Acclaimed historian Patricia Limerick joins host Gil Troy to explore how presidential power was reshaped by the relentless march of America’s westward expansion. Beneath the lofty rhetoric of Manifest Destiny, they uncover the practical realities of conquest, dispossession, and the explosive growth of federal authority needed to drive it forward.

Tracing how frontier dreams gave rise to federal sprawl - and how Jeffersonian ideals collided with the machinery of land offices, standing armies, and Interior departments - Limerick brings wit and nuance to a story too often flattened into myth.This is the expansion of power - executive, federal, and destined to reshape the world.

To read the texts and learn more about the manuscripts discussed in this episode, visit: 

President James Monroe on Purchase of Florida, 1821

Theodore Roosevelt's Square Deal Reclamation Act in Relation to Westward Expansion

John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier Speech, 1960

Chapters

(0:00) Opening

(0:04) How America Became an Accidental Empire

(0:38) Introducing Patricia Limerick: Historian of the American West

(1:54) Presidential Humor and the Power of the Fool in History

(4:11) Reagan, Roosevelt, and the Role of Humor in Leadership

(6:40) Manifest Destiny Debunked: Land, Myth, and Migration

(10:17) The Real Cost of Westward Expansion for Settlers

(11:02) Conquest and Consequences: Native Displacement and Injustice

(18:06) Nostalgia vs. Reality: Rewriting the Myth of the West

(20:19) How 19th-Century Presidents Shaped Land Expansion

(23:55) Land, Power, and the Birth of American Empire

(26:51) Bureaucracy and the Federal Government’s Rise in the West

(27:26) Debunking the Myth of Small Government in U.S. History

(30:21) Civil War Aftermath: Army Growth and Federal Authority

(31:20) American Individualism vs. Government Support in the West

(33:22) Closing the Frontier: National Identity After Expansion

(35:13) Roosevelt’s Reclamation Act and Federal Land Policy

(39:44) JFK’s New Frontier and the Legacy of Manifest Destiny

(43:35) Historians as Fixers: Cleaning Up the Narrative of the West

(47:00) Harvesting Hope: What the American West Can Still Teach Us

(49:54) Summary and Credits

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Production by docyourstory

Music by Adam Weingrod

The show is produced by The Shapell Manuscript Foundation. To learn more about the foundation and discover the manuscript collection visit: www.shapell.org