Manifest Destiny — Primary Document Worksheet

TL;DR — A classroom worksheet pairing Melish’s 1816 map with O’Sullivan’s 1839 text — how expansion was argued for at the time.

⬇ Download the archived copy — kept here so the document survives its source going dark. Explicitly free / author-released / CC.

A document-based classroom exercise built around the 1816 John Melish map, whose own caption is the argument: the map “shows at a glance the whole extent of the United States territory from sea to sea; and in tracing the probable expansion of the human race from east to west, the mind finds” its conclusion already drawn for it.

The interesting thing is that the map is the rhetoric. Melish drew the continent as a single unit before it was one, and the drawing did persuasive work no essay could. Paired here with the O’Sullivan excerpt filed alongside it.

Where this came from

• Tim Hwang’s “greatest, rarest PDF” thread

3 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.