The Louisiana Purchase

Welcome to the Home Page of Lisa's site on the Louisiana Purchase. This website was born out of both necessity and desire. As a necessity, this website was part constructed as part of a University of Sydney course - History 3038: American History on the World Wide Web - which aimed to have students design a site around a primary, or set of primary, source/s. My desire was to build this site around the primary source of the text of the Treaty of the Louisiana Purchase and encourage people to think about building historical understandings of the issues - such as international relations, the events leading up to the event, colonial desires and intentions, etc - surrounding the Treaty.

To make sense of the Treaty, there are a number of contextual sources and interpretive writings that comprise the majority of this web site. To make it easier for the visitor, the focal primary source of this site, the Treaty of the Louisiana Purchase itself, has been set out very distinctively. The page layout consists of the text of the Treaty with very little evidence of surrounding objects or interpretation. Making sense of a primary source requires context. You can build up your own interpretations on the Treaty by reading the interpretive essays that have been written specifically for this purpose, read Hunter Miller's Notes on the third convention of the Treaty or browse the timeline to get a feel for the historical context in which the purchase took place. If you feel that you want more information, head to the bibliography and webography for some further ways to find information. You can navigate through this site to find the information you require by wandering through the menu (at left) or by consulting the site map (see below).

If you would like more ideas on the type of questions that primary sources raise and how to approach them, please follow this link.

Site Map

1. Home Page

2. Introduction to the Treaty of the Louisiana Purchase

3. Treaty of the Louisiana Purchase - First Convention, Second Convention, Third Convention

4. Hunter Miller's Notes on the Louisiana Purchase (Third Convention)

5. Interpretive essays about the events that lead up to and including the Louisiana Purchase, as well as the events immediately after

a) A History of Colonial and International Relations in Louisiana, 1762-1801.

b) The Lead-Up to the Louisiana Purchase, 1802-3.

c) What was Louisiana Like After the Purchase?

6. Timeline of Events

7. Who was involved in the Louisiana Purchase? - Robert R. Livingston, Jason Monroe, Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon Bonaparte, Francois Barbe-Marbois.

-8. Related Primary Source Documents - the Convention of 1800, the Treaty of San Ildefonso, Jefferson's Draft of the Change to the Constitution.

9. Bibliography

10. Webography

11. About the Author