Historians might need to describe a place on earth to differentiate it from another place on earth.
Humans have altered the landscape of the United States through mining, urbanization, building roads and structures etc, all of these fall into the category of westward expansion.
Physical and human features of an area impact the events that happen there, if I may give an example, the physical features of Russia support a cold climate which impacted events such as Napoleon's invasion of Russia.
hoped this helped
