Seizing Destiny

Less than 100 years after its creation as a fragile republic, the United States more than quadrupled its size, making it the world’s third largest nation.

No other country or sovereign power had ever grown so big so fast or become so rich and so powerful.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Kluger chronicles this epic achievement in a compelling narrative, celebrating the energy, daring, and statecraft behind America’s insatiable land hunger while exploring the moral lapses that accompanied it. Comprehensive and balanced, Seizing Destiny is a revelatory, often surprising reexamination of the nation’s breathless expansion, dwelling on both great accomplishments and the American people’s tendency to confuse opportunistic success with heaven-sent entitlement that came to be called manifest destiny.

From the Trade Paperback edition.