Building an American empire : the era of territorial and political expansion

Resource Information

The work Building an American empire : the era of territorial and political expansion represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Bowdoin College Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Building an American empire : the era of territorial and political expansion

Title remainder

the era of territorial and political expansion

Statement of responsibility

Paul Frymer

Creator

• Frymer, Paul,

Author

• Frymer, Paul,

Subject

• Frontier thesis
• HISTORY -- North America
• HISTORY -- United States -- 19th Century
• Imperialism -- Case studies
• Land settlement -- United States -- Historiography
• National characteristics, American -- Historiography
• POLITICAL SCIENCE -- Government | National
• POLITICAL SCIENCE -- Political Ideologies | Nationalism
• SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Discrimination & Race Relations
• United States -- Historical geography
• United States -- Territorial expansion | Political aspects
• West (U.S.) -- Historiography
• Case studies
• Frontier and pioneer life -- United States -- Historiography

Genre

• Case studies

Language

eng

Summary

"Westward expansion of the United States is most conventionally remembered for rugged individualism, geographic isolationism, and a fair amount of luck. Yet the establishment of the forty-eight contiguous states was hardly a foregone conclusion, and the federal government played a critical role in its success. This book examines the politics of American expansion, showing how the government's regulation of population movements on the frontier, both settlement and removal, advanced national aspirations for empire and promoted the formation of a white settler nation. Building an American Empire details how a government that struggled to exercise plenary power used federal land policy to assert authority over the direction of expansion by engineering the pace and patterns of settlement and to control the movement of populations. At times, the government mobilized populations for compact settlement in strategically important areas of the frontier; at other times, policies were designed to actively restrain settler populations in order to prevent violence, international conflict, and breakaway states. Paul Frymer examines how these settlement patterns helped construct a dominant racial vision for America by incentivizing and directing the movement of white European settlers onto indigenous and diversely populated lands. These efforts were hardly seamless, and Frymer pays close attention to the failures as well, from the lack of further expansion into Latin America to the defeat of the black colonization movement. Building an American Empire reveals the lasting and profound significance government settlement policies had for the nation, both for establishing America as dominantly white and for restricting broader aspirations for empire in lands that could not be so racially engineered."--

Member of

• Princeton studies in American politics

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Cataloging source

DLC

Illustrations

• illustrations
• maps

Index

index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Series statement

Princeton studies in American politics: historical, international, and comparative perspectives