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Northwest Ordinance
The Northwest Ordinance (formally An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States, North-West of the River Ohio, and also known as the The Ordinance of 1787) was an act of the Congress of the Confederation of the United States (the Confederation Congress), passed July 13, 1787. -
Louisiana Purchase
The Louisiana Purchase (1803) was a land deal between the United States and France, in which the U.S. acquired approximately 827,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River for $15 million. -
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Erie Canal
The Erie Canal is a canal in New York that is part of the east–west, cross-state route of the New York State Canal System. Originally, it ran about 363 miles from Albany, on the Hudson River, to Buffalo, at Lake Erie. -
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Cumberland Road
Cumberland Road, also called National Road, first federal highway in the United States and for several years the main route to what was then the Northwest Territory. Built (1811–37) from Cumberland, Md. (western terminus of a state road from Baltimore and of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal), to Vandalia, Ill., it forms part of the present U.S. Route 40. In April 1802 Congress appropriated land-sale funds to finance an overland link between the Atlantic Coast and the new state of Ohio. -
Indian Removal Act
The Indian Removal Act was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830, authorizing the president to grant unsettled lands west of the Mississippi in exchange for Indian lands within existing state borders. A few tribes went peacefully, but many resisted the relocation policy. -
Texas Annexation
The Texas annexation was the 1845 incorporation of the Republic of Texas into the United States of America, which was admitted to the Union as the 28th state on December 29, 1845. The Republic of Texas declared independence from the Republic of Mexico on March 2, 1836. -
Mormons in Utah
After Smith's death in 1844, the Mormons followed Brigham Young to what would become the Utah Territory. Today, most Mormons are understood to be members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). Some Mormons are also either independent or non-practicing. -
Manifest Density
the 19th-century doctrine or belief that the expansion of the US throughout the American continents was both justified and inevitable. -
California Gold Rush
The California Gold Rush began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California. The news of gold brought some 300,000 people to California from the rest of the United States and abroad. -
Gadsden Purchase
The Gadsden Purchase is a 29,670-square-mile region of present-day southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico that the United States purchased via a treaty signed on December 30, 1853, by James Gadsden, U.S. ambassador to Mexico at that time. -
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Transcontinental Railroad
The first of these, the 3,103-kilometer (1,928 mi) "Pacific Railroad", was built by the Central Pacific Railroad and Union Pacific Railroad to link the San Francisco Bay at Alameda, California with the nation's existing eastern railroad network at Council Bluffs, Iowa/Omaha, Nebraska thereby creating the world's first cross country transportation system.
