Austral Empires: Southern Investment in Latin America, 1808-1877

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Issue Date
2016-05-31Author
Wolnisty, Claire
Publisher
University of Kansas
Format
230 pages
Type
Dissertation
Degree Level
Ph.D.
Discipline
History
Rights
Copyright held by the author.
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
My dissertation, “Austral Empires: Southern Investment in Latin America, 1808-1877,” argues that early nineteenth-century, white United States southerners strengthened their identities as pro-slavery, modern, and southern heads of families through their connections to Latin America. Tracing this long-standing outward southern gaze sheds new light on what United States “expansionism” and southern “modernization” looked like in practice both before and after the Civil War. I critique traditional narratives about the development of Manifest Destiny when I demonstrate that United States residents created multiple expansionistic ideologies that highlighted either militant or commercial agendas. These expansionists sought to establish a vast empire rooted in slavery that stretched southward to Argentina as well as westward to the Pacific Ocean, a goal often overlooked in the current historiography. Archival material from both the United States and Brazil questions stories that depict the antebellum South as an isolationist and anti-modern entity when it traces the ways in which southerners capitalized on Latin American connections to promote visions of modernity compatible with slave labor.
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- History Dissertations and Theses [250]
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