How American westward enlargement was once governmentally engineered to advertise the formation of a white settler nation

Westward enlargement of the us is such a lot conventionally remembered for rugged individualism, geographic isolationism, and a good quantity of success. but the institution of the forty-eight contiguous states was once hardly ever a foregone end, and the government performed a serious function in its good fortune. This ebook examines the politics of yankee enlargement, exhibiting how the government's law of inhabitants hobbies at the frontier, either cost and elimination, complex nationwide aspirations for empire and promoted the formation of a white settler nation.

Building an American Empire info how a central authority that struggled to workout plenary energy used federal land coverage to claim authority over the course of growth by way of engineering the velocity and styles of cost and to manage the circulate of populations. now and then, the govt mobilized populations for compact cost in strategically very important components of the frontier; at different instances, guidelines have been designed to actively restrain settler populations for you to hinder violence, overseas clash, and breakaway states. Paul Frymer examines how those payment styles helped build a dominant racial imaginative and prescient for the US by means of incentivizing and directing the flow of white eu settlers onto indigenous and diversely populated lands. those efforts have been rarely seamless, and Frymer will pay shut realization to the disasters in addition, from the shortcoming of extra growth into Latin the United States to the defeat of the black colonization movement.

Building an American Empire unearths the lasting and profound value govt payment guidelines had for the kingdom, either for developing the United States as dominantly white and for limiting broader aspirations for empire in lands which could now not be so racially engineered.