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8 - Onwards to the Pacific Shore

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2023

Peter Trudgill
Affiliation:
Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
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Summary

St John’s, Newfoundland, to Vancouver is about 3,000 miles; Plymouth, Massachusetts, to San Francisco is about 2,700 miles, the distances which English covered on its westward expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific between 1700 and the late 1800s. Revolution, purchase, negotiation, violent conquest, slavery and genocide brought the continental USA finally to its modern geographical limits. English-speaking powers controlled the east coast of North America from Labrador to Florida, and the west coast from the Arctic Ocean to the USA–Mexico border between San Diego and Tijuana. The 250 years of spread of native English speakers occurred at the expense of indigenous North American languages, and to a lesser extent Spanish, French and the other languages of other European colonists.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Long Journey of English
A Geographical History of the Language
, pp. 99 - 114
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

Further Reading

Greenberg, Amy. 2012. A wicked war: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. invasion of Mexico.Google Scholar
Hinton, Alexander, Woolford, Andrew & Benvenuto, Jeff (eds.). 2014. Colonial genocide in indigenous North America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laramie, Michael. 2021. Queen Anne’s War: the second contest for North America 1702–1713. Yardley, PA: Westholme.Google Scholar

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