President James K. Polk Home and Museum

Columbia, Middle Tennessee

Selected by Executive Director Rachel Helvering

James K. Polk was the eleventh President of the United States. Polk believed in Manifest Destiny – a philosophy of American exceptionalism that asserted that America had the right and duty to expand westward. President Polk oversaw the addition of over a million square miles of land to the United States, literally reshaping the nation’s borders.