American Progress

The image below is John Gast’s 1872 depiction of “American Progress.” In a way it was an echo and celebration of earlier settlers colonial tendencies expressed by John L. O’Sullivan’s 1845 notion of “Manifest Destiny.” What does the image “American Progress” tells about the American past? How does the image give us early warning about the contradictions of progress and its destruction, which is actually depicted in the image but also in actual U.S. History before 1872, and continued throughout the mid twentieth Century with the dropping of atomic bombs on civilian populations during WWII?