(v) Land, property and power in America, c. 1500-2000

From the Doctrine of Discovery to the Dakota Access Pipeline, contests over the control of land have been a persistent feature of North American history for the past 500 years. Given this time span and the variety of land-related issues, studies of conflicts over land have focused historians’ attention from a range of subfields, from legal and labor history to cultural and environmental history. This offering will expose students to the best of these works, help them to disentangle historiographical trends intersecting in this field, and prepare them for striking out in a variety of directions in source analysis for their own research. In the process, the offering will introduce students to major transformations that turned American spaces into imperial domains, private real estate, natural resources, tourist destinations, and hallowed grounds.

The course will touch down at key topics as it moves forward, roughly, from the sixteenth century to the present. In brief, we will consider the legal origins of imperial dominions, the grasping attempts at geographic description produced through exploration, the violent restructuring of land use patterns that came with colonial occupation, the distributive mechanisms that recast the continent as alienable real estate, the sublimation of nature that underpins much modern American tourism, the changes wrought by extractive industries and industrialized agriculture, and the rise of movements for conservation and preservation that animate contemporary protest movements.  

There is a rich variety of available primary sources that will furnish the course readings. These include, political treatises, maps, paintings, travel narratives, laws, congressional debates, government reports, private correspondence, newspaper articles, pamphlets, and websites. Our meetings will revolve around discussions of these materials and analysis of how historians have deployed primary sources to ground claims and build arguments.