Empty Land

As part of the Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures series, this edition contains exclusive bonus materials! For thousands of years the lonely canyon knew only wind and rain, wild animals, and an occasional native hunter. Then a trapper found a chunk of gold, and everything changed overnight. In six days a town called Confusion appeared . . . and on the seventh it could disappear, consumed by the flames of lawlessness and violence. On one side are those who understand only brute force. On the other are men who want law and order but are ready to use a noose to achieve their ends. Between them stand Matt Coburn and Dick Felton: one a hardened realist, the other an idealist trying to dig a fortune from the muddy hillside. Outnumbered and outgunned, Felton and Coburn can’t afford to be outmaneuvered. For as the two unlikely allies confront corruption, betrayal, and murder in an attempt to tame a town where the discovery of gold can mean either the fortune of a lifetime or a sentence of death, they realize that any move could be their last. Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures is a project created to release some of the author’s more unconventional manuscripts from the family archives. In Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 1 and Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 2, Beau L’Amour takes the reader on a guided tour through many of the finished and unfinished short stories, novels, and treatments that his father was never able to publish during his lifetime. L’Amour’s never-before-seen first novel, No Traveller Returns, faithfully completed for this program, is a voyage into danger and violence on the high seas. Additionally, many beloved classics will be rereleased with an exclusive Lost Treasures postscript featuring previously unpublished material, including outlines, plot notes, and alternate drafts. These postscripts tell the story behind the stories that millions of readers have come to know and cherish.

For thousands of years the lonely canyon knew only wind and rain, wild animals, and an occasional native hunter. Then a trapper found a chunk of gold, and everything changed overnight. In six days a town called Confusion appeared . . . and on the seventh it could disappear, consumed by the flames of lawlessness and violence. On one side are those who understand only brute force. On the other are men who want law and order but are ready to use a noose to achieve their ends. Between them stand Matt Coburn and Dick Felton: one a hardened realist, the other an idealist trying to dig a fortune from the muddy hillside. Outnumbered and outgunned, Felton and Coburn can’t afford to be outmaneuvered. For as the two unlikely allies confront corruption, betrayal, and murder in an attempt to tame a town where the discovery of gold can mean either the fortune of a lifetime or a sentence of death, they realize that any move could be their last.

A young man, left home in Africa with his close friend; for the shores of Western Europe. He was convinced as much as his friend that his country had nothing For him, as far as progress, peace or prosperity is concerned. They traversed through the scorching heat of the arid desert landscape, the wild open ocean and the rugged cold mountain. According to him and other youths of many other countries, they were in search of ‘A life worth living’ However, events and situations, on arrival at the destination of their aspiration led both friends to be reasonable in the management of their expectation. When they were twice refused permission to stay where they had set their heart, both had no option, than to reverse their journey, back to where they did not want to be. As he returned, he concluded that all the lands he crossed, were empty for him. On a reassuring note for the friends, they made a dignified exit from the land they sought the failed asylum. They were pleased that they weren’t detained at the removal center, restrained, and then deported in a humiliating way.

In the days of reconstruction after the Civil War, a wild strip of land in northern Louisiana remained unconquered by troops and untamed by the law. This is the story of the fearless veterans--Union and Confederate--who dared to enter this beautiful but hellish valley. . .and finish what the war started. Lords Of An Empty Land Red River Valley, 1869. Hoardes of ex-Confederate soldiers have emerged from the piney hills and mosquito infested swamps of Lousiana backcountry in a final, bloody show of defiance. After a series of violent raids on carpetbaggers, freed slaves, and northern cargo ships, Captain Douglas Owens of the 4th Calvary is given orders to reclaim this God-forsaken land from its murderous outlaw gangs. By Owens' side is Huff, a former slave, and Basil Dubose, an ex-Rebel gunslinger for hire who answers to no man but his paymaster. With each deadly encounter, it becomes clear to Owens that neither the Army nor the public is willing to spill blood for the sake of freed slaves. With his options dwindling, the Captain takes a squad of soldiers under his command--in a last desperate bid for freedom and justice that would change the course of history. . .

This important book on Land Education offers critical analysis of the paths forward for education on Indigenous land. This analysis discusses the necessity of centring historical and current contexts of colonization in education on and in relation to land. In addition, contributors explore the intersections of environmentalism and Indigenous rights, in part inspired by the realisation that the specifics of geography and community matter for how environmental education can be engaged. This edited volume suggests how place-based pedagogies can respond to issues of colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty. Through dynamic new empirical and conceptual studies, international contributors examine settler colonialism, Indigenous cosmologies, Indigenous land rights, and language as key aspects of Land Education. The book invites readers to rethink 'pedagogies of place' from various Indigenous, postcolonial, and decolonizing perspectives. This book was originally published as a special issue of Environmental Education Research.

This book presents a new approach to recurrent property taxation based on occupancy, size, and location, that will strengthen local governments. Reflecting on the concept of “beneficial property taxation” first proposed by Alfred Marshall, the political economy constraints faced by traditional property taxation are examined and compared with evidence for beneficial property tax seen in China, Mexico, and sub-Saharan Africa. The benefits of this form of taxation are highlighted in relation to the financing of local public services and infrastructure that are required for sustainable development. This book provides a policy-oriented look at property taxation that engages with the sustainable development goals and lay the foundations for a post-pandemic recovery. It will be relevant to researchers and policymakers interested in development economics and the governance of taxation.

Exploring the multifaceted history of dispossession, consumption, and inequality in West Central Africa, Mariana P. Candido presents a bold revisionist history of Angola from the sixteenth century until the Berlin Conference of 1884–5. Synthesising disparate strands of scholarship, including the histories of slavery, land tenure, and gender in West Central Africa, Candido makes a significant contribution to ongoing historical debates. She demonstrates how ideas about dominion and land rights eventually came to inform the appropriation and enslavement of free people and their labour. By centring the experiences of West Central Africans, and especially African women, this book challenges dominant historical narratives, and shows that securing property was a gendered process. Drawing attention to how archives obscure African forms of knowledge and normalize conquest, Candido interrogates simplistic interpretations of ownership and pushes for the decolonization of African history.

In the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman government sought to fill landscapes they legally defined as "empty." Both land and people were incorporated into territorially bounded grids of administrative law. Bedouin Bureaucrats examines how tent-dwelling, seasonally migrating Bedouin engaged in these processes of Ottoman state transformation on local, imperial, and global scales. As the "tribe" became a category of Ottoman administration, Bedouin in the Syrian interior used this category both to gain political influence and to organize community resistance to maintain control over land. Narrating the lives of Bedouin individuals involved in Ottoman administration, Nora Elizabeth Barakat brings this population to the center of modern state-making, from their involvement in the pilgrimage administration in the eighteenth century and their performance of land registration and taxation as the Ottoman bureaucracy expanded in the nineteenth, to their eventual rejection of Ottoman attempts to reallocate the "empty land" they inhabited in the twentieth. She places the Syrian interior in a global context of imperial expansion into regions formerly deemed marginal, especially in relation to American and Russian empires. Ultimately, the book illuminates Ottoman state formation attempts within Bedouin communities and the unique trajectory of Bedouin in Syria, who maintained their control over land.