The Story of The U.S. in 141 Maps

Manifest Destiny - The Story of the US Told in 141 Maps tells the story of the United States in 141 maps from the Declaration of Independence right up to the present day. Manifest Destiny uses small multiple maps to show how the territory of the United States has grown throughout its history

Click on any one of the small maps and you can view it as a larger map. On each map different colors are used to show the extent of U.S. territory at the time and the disputed & unclaimed territory. Each map reveals the changes which occurred due to a significant event in U.S. history. The first map in Manifest Destiny comes from March 4 1789. This is the date when the Constitution of the United States came into effect forming a new nation. The last map in the series is from August 21 1959. This is the date when Hawaii became the 50th state.


The belief in the Manifest Destiny of the United States was widely held in early America. It was a belief that the country's settlers were destined to expand across the whole of North America. You can see how this Manifest Destiny played out on another mapped visualization. The US Census Bureau has created an animated map which shows where the mean center of the population has been for each U.S. census from 1790 to 2010. The Mean Center of Population for the United States 1790 to 2010 shows how the mean center of population in the US has shifted westward in the last 220 years from Kent County, Maryland to Texas County, Missouri.