The term “Manifest Destiny” was first used by Journalist John O. Sullivan in 1845 to justify the American claim to the territory of Texas, writing that it was: “the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us.” The phrase captured the expansionist fervor and messianic vision that had been in play for centuries, and was perhaps the first expression of the jingoistic “American exceptionalism” heard in American politics today. With evangelical justification of the otherwise unjustifiable, this pernicious western development paradigm spread across the continent like a wildfire, consuming every environment and culture it met along the way.