Changes

===The United States of America===

Poinsett’s expedition to Mexico was part of a larger trend in the history of the United States, during the years of the New Republic, as the U.S. applied the philosophical debate over the definition of the human species and the meaning of human diversity, to American ideas of Manifest Destiny and race. Thomas C. Patterson’s book, A Social History of Anthropology in the United States, examines the purpose and meaning in the development of anthropology in the U.S. Patterson explores the origins of anthropology in European traveler’s accounts and the philosophical debates of Rousseau, Kant and others, and identifies two different ways anthropology and other human sciences have been used by individuals and states. Supporters of social hierarchy used travel accounts to justify conquest and repression, seeing history as, “a series of progressive changes…from the original, primitive condition to more advances, diversified circumstances,” and, “the conquest of nature, material improvement, and increasing modernity as motors driving these changes.”<ref> Patterson, <I>A Social History of Anthropology in the United States</I>, pg 1.</ref>