Author: Paul Wallace Gates
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Homestead law
Languages : en
Pages : 12

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Author: Robert Olmstead
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616207655
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
“The year was 1873 and all about was the evidence of boom and bust, shattered dreams, foolish ambition, depredation, shame, greed, and cruelty . . .” Onto this broken Western stage rides Michael Coughlin, a Civil War veteran with an enigmatic past, come to town to settle his dead brother’s debt. Together with his widowed sister-in-law, Elizabeth, bankrupted by her husband’s folly and death, they embark on a massive, and hugely dangerous, buffalo hunt. Elizabeth hopes to salvage something of her former life and the lives of the hired men and their families who now depend on her; the buffalo hunt that her husband had planned, she now realizes, was his last hope for saving the land. Elizabeth and Michael plunge south across the aptly named “dead line” demarcating Indian Territory from their home state of Kansas. Nothing could have prepared them for the dangers: rattlesnakes, rabies, wildfire, lightning strikes, blue northers, flash floods—and human treachery. With the Comanche in winter quarters, Elizabeth and Michael are on borrowed time, and the cruel work of harvesting the buffalo is unraveling their souls. Bracing, direct, and quintessentially American, Olmstead’s gripping narrative follows that infamous hunt, which drove the buffalo to near extinction. Savage Country is the story of a moment in our history in which mass destruction of an animal population was seen as a road to economic salvation. But it’s also the intimate story of how that hunt changed Michael and Elizabeth forever.

Author: Jason Porterfield
Publisher: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc
ISBN: 9781404201781
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 70

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Book Description
Primary source documents discuss the creation of the Homestead Act that allowed pioneers headed West a piece of land to settle on and build a new life.

Author: Richard Edwards
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496202295
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
"Homesteading the Plains offers a bold new look at the history of homesteading, overturning what for decades has been the orthodox scholarly view. The authors begin by noting the striking disparity between the public's perception of homesteading as a cherished part of our national narrative and most scholars' harshly negative and dismissive treatment. Homesteading the Plains reexamines old data and draws from newly available digitized records to reassess the current interpretation's four principal tenets: homesteading was a minor factor in farm formation, with most Western farmers purchasing their land; most homesteaders failed to prove up their claims; the homesteading process was rife with corruption and fraud; and homesteading caused Indian land dispossession. Using data instead of anecdotes and focusing mainly on the nineteenth century, Homesteading the Plainsdemonstrates that the first three tenets are wrong and the fourth only partially true. In short, the public's perception of homesteading is perhaps more accurate than the one scholars have constructed. Homesteading the Plainsprovides the basis for an understanding of homesteading that is startlingly different from current scholarly orthodoxy. "--

Author: Paul Wallace Gates
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Homestead law
Languages : en
Pages : 11

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Author: Michael L. Lanza
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807124307
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
At the close of the Civil War, the Federal government undertook a sweeping reform of land tenure in the South with the passage of the Southern Homestead Act of 1866. Designed primarily to allow freedmen to settle public land and take part in the great agrarian program of establishing a nation of independent yeoman farmers, the act soon became the victim of political abuses, bureaucratic ineptitude, and burgeoning racism. In Agrarianism and Reconstruction Politics, Michael L. Lanza studies the conception, evolution, and demise of this critical aspect of Reconstruction history.Lanza deals with the formulation of the act in Congress, the implementation of new land regulations in the southern states, and the distribution of land to the hopeful body of southern freedmen. As Lanza points out, however, the homesteaders faced obstacles and disappointments at almost every turn. White southerners vehemently opposed black landownership and did everything possible to stand in the freemen's way. Furthermore, much of the land allocated to the homesteaders proved unfarmable. An unwieldy, sometimes dishonest bureaucracy and a lessening of support from the Republican party were additional barriers that prevented the Southern Homestead Act from living up to its promise. Lanza relies on letters written by many homesteaders to paint a vivid picture of their hopes, frustrations, achievements, and failures.Historians have long debated the centrality of land distribution policies to Reconstruction history. But until now one has fully considered the single most important measure adopted during Reconstruction to provide land to the landless. Drawing on records of the General Land Office, contemporaneous newspaper accounts, and other sources, Michael Lanza's study of the Southern Homestead Act provides a significant new interpretation of land policy during this era.

Author: The National Archives
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198042272
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Our Documents is a collection of 100 documents that the staff of the National Archives has judged most important to the development of the United States. The entry for each document includes a short introduction, a facsimile, and a transcript of the document. Backmatter includes further reading, credits, and index. The book is part of the much larger Our Documents initiative sponsored by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), National History Day, the Corporation for National and Community Service, and the USA Freedom Corps.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Willa Cather
Publisher: Union Square & Co.
ISBN: 1454954582
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 127

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Book Description
When the Bergson family leave their home in Sweden to travel to the United States in search of a better life, they, like many immigrants, are awed by the beautiful harshness of their new life in Nebraska. When their father, John Bergson, grows sick and dies, he leaves the farm in the hands of his eldest daughter Alexandra Bergson. Resourceful and determined, Alexandra devotes her life to her family's farm, determined to prosper even as her neighbors are overwhelmed by the unremitting demands of pioneer life. But when she falls in love with her childhood friend, Carl Linstrum, Alexandra must choose between her duty to the land, and to her heart. A spirited celebration of the immigrants who have shaped the United States, O Pioneers! is a masterpiece by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

Author: Brian Q. Cannon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
The first ever history of the post-World War II homesteading program that provided frontier land to returning veterans. Reveals the many challenges they faced--and how they helped change our perceptions of the modern American West.