicanism and the American way of life.^[5] It is one of the earliest expressions of American imperialism in the United States.^[6][7][8]

wikipedia