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Looking for a big timely summer read? Dad book extraordinaire! This is it.

From LaSalle to Thomas Jefferson, the story of how our country was made in the grand sweep of time.

A true American tale as bold as the people who lived the story. Native Americans, Immigrants and enlsaved people. Lives coming together to establish a nation.

Four cents an acre. The greatest real estate deal in history. A clean swap that doubled the United States overnight. Those lines are catchy, and they’re also wildly incomplete. We sit down with historian Alexander Mikaberidze, author of The Louisiana Purchase: The Grand Bargain and the Making of America, to rebuild the story from the ground up and follow the long chain of events that made 1803 possible.

We start where most retellings don’t: the Seven Years’ War (the French and Indian War) and the imperial scramble it triggered across North America. From LaSalle’s sweeping 1682 claim over everything west of the Mississippi River to the hard reality that Indigenous nations already held sovereignty, Louisiana begins as a gigantic, poorly defined idea. That ambiguity fuels decades of rivalry among France, Spain, and Britain and turns places like Natchez and New Orleans into high-stakes borderlands where diplomacy, trade, and military power collide.

If you like early American history, Napoleonic history, constitutional debates, and the real origins of US continental expansion, hit play, then subscribe, share this with a fellow history reader, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway.

Find Professor Alexander Mikaberidze https://www.amikaberidze.com/