frontier expansion
Settling new territories
Frontier expansion is the process of extending a nation's settled territory into lands considered undeveloped or sparsely populated.
The term carries the perspective of the expanding power—what's a frontier to settlers may be homeland to indigenous peoples.
In American history, frontier expansion describes the westward movement across the continent: Frontier expansion accelerated after the Civil War.
The phrase applies to any territorial growth into borderlands.
- land acquisitionGaining ownership of terrain
- colonizationForeign territorial takeover
- explorationTraveling through unknown regions
- pioneersFirst to explore territory
- wagon trainPioneers' covered convoy
migration · settler colonialism · displacement · indigenous resistance · broken treaties · land speculation · manifest destiny · settlement · treaty negotiation · resource extraction · cartography · borderlands · homesteading · open range · reservation system · annexation · westward · demographic shifts
- US HistoryAmerican Revolution, US history, Civil War, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln
- territorial expansionannexing, colonization, conquest, land grab, land acquisition
- American HistoryAmerican Revolution, Revolutionary War, colonial era, founding fathers, Declaration of Independence
- migrationmigration, immigrants, refugees, immigration, emigration
- colonial historycolonization, colonies, pilgrims, Jamestown, Plymouth
- imperialismempire building, colonization, British Empire, colonies, colonial rule
frontier expansioncontraction
Reduction in size
retrenchment · withdrawal · cession · abandonment · pullback
frontier expansionconcentration
Sustained single-minded attention
urbanization · centralization · consolidation · intensification · infill development