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and, during this time, “assimilate” America did. With the
“Louisiana Purchase” in 1803, America bought from France the
territory occupied by the present day states of Arkansas,
Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, South
Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Minnesota. With the
“Mexican-American War” in 1846, America won from Mexico the
territory occupied by the present day states of Texas, New
Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and California. With
the so-called “Seward’s Folly” in 1867, America bought from
Russia the territory occupied by the present day state of
Alaska. And with the “Spanish-American War” in 1898, America
won as “foreign territories” the islands of the Philippines,
Puerto Rico, and Guam. This was “Manifest Destiny” manifested
through acquisition and war – and seemingly, as Ackerknecht
wrote, “as rapidly as possible.”
It is greatly ironic that America, its own existence as a
colony of England a fact of a not so distant past, was utterly
intent on expansion and colonization. This was the spirit of
the nineteenth century for America and, as I have already tried
to express, it was a spirit rising from out of the
consanguineous ideology – conscious or unconscious, published or
unpublished – of Western religion and Western science, which was
itself founded upon a fundamental perspective towards reality
and “truth” that ignored all that was foreign, abnormal, and
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