Building an American empire : the era of territorial and political expansion / Paul Frymer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Frymer, Paul, author.

Series:

Princeton studies in American politics.

Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparative Perspectives ; 156

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Imperialism--Case studies.

Imperialism.

National characteristics, American--Historiography.

National characteristics, American.

Frontier thesis.

Frontier and pioneer life--United States--Historiography.

Frontier and pioneer life.

Land settlement--United States--Historiography.

Land settlement.

United States--Historical geography.

United States.

West (U.S.)--Historiography.

West (U.S.).

United States--Territorial expansion--Political aspects.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (311 pages) : illustrations.

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2017]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

How American westward expansion was governmentally engineered to promote the formation of a white settler nation 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.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Figures

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 2. Boundaries and Movement

Chapter 3. "Advancing Compactly as We Multiply"

Chapter 4. Homesteading and Manufacturing Whiteness

Chapter 5. The Limits of Manifest Destiny

Chapter 6. A Second Removal?

Chapter 7. America's Settler Empire at the End of the Frontier

Index

Credits:

Cover image: Map of the Indian and Oklahoma Territories, 1892. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Mai 2019)

ISBN:

9781400885350

1400885353

OCLC:

986183878