Uncertain histories: Writing and rewriting national narratives of progress on the United States-Mexican frontier, 1830--1850

Uncertain Histories investigates the narratives of progress that mid-nineteenth century writers employed to promote, as well as to explain, the United States' expansion over the continent---particularly its seizure of Mexico's northern provinces in the war of 1846--48. These progressive histories directed U.S. citizens to identify themselves as Americans, to imagine their nation as a historical protagonist moving along predetermined narrative trajectories, and to make history by interjecting themselves into those narratives.;Through political arguments and frontier narratives of the 1830s and 40s, the dissertation tracks the progressive histories that propelled notions of manifest destiny. "Trajectories of Progress: Rival Periodicals and the Reign of History" shows how The Democratic Review and The American Whig Review both represented the U.S. as sole agent of democracy and civilization, thus composing a shared national history that subsumed their parties' ideological differences. Chapter Two follows the magazines' uneasy reinterpretations of this history during the United States' invasion of a "sister republic.";"Vagrant Histories: U.S. Writers in the Mexican Borderlands" examines first-person accounts of experience in California and New Mexico. Chapter Three investigates the way Lansford Hastings incorporates into his Emigrants' Guide (1845) the progressive narrative that predicts civilization's inevitable triumph over savagery; this narrative falters when Hastings ventures to describe confrontations with the California Indians. Chapter Four turns to The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie (1831), an adventure tale that goes awry when encounters with Mexican bureaucracy disrupt Pattie's reiterated scenes of savage conquest. These writers struggled, and often failed, to join their personal stories with an emergent national history; like the periodical writers, they were compelled to revise prevailing narratives of progress to accommodate experiences that somehow exceeded the explanatory limits of those narratives.;Uncertain Histories thus explores the indeterminate relation between individual writers and the discourses prevailing in their cultures. My readings highlight textual moments that represent neither recapitulation nor rejection of the progressive narratives---moments that instead reveal a writer's active engagement with these narratives. Readers who attend to such moments may apprehend, in the interlude between available discourse and incommensurable experience, a writer writing.