Louisiana Purchase
1803 acquisition of region of Middle America land by the U.S. from France
The Louisiana Purchase was the acquisition of the territory of Louisiana by the United States from the French First Republic in 1803. This consisted of most of the land in the Mississippi River's drainage basin west of the river. In return for $15 million, or approximately $18 per square mile ($7/km2), the United States nominally acquired a total of 828,000 sq mi of land now in the Central United States. However, France only controlled a small fraction of this area, most of which was inhabited by Native Americans; effectively, for the majority of the area, the United States bought the preemptive right to obtain Indian lands by treaty or by conquest, to the exclusion of other colonial powers.
“Louisiana Purchase” enters the record as 1803 acquisition of region of Middle America land by the U.S. from France. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Louisiana, Purchase and acquisition can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The first chronological checks are 1803.
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This entry incorporates text from “Louisiana Purchase” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.