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Prompt 3: America has benefited from many things over the past four decades: a tremendous amount of human capital (both paid and coerced); vast reserves of mineral wealth, timber, and fresh water; and two wide oceans that have let its people stay relatively safe from invasion while simultaneously enjoying maritime access to both the Atlantic and Pacific Worlds. But some may argue that its most valuable commodity over the years has been something that is in finite supply: land. But from 1607 through the 1890s, Americans had seemingly unlimited access to land. Although already populated with millions of indigenous inhabitants, disease, technology, immigration, and low preexisting population densities conspired to make the Euro-American conquest of the continent far easier and more rapid than most wars for conquest back in Eurasia. But even America’s vast land reserves could not make everyone happy, and from the earliest years of American colonization frictions over the disposition of this land would create a unique series of misunderstandings and conflicts.
Write an essay discussing how both the availability of and disputes over land shaped American history up through the Civil War. How did designs and plans to distribute the land affect politics, economies, and culture in those areas? How did a surplus of cheap land affect social and economic mobility in America?How did people imagine land use differently from one another, and how did these imaginings create conflict? What was the relationship between land and American democracy? Finally, in spite of already being one of the largest countries in the world in land area when the United States won its independence in 1783, why did Americans keep obsessively buying and fighting for more space and room to grow? Why did they need Louisiana? Texas? California? Oregon?
Be sure to use Changes in the Land and Journal of a Trip to California ( when writing your answer.
