How the contours of the United States took shape—and what they might have been

There was nothing predestined about the now-familiar shape of the United States of America. Early visions of what the new country’s borders could encompass included Canadian provinces, Caribbean islands, and even Kamchatka in eastern Russia. In Before Manifest Destiny, Nicholas DiPucchio tells the surprising, dramatically contingent story of the United States’ expansion, focusing in particular on the ultimately unrealized territorial ambitions cherished by many Americans in the early republic.

Between the 1770s and 1820s, American expansionists made efforts to annex Bermuda, Upper Canada, Cuba, and vast swathes of the Pacific Northwest. As DiPucchio shows, however, local populations in these contested spaces—from small groups of Caribbean merchants to Indigenous populations to rival imperial powers—contested their efforts, helping define the boundaries of the United States and forcing its leaders to recalibrate their expectations of the nation’s growth. Rather than the relentless procession it may appear to be in retrospect, the story of early US expansion was in many ways defined by thwarted ambitions and unfulfilled possibilities. Halted in the Atlantic East, the Canadian North, and the Caribbean South, antebellum expansionists eventually declared it their manifest destiny to overspread the West.