The award winning 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 upend the scholarly consensus regarding the Homestead Act.
Homesteading the Plains, the first major scholarly study of homesteading in a generation, uses new data sources and new digital techniques to present a nuanced account of an important government program that scholars will need to reevaluate.
-Richard White, Stanford University
Homesteading the Plains unsettles longstanding homesteading myth and history alike. Provocative and illuminating, it offers new data, technologies, and questions to open new historical terrain.
-Elizabeth Jameson, University of Calgary
Attractively and accurately written, this book demolishes much conventional wisdom about homesteading – that it was a minor factor in settlement, that most claims never proved up, that fraud was “rife.” The book also seriously revises the idea that homesteading dispossessed Indians, expands our understanding of women homesteaders, and explains how homesteading helped build communities. This is the most thoughtful analysis of homesteading to appear in many years.
-Walter Nugent, University of Notre Dame
This careful empirical analysis provides a long overdue corrective to frequently cited but flawed “facts” about homesteading in the nineteenth-century West.
-Brian Cannon, Brigham Young University
Homesteading the Plains is a provocative plea for a new history of the Homestead laws. The authors argue that a yawning gap exists between public perceptions of the free land granting policies as great successes and negative scholarly assessments of those same laws as ineffective and even harmful failures tainted by fraud and corruption. Anyone interested in understanding the place of these almost mythic laws in the American past must read Homesteading the Plains.
-Michael Grossberg, Indiana University