American Progress: Sourcing and the Promise of Primary Sources

Abstract

Primary sources are tricky documents. They can be excellent texts to use in the classroom to improve content knowledge and build skills, but care must be taken so they promote rather than thwart learning (Eicher, 2007; Newman, 2014). A couple of preliminary steps can eliminate pitfalls and help a primary source fulfill its promise. Traditionally, sourcing meant authenticating the document by checking its provenance to ensure it is legit, meaning the document is what it purports to be (Wineburg, 1991). In recent years with digitized collections becoming more numerous, evaluating where the document was accessed has become important, as has assessing any information on the document included in the repository. Others steps might be considered beyond the traditional bounds of sourcing but they seem to fit the idea of authentication. Surveying the primary source document helps make sure it fits the people, place, and time context as well as the topic of study. So does researching its backstory. Neglecting sourcing can lead to misuse of a document and possibly mis-education. Conversely, when vetted carefully, the same document can prove to be quite valuable for studying different topics. Both scenarios have occurred with American Progress (Figure 1), a popular visual often used incorrectly to illustrate manifest destiny. It is about western expansion after the Civil War. American Progress has been used in schools, on the internet, in textbooks, and even on government websites to depict manifest destiny. In a number of U.S. history classrooms in various high schools in a large metropolitan area, I have witnessed teachers using American Progress to illustrate manifest destiny in the 1840s. Google manifest destiny pictures and the first visual seen is American Progress. Search on Wikimedia Commons and American Progress also is connected to manifest destiny. The online textbook, U.S History: Precolumbia to the New Millennium (https://www.ushistory.org/us/29.asp) describes America Progress as a symbol of manifest destiny. On The U.S. House of Representatives website, there is an essay on the “Era of U.S. Continental Expansion (2022),” that includes a short section on manifest destiny. American Progress is used as a visual with the caption: “Titled American Progress. Westward the course of destiny. Westward ho!, this print memorializes the movement of U.S. settlers across the continental United States during the 1840s and 1850s.” Various authors have also interpreted the picture as celebrating manifest destiny. In her article on selling the American West, Raab (2013, pp. 499, 501) described American Progress as depicting “the mythology of the endless frontier and a divinely inspired manifest destiny.” Greenberg (2005, pp. 1–2) was more effusive suggesting the picture was “perhaps the best-known image of the nineteenth-century concept of manifest destiny.” In the 1840s, manifest destiny was the belief that the United States had a God-given, divine right to expand the nation and spread democracy across the continent. The doctrine arose to