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Westward expansion

  • Northwest Ordinance

    Northwest Ordinance
    The ordinance created the Northwest Territory, the first organized territory of the United States, from lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains, between British North America and the Great Lakes to the north and the Ohio River to the south. The upper Mississippi River formed the Territory's western boundary
  • Louisiana Purchase

    Louisiana Purchase
    The acquisition of the Louisiana territory (828,000 square miles = 2.14 million km²) by the United States from France in 1803.
  • Erie Canal

    Erie Canal
    The Erie Canal is a canal in New York that is part of the east–west, cross-state route of the New York State Canal System (formerly known as the New York State Barge Canal). Originally, it ran about 363 miles (584 km) from Albany, on the Hudson River, to Buffalo, at Lake Erie. It was built to create a navigable water route from New York City and the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes.
  • Indian Removal Act

    Indian Removal Act
    The Indian Removal Act was passed by Congress on May 28, 1830, during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, who signed it into law two days later. The law authorized the president to negotiate with southern Native tribes for their removal to federal territory west of the Mississippi River in exchange for their ancestral homelands
  • Cumberland Road

    Cumberland Road
    The National Road (also known as the Cumberland Road)[1] was the first major improved highway in the United States built by the federal government.
  • Manifest Destiny

    Manifest Destiny
    In the 19th century, manifest destiny was a widely held belief in the United States that its settlers were destined to expand across North America. There are three basic themes to manifest destiny: The special virtues of the American people and their institutions
    The mission of the United States to redeem and remake the west in the image of agrarian America
    An irresistible destiny to accomplish this essential duty
  • Mormons in Utah

    Mormons in Utah
    After Smith's death in 1844, the Mormons followed Brigham Young to what would become the Utah Territory.
  • Texas Annexation

    Texas Annexation
    The Texas annexation was the 1845 incorporation of the Republic of Texas into the United States of America, which was admitted to the Union as the 28th state on December 29, 1845.
  • California Gold Rush

    California Gold Rush
    The California Gold Rush (1848–1855) began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California. The news of gold brought some 300,000 people to California from the rest of the United States and abroad.[
  • Gadsden Purchase

    Gadsden Purchase
    The Gadsden Purchase (known in Mexico as Spanish: Venta de La Mesilla, "Sale of La Mesilla") is a 29,670-square-mile (76,800 km2) region of present-day southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico that the United States purchased via a treaty signed on December 30, 1853
  • Transcontinental Railroad

    Transcontinental Railroad
    The First Transcontinental Railroad (known originally as the "Pacific Railroad" and later as the "Overland Route") was a 1,912-mile (3,077 km) continuous railroad line constructed between 1863 and 1869 that connected the existing eastern U.S. rail network at Omaha, Nebraska/Council Bluffs, Iowa with the Pacific coast at the Oakland Long Wharf on San Francisco Bay.