Book Reviews Manifest Destinies and Indigenous Peoples. Edited

Much has been written about Manifest Destiny in the United States. The authors of Manifest Destinies and Indigenous Peoples primarily focus on other countries in the Americas and examine how Manifest Destiny and its organizing principles were used against the indigenous peoples in those countries. The book is a collection of essays by professors from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, and the United States that were presented as papers at a conference at Harvard University in 2006. The authors primarily address the time period 1865–89 and examine how frontier expansion was justified in their countries under Manifest Destiny themes. One cannot help but note the irony that these countries were only recently decolonized when they immediately began colonizing their indigenous populations. Interestingly, though, the chapter on Brazil claims that while the coastal peoples of Brazil had been devastated by colonization, the newly independent country romanticized the indigenous inhabitants of the interior and even adopted them as a uniquely Brazilian symbol, which continues to today. While Professor Anders Stephanson writes that Manifest Destiny is " a unique American trope, " the authors almost uniformly describe the frontier advances against indigenous peoples as being justified by rationalizations