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oceans, mountains, plains, rivers, desertsAn easy answer would be “a lot” since physical barriers have both restricted and defined settlement from the very beginning. We’re supposed to be answering geography questions here, you might object, not history, so let’s keep the answer short and just list the barriers from east to west starting with the Atlantic OceanAtlantic Ocean, the Appalachian MountainsAppalachian Mountains from New EnglandNew England to the south, the Great LakesGreat Lakes if you stay north after crossing the Appalachians, then the Great PlainsGreat Plains – which you wouldn’t need climbing skills to cross but which require a great deal of perseverance: the Great Plains are thousands of kilometers of nothing but very plain Plains. But to get across the Plains you would have to swim across the MississippiMississippi and its tributaries first (and during flooding, the Mississippi can be several kilometers wide). Only after surviving the great sameness of the Great Plains would you be faced with the sheer faces of the RockyRocky MountainsRocky Mountains, which are rocky indeed with more than 60 peaks easily dwarfing GermanyGermany’s ZugspitzeZugspitze. But even after crossing the RockiesRockies, settlers then have a few deserts to traverse, including one of the hottest places on the planet, Death ValleyDeath Valley. Travelers now would have to resist the temptations of recreation [8]at one of the largest man-made lakes in the world, Lake MeadLake Mead, and the temptations of gambling in one of the largest man-made cities in one of the least habitable places on Earth, Las VegasLas Vegas, before finally arriving in the Promised Land of CaliforniaCalifornia. But the American drive towards the West wouldn’t stop at the coast but continue into the Pacific to one of the most isolated islands in the world, HawaiiHawaii, and even further to one of the United States’ few territories, the island of GuamGuam, the most extreme western point of the United States, which is so far west that it’s almost in the Far East, being only a couple of thousand miles (or a few more thousand kilometers: 1.6 kilometers = 1 mile) from Japan, where it’s already tomorrow since Guam is on the other side of the International Date Line. We’ve now moved from the East coast all the way across the country and much of the Pacific Ocean and thus duplicated partly the original movement west, a movement that has been thought of in some periods of American history as a sign of divine will ( 6).