Taking information from Wikipedia and repackaging it in a visual and browsable format, Manifest Destiny portrays the territorial evolution of the United States from 1790 to the present, covering important milestones such as the Louisiana Purchase or the Civil War. The initial view shows 144 high level maps that can be browsed through in just a few seconds, revealing the territorial expansion of the US. Every single map also provides an interactive detail view.

For this project, I vectorized and georeferenced over 140 bitmap maps from Wikipedia by hand and released them as Shapefiles under a Creative Commons license.

Since I released this project, it has been used at dozens of K-12 schools around the country as supplemental educational material.

Explore the Manifest Destiny project online.