============What motivated the westward expansion of the post-colonial Americans? The westward movement was driven by economics, as much as a cultural desire for independence. That is to say, in other words, that (1) the promise of new work and prosperity in places unknown to early Americans seemed attractive to Americans, looking to begin new lives, in new places. The west brought with it a sense of possibility for new land, new resources for production. But (2) it also had the allure, and the appeal, to dominant cultural ideologies of the time, which favored independence and the continual formation of new personal and cultural identities, outside of any nation, in territories unexplored. Thus new possibilities for a good life in undiscovered lands (i.e. undiscovered by the Americans), “good” as being materially and economically stable, and “good” as an ideological construct—partly comprised of the notions of …show more content…
One also sees how each author, in their own ways (with more or less emphasis), describe both the economic motivations, as well as the cultural motivations, which drove the westward expansion. In a sense, their very words become pictures of the kind of socio-economic pressures shared by many Americans to expand westward, as well as the Manifest-Destiny fever in many of those same Americans, hungry for land, desirous for expansion, driven by the ideal of spreading their own culture’s ways into other lands (sometimes onto their indigenous inhabitants). But in the end, they all perceive westward expansion as being, somehow, the only option for early Americans to find the good life; no doubt because of the economic and cultural influences on their thinking.