US Didn't Conquer Most of Its Land - It Bought It

More than half of the United States was never conquered. It was bought: Louisiana, Florida, the American Southwest, a strip of Arizona and Alaska, for about $55 million in total. Today, one F-35 costs $92 million. But the receipt has a problem. Some of these "sales" happened with an army standing in the seller's capital. The sellers had never even seen most of the land. And the people who actually lived there were never asked. From Napoleon's fire sale of Louisiana and the Haitian Revolution that forced it, to Andrew Jackson's march into Spanish Florida, Polk's war with Mexico and the gold found nine days before the treaty, the Gadsden railroad strip and Seward's 4 a.m. Alaska deal, all the way to the land the US paid for a second time to Native nations, the Black Hills money the Sioux still refuse, and why Greenland never got a price tag. The history of US territorial expansion, told with 3D maps. CHAPTERS 0:00 Half of America cost less than one jet 0:37 1783: a country boxed in 1:10 Louisiana: the deal of the century 2:34 Florida: the purchase with no money 3:19 Mexico: the purchase at gunpoint 4:46 Gadsden: the railroad strip 5:05 Alaska: Seward's folly 5:51 The honest receipt 8:01 The ones it didn't get, and Greenland 8:56 Bought… twice SOURCES US Department of State, Office of the Historian: Louisiana Purchase (1803); Acquisition of Florida (1819); Annexation of Texas and the Mexican-American War (1845–48); Gadsden Purchase (1853–54); Purchase of Alaska (1867) R. Livingston to J. Madison, 11 April 1803 (Founders Online, National Archives) Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848); Treaty with Russia (1867); Fort Laramie Treaty (1868) United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371 (1980) Felix S. Cohen, "Original Indian Title," 32 Minnesota Law Review 28 (1947) MeasuringWorth.com: relative value of US dollar amounts (real price and economic share, 2024) Breaking Defense (4 Sept 2026): F-35A flyaway cost, Lots 18–19, $92M (confirmed by the F-35 Joint Program Office) NPR fact check (22 Aug 2019): the 1946 US offer to buy Greenland Prime Minister's Office of Denmark; NPR; Al Jazeera (Sept 2026): US–Denmark–Greenland defence agreement USGS National Atlas: Territorial Acquisitions of the United States (public domain) #history #maps #usa #geography #louisianapurchase #alaska #greenland CREDITS Music by Scott Buckley (www.scottbuckley.com.au), released under CC-BY 4.0: "Penumbra", "Aphelion" Music by Lee Rosevere (leerosevere.bandcamp.com), released under CC-BY 4.0 via Free Music Archive: "Under Suspicion", "It's A Mystery", "Let That Sink In", "Glass Android", "Night Caves", "Thinking It Over", "Bigger Questions", "Thoughtful" Archive images (public domain / CC0, via Wikimedia Commons): Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale (1800); The Jolly Flatboatmen by George Caleb Bingham (1846, National Gallery of Art, CC0); Battle for Palm Tree Hill by January Suchodolski (1845); Abraham Lincoln, attributed to Nicholas H. Shepherd (1846); General Scott's Entrance into Mexico by Carl Nebel (1851); Sutter's Mill by R. H. Vance (c. 1850); James Gadsden, after Charles Fraser; Alaska Purchase Treasury warrant (US National Archives); US Army Commissioners in Council, Fort Laramie (1868) by Alexander Gardner. Elevation data: AWS Terrain Tiles / Mapzen (SRTM, GMTED2010, ETOPO1 and others). Map data: Natural Earth (public domain); USGS National Atlas. Sound effects: Freesound contributors (CC0). Background removal: BiRefNet (MIT).