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It is the largest landholder in America, overseeing nearly an eighth of the country: 258 million acres located almost exclusively west of the Mississippi River, with even twice as much below the surface. Its domain embraces wildlife and wilderness, timber, range, and minerals, and for over 60 years, the Bureau of Land Management has been an agency in search of a mission. This is the first comprehensive, analytical history of the BLM and its struggle to find direction. James Skillen traces the bureau's course over three periods—its formation in 1946 and early focus on livestock and mines, its 1970s role as mediator between commerce and conservation, and its experience of political gridlock ...
American Scientist Recommended Read Historical narratives often concentrate on wars and politics while omitting the central role and influence of the physical stage on which history is carried out. In Losing Eden award-winning historian Sara Dant debunks the myth of the American West as "Eden" and instead embraces a more realistic and complex understanding of a region that has been inhabited and altered by people for tens of thousands of years. In this lively narrative Dant discusses the key events and topics in the environmental history of the American West, from the Beringia migration, Columbian Exchange, and federal territorial acquisition to post-World War II expansion, resource exploita...
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Profiles in the History of the U.S. Soil Survey offers a broad-ranging collection of essays chronicling the development of the U.S. Soil Survey and its influence on the history of soil survey as a scientific discipline that focuses on mapping, analysis, and description of soils. Appraises the influences of key individuals and institutions on the establishment of federal support for and coordination of U.S. soil surveys. Provides an account of life in the field, detailing experience shared by many soil scientists and survey processionals. Reviews the opening of careers in soil survey to women and African-Americans. Relates aspects of the utility of the soil survey to other federal services, t...
The little-known story of how the U.S. government came to hold nearly one-third of the nation’s land and manage it primarily for recreation, education and conservation. “A much-needed chronicle of how the American people decided––wisely and democratically––that nearly a third of the nation’s land surface should remain in our collective ownership and be managed for our common good.”—Dayton Duncan, author of The National Parks: America’s Best Idea America’s public lands include more than 600 million acres of forests, plains, mountains, wetlands, deserts, and shorelines. In this book, John Leshy, a leading expert in public lands policy, discusses the key political decision...
ÒAre you an American, or are you not?Ó This was the question Harry Wheeler, sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona, used to choose his targets in one of the most remarkable vigilante actions ever carried out on U.S. soil. And this is the question at the heart of Katherine Benton-CohenÕs provocative history, which ties that seemingly remote corner of the country to one of AmericaÕs central concerns: the historical creation of racial boundaries. It was in Cochise County that the Earps and Clantons fought, Geronimo surrendered, and Wheeler led the infamous Bisbee Deportation, and it is where private militias patrol for undocumented migrants today. These dramatic events animate the rich story of...
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By shedding light on Montana's first women homesteaders--determined 19th- and early 20th-century pioneers--Carter reveals inspiring stories filled with joy, tragedy, and redemption.
Stunning photographic testimony to the hard realities of western farming In words that are as clean and precise as his haunting, starkly beautiful photographs, John Martin Campbell vividly recreates the life and times of the western homestead era, the period from about 1885 when the prairie lands lying west of the longitude of the western Dakotas became available to pioneering farmers. More than 70 black-and-white duotone photographs, with detailed captions, record bleak landscapes and abandoned farms, outbuildings, farm implements, and hand tools—mute testimonies to the failed hopes of several million families who settled on these arid and semi-arid lands. Campbell explains how their fail...