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Example Of Westward Expansion

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The story of the United States has always been one of westward expansion, beginning along the East Coast and continuing, often by leaps and bounds, until it reached the Pacific, what Theodore Roosevelt described as "the great leap westward." The acquisition of Hawaii and Alaska, though not usually included in discussions of Americans expanding their nation westward, continued the practices established under the principle of Manifest Destiny. Even before the American colonies won their independence from Britain in the Revolutionary War, settlers were migrating westward into what are now the states of Kentucky and Tennessee, as well as parts of the Ohio Valley and the Deep South. Westward expansion was greatly aided in the early 19th century in the year of 1803 by the Louisiana Purchase , which was followed by the Corps of Discovery Expedition that is generally called the Lewis and Clark Expedition; the War of 1812, which secured existing U.S. boundaries and defeated native tribes of the Old Northwest, the region of the Ohio and Upper Mississippi valleys, and the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which forcibly moved virtually all Indians from the Southeast to the present states of Arkansas and Oklahoma, a journey known as the Trail of Tears. In 1845, a journalist by the name of John O’Sullivan created the term "Manifest Destiny," a belief that Americans and American institutions are morally superior and therefore Americans are morally obligated to spread those institutions in order to free people in the Western Hemisphere from European monarchies and to uplift "less civilized" societies, such as the Native American tribes and the people of Mexico. The Monroe Doctrine, adopted in 1823, was the closest America ever came to making Manifest Destiny official policy; it put European nations on notice that the U.S. would defend other nations of the Western Hemisphere from further colonization. The debate over whether the U.S. would continue slavery and expand the area in which it existed or abolish it altogether became increasingly contentious throughout the first half of the 19th century. When the Dred Scott case prevented Congress from passing laws prohibiting slavery and the Kansas-Nebraska act gave citizens of new

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