The Louisiana Purchase and American Expansion, 1803-1898

The bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase brought flush times for reenactors but maybe not the tide of public fascination longed for by various commemorative commissions. Yet attendant conferences and symposia did prompt scholars to fresh exploration of the purchase and its transcontinental consequences. The professors of law, political scientists, historians, and sociologist assembled in this volume took the bicentennial as an occasion to examine a broader question: “What does it mean for a nation-state to incorporate new regions?” (p. 1). Accordingly, and in contrast to other of the bicentennial's scholarly spawn, this collection has the Louisiana Purchase as its starting point rather than its focal point. Some of its authors touch only briefly on the purchase in the course of tackling various constitutional and political aspects of expansion—whether its object was Texas, California, or the imperial fruit of 1898. The editors Sanford Levinson and Bartholomew H. Sparrow begin the volume spoiling for a brawl. The Louisiana Purchase, they insist, was far more consequential for the nation's constitutional development than the Marbury v. Madison (1803) decision made the same year, a point missed by legal academics, whose “infatuation” with courts and judges amounts, it seems, to “professional deformation” (p. 2). A few of their authors have the editors' back in identifying other agents of constitutional interpretation. Mark Graber describes how constitutional doubts about the purchase and, more particularly, the annexation of Texas, were settled not by courts but when the doubting politicians gave up the fight. Ultimately, hopes for a brawl fizzle, though, for judges' understandings of the Constitution end up at the center of this volume—in the extensive coverage that Efrén Rivera Ramos, Christina Duffy Burnett, Julian Go, and Sparrow himself give to the Insular Cases and the way in which the Supreme Court limited the reach of citizenship and the Constitution in an era of overseas expansion. Indeed, one of the virtues of this volume lies in reminding us how the nation withheld the promise of citizenship and statehood, when it came to Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, and Samoa, that earlier had been extended to residents of greater Louisiana. The “unincorporated” status of those overseas territories placed them outside America's body politic, leaving them candidates, Burnett emphasizes, not for statehood but for deacquisition should the United States fall of the imperial wagon. Go is particularly effective in illuminating how variously the United States has governed its acquisitions, while also identifying continuities between 1803 and 1898 in the procedures by which territories were acquired and the administrations initially established for them

Annexation · Political science · Politics · State (computer science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law

• Empire

  Bartholomew H Sparrow•Oxford Handbook of the U. S.…•2015

  Add to list

• The Greater United States

  Open Access•Daniel Immerwahr•Diplomatic History•2016

  Add to list