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A Wilderness So Immense
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
Napoleon’s empire-building rocked the Atlantic community,
Spain’s New World empire grew increasingly vulnerable to
American and European rivals. Jefferson hoped to take
Spain’s 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.
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