Manifest Destiny’s iconic painting was actually a travel-guide advertisement

Evidence

In a short analysis of the painting, the historian Martha A. Sandweiss writes that when she shows the image to her students, they imagine it to be some large and grandiose oil painting. In fact, she writes, it’s merely twelve and three-quarters by sixteen and three quarters inches. That’s because it was commissioned and produced as a foldout by George A. Crofutt, the publisher of a series of Western travel guides. In that sense, we can consider it an ad: buyers of the Crofutt guides stood not just to see new places but to see the unfolding of a kind of divine progress (certainly something not to be missed!). — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 632

Categorization

• CANDY: The grandest image of American destiny was a 12x16 inch foldout ad inserted into guidebooks — a nice reversal for casual conversation.
• XREF: connects to: Manifest destiny imagery circulated through commercial tourist guidebooks
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Manifest destiny imagery circulated through commercial tourist guidebooks