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A WILDERNESS SO IMMENSE
By: Jon Kukla
The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America
Anchor
August 2004
On Sale: August 10, 2004
448 pages
ISBN: 0375707611
EAN: 9780375707612
Trade Size (reprint)
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Historical | Non-Fiction
The remarkable story of the land purchase that doubled the size of our young nation, set the stage for its expansion across the continent, and confronted Americans with new challenges of ethnic and religious diversity. In a saga that stretches from Paris and Madrid to Haiti, Virginia, New York, and New Orleans, Jon Kukla shows how rivalries over the Mississippi River and its vast watershed brought France, Spain, Great Britain, and the United States to the brink of war and shaped the destiny of the new American republic. We encounter American leaders--Jefferson and Jay, Monroe and Pickering among them--clashing over the opening of the West and its implications for sectional balance of power. We see these disagreements nearly derailing the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and spawning a series of separatist conspiracies long before the dispute over slavery in the territory set the stage for the Missouri Compromise and the Civil War. Kukla makes it clear that as the French Revolution and Napoleonβs empire-building rocked the Atlantic community, Spainβs New World empire grew increasingly vulnerable to American and European rivals. Jefferson hoped to take Spainβs territories--piece by piece,--while Napoleon schemed to reestablish a French colonial empire in the Caribbean and North America. Interweaving the stories of ordinary settlers and imperial decision-makers, Kukla depicts a world of revolutionary intrigue that transformed a small and precarious union into a world power--all without bloodshed and for about four cents an acre.
 Media BuzzAll Things Considered - November 21, 2011
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