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Book Review
| The Louisiana Purchase and American Expansion, 1803–1898. Ed. by Sanford Levinson and Bartholomew H. Sparrow. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. viii, 262 pp. Cloth, $75.00, ISBN 0-7425-4983-6. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 0-7425-4984-4.)
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| The bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase brought flush times for reenactors but maybe not the tide of public fascination longed for by various commemorative commissions. Yet attendant conferences and symposia did prompt scholars to fresh exploration of the purchase and its transcontinental consequences. The professors of law, political scientists, historians, and sociologist assembled in this volume took the bicentennial as an occasion to examine a broader question: "What does it mean for a nation-state to incorporate new regions?" (p. 1). Accordingly, and in contrast to other of the bicentennial's scholarly spawn, this collection has the Louisiana Purchase as its starting point rather than its focal point. Some of its authors touch only briefly on the purchase in the course of tackling various constitutional and political aspects of expansion—whether its object was Texas, California, or the imperial fruit of 1898. |
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