New from Johns Hopkins University Press:
Securing the West: Politics, Public Lands, and the Fate of the Old Republic, 1785-1850 (April 2014), by
John R. Van Atta. The Press explains:
Few issues defined the period between
American independence and the Mexican War more sharply than westward
settlement and the role of the federal government in that expansion. In
Securing the West, John R. Van Atta examines the visions of the
founding generation and the increasing influence of ideological
differences in the years after the peace of 1815.
Americans
expected the country to grow westward, but on the details of that growth
they held strongly different opinions. What part should Congress play
in this development? How much should public land cost? What of the
families and businesses left behind, and how would society's
institutions be established in the West? What of the premature settlers,
the "squatters" who challenged the rule of law while epitomizing
democratic daring?
Taking a broad approach, Van Atta addresses
three interrelated queries: First, how did competing economic beliefs
and divergent cultural mandates influence the various outcomes of this
broad debate over the means, timing, and purposes of settling the
trans-Appalachian West? Second, what alternative visions of western
society lay behind the battles among policy makers within the government
and the interested parties who would sway them? Third, why did
settlement of the West take such a different course in the end from that
which the earliest leaders of the republic intended?
This story
explores dimensions of the federal lands question that other historians
have minimized or left out entirely. Van Atta draws upon a range of
sources known to have influenced the public discourse, including
congressional debates, committee reports, and correspondence; editorial
writings by the famous and unknown; and news coverage in various widely
circulated newspapers and magazines of the period.
Much of the
attention focuses on Congress—the elected leaders who advocated
divergent plans about western lands. In Congress, more than any other
place, public leaders articulated basic concerns about the character,
structure, direction, and destiny of society in the early United States.
By 1830, many other important national concerns had become
critically entangled with land disposition, creating points of
ideological tension among rival regions, parties, and interests in the
early years of the republic—particularly in Jacksonian America.
More information is available
here.
