Introduction: The Promise of Free Land

Introduction to American Land Rush, a virtual exhibition by Sara Gregg.

American Land Rush:
“A Lonely Homesteader” Searches for Security in the Montana Homestead Boom

Swept up in the optimism of the 1910s, Lily Stearns settled with her four children on a promising homestead in northeastern Montana, where she found her fate conscribed by extreme weather and the limits of her endurance. This richly illustrated virtual exhibition tells the story of one participant in the largest homestead boom in US history, revealing the erratic fortunes of farm life reflected in the abundant economic, political, and personal uncertainties of the era.

Sara M. Gregg

About the author

Gregg, Sara M.

University of Kansas, USA

Sara M. Gregg (PhD, Columbia University) is an associate professor of history and environmental studies at the University of Kansas. Her current project, Little Piece of Earth: The Hidden History of the Homestead Era, examines the process of state formation from Native dispossession through the several U.S. Homestead Acts using historical GIS and grassland microhistories of the homestead booms in Kansas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, and Montana. She is the author of Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, the New Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia (Yale, 2010) and co-editor of the anthology American Georgics: Writings on Farming, Culture, and the Land (Yale, 2011).

orcid.org/0000-0001-9680-9856

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A Complicated Relationship: The Transhumant Pastoralists of Macedonia and the Greek State, 1913–1936

by George L. Vlachos

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Arcadia, Summer 2020, no. 29

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"Recognising Land Rights for Conservation? Tenure Reforms in the Northern Sierra Madre, the Philippines"

The authors provide an empirical study of the conservation strategy adopted in the northern Sierra Madre, the Philippines, and criticize the assumptions behind the main legalistic interventions.

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Renewable Energy and Class Struggles: Slurry and Stratification in Germany’s Energy Transition

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Perspectives Issue 2019/2

Jennifer Carlson examines the material and social dimensions of contemporary energy transitions in the village of Dobbe in the East Frisian Peninsula.

Do Wastelands Exist? Perspectives on “Productive” Land Use in India’s Rural Energyscapes

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Perspectives Issue 2019/2

Jennifer Baka looks at energy cultivation and energy security in India through an analysis of two energy development programs.

What Consumers in the Past Tell Us about Future Energyscapes

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Perspectives Issue 2019/2

Taylor and Chappells examine changing material cultures of energy in Britain and Canada.

Map: Lands of the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad in Nebraska in the Great Republican Valley, 1879

Map of the “Great Republican Valley” showing Burlington & Missouri River Rail Road lands for sale in Nebraska (1879).

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Standing on Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Tourists

This episode of a four-part documentary series reveals the struggles of how two indigenous communities, in Russia’s Republic of Altai and in California, are resisting government mega-projects.

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Wild Earth 5, no. 4

In Wild Earth 5, no. 4 Reed F. Noss reflects on what endangered ecosystems should mean to The Wildlands Project, and preliminary results of a biodiversity analysis in the Greater North Cascades ecosystem and a biodiversity conservation plan for the Klamath/Siskiyou region are presented.

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Governing the “Wasteland”: Ecology and Shifting Political Subjectivities in Colonial Bengal

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Perspectives Issue 2014/3

Looks at the changing governance practices towards agro-ecological resources and the political response that it received from the agrarian community in colonial eastern Bengal.

land tenure

Introduction: The Promise of Free Land

American Land Rush: “A Lonely Homesteader” Searches for Security in the Montana Homestead Boom

About the author

Browse the exhibition

American Land Rush:
“A Lonely Homesteader” Searches for Security in the Montana Homestead Boom