by Rich Wandschneider | Dec 31, 2025 | Manifest Destiny, Marcus Whitman, Native Americans, Nespelem, Nex Perce history, Nez Perce
President Trump’s recent outbursts about Somali-Americans and their homeland being “garbage” have been the most xenophobic rants since those a year ago about Haitians eating pets in Illinois. There have been milder explosions about Venezuelans and South Africans and...
by Rich Wandschneider | Sep 29, 2024 | American Indian history, General Allotment Act, Henry Spalding, Jefferson, Jefferson Bible, Jill Lepore, Manifest Destiny, Uncategorized
In the July-August 2024 issue of the Smithsonian magazine, in an article on “Mapping the Mississippi,” Boyce Uphold writes of Thomas Jefferson: “Jefferson had formed a vision for new territory west of the Appalachian Mountains. It would fuel the creation of an ‘empire...
by Rich Wandschneider | Jan 12, 2024 | Manifest Destiny, migrations, Minnesota, Minnesota Indian uprising, Minnesota Indians
My family doesn’t trace lineage to the Mayflower, played no roles in the Revolutionary War or the Civil War. And I don’t remember anyone referring to our grandparents and great grandparents as “migrants”; they were “immigrants,” people from specific European places...
by Rich Wandschneider | Nov 2, 2021 | Bison Books, Catholicism, Manifest Destiny, Marcus Whitman, Reverend Spalding, smallpox epidemic of 1780s, spalding, whitman
My last rambling blog post tried to link missionaries Whitman and Spalding, Catholic and anti-Catholic Northwesterners, Yale historians, Manifest Destiny, the Fur Trade, Whitman College and Bison Books into a tidy essay on history and historiography. I could have done...
by Rich Wandschneider | Nov 22, 2019 | assimilation, immigration, Manifest Destiny, racism, Stephen Miller
And immigration too. If we think about it, we, as individuals, families, communities, and a nation are conflicted about both race and immigration, and always have been. This came to mind this week with news that White House advisor Stephen Miller was exposed as having...
by Rich Wandschneider | May 2, 2018 | American Indians, Anglo-American, DNA, Germans, Manifest Destiny, Scandinavians, whiteness
Viking TravelsA few years ago my sister had a DNA profile done. To her surprise, the family stories, passed down from Minnesota Germans and Norwegians, that said our mother’s people were pure Scandinavian and dad’s side was all German, turned out to be more...
