The western genre depicts an era in the United States of America where expansionism and imperialism were at its peak and the people who lived in the west where fighting to keep things as they were and used to be. In the book, Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West (McCarthy, 1985), published in 1985, the violence and brutality depicted by the American frontier can be the film, The Wild Bunch, directed by Sam Peckinpah in 1969. The film seems to be the filmic version of the mythical written version of the book. Both the film and book contain groups of outlaws who quest their way across the west killing anyone who gets in their way, which is the classic take on the stereotypical American myth of the west. Though the plot line may seem the same the movie has a different ending to the book.
Expansionism consists of policies of governments and states that involve territorial or economic expansion (Oxford Dictionaries, 2016). Between 1803 and 1853, the United States grew size. In the early 1800s, the land west of the United States was undeveloped and it was considered to be uncivilized and underdeveloped even though
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The Monroe Doctrine was a U.S. foreign policy regarding domination of the Americas in 1823. It stated that further efforts by European nations to colonize land or interfere with states in North or South America would be viewed as acts of aggression, requiring U.S. intervention (The Monroe Doctrine (1823), 2012). Manifest Destiny is a term for the attitude prevalent during the 19th century period of American expansion that the United States not only could, but was destined to, stretch from coast to coast. This attitude helped fuel western settlement, Native American removal and war with Mexico (Manifest Destiny,