Since the beginning of the United States we have been faced with the challenge of expansion and how to achieve it. As people started to move to the U.S., the U.S. started to get bigger as well land wise and were moving westward. People were able to move westward because the government made decisions to buy and win land. But as time went on things started to shift from what they use to be. During the late 1800's and early 1900's America expanded and improved their already existing way of expansion by buying more and different land to help the U.S. economy and by winning land through negotiations because of the feeling of manifest destiny nevertheless, the U.S. also changed in the way they were expanding because now they were trying gaining the highest power in the world and becoming the international police. .
The U.S. expanded from just the 13 original colonies to help profit America's economy by gaining more land with different types and more resources through numerous amounts of purchases. A lot of agriculture in the world today comes from the mid-west of the United State. Before the Spanish-American war, the U.S. had gained the whole continent. In 1803 America purchased the Louisiana territory from France, this purchased doubled the size of the U.S. Much of this land was land that was used for agricultural growth. In 1819 the Florida Cession took place and the U.S. bought Florida from Spain. After the Spanish-American war, America started to buy land that wasn't on the continent; they wanted to expand into the oceans and further. Shortly after the war started, the U.S purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867 as an accident. But in the end it was beneficial to the U.S. Many defended the U.S. expanding beyond the continent as a good thing because it helped us gain more raw materials. In Alfred T. Mahan's writing The Interest of America in Sea Power (1897) it says that America has a need and will to expand to help deal with the great demands because they need more raw materials.