The United States as we know it today is the result of a long history of territorial acquisition. At the time of European contact in the late fifteenth century North America was home to thousands of indigenous tribal communities. What followed was a lengthy process of conquest, genocide, and annexation as European colonial powers established settlements that became the continental United States. Consequently, the "America" referenced in a seventeenth-century literary text is different to that found in an eighteenth-century work, and even in a nineteenth-century text what is referred to as "America" or the United States probably is not what we envision from a twenty-first century perspective. Therefore, this account of the emergence of the American nation offers an overview of literary engagements with the process of expansion that formed the contemporary nation-state.