Public Domain Private Dominion

Definitive history of the laws and policies that govern the mineral resources of America's public lands.

In this historical and comparative study, Christopher McGrory Klyza explores why land-management policies in mining, forestry, and grazing have followed different paths and explains why public-lands policy in general has remained virtually static over time. According to Klyza, understanding the different philosophies that gave rise to each policy regime is crucial to reforming public-lands policy in the future. Klyza begins by delineating how prevailing policy philosophies over the course of the last century have shaped each of the three land-use patterns he discusses. In mining, the model was economic liberalism, which mandated privatization of public lands; in forestry, it was technocratic utilitarianism, which called for government ownership and management of land; and in grazing, it was interest-group liberalism, in which private interests determined government policy. Each of these philosophies held sway in the years during which policy for that particular resource was formed, says Klyza, and continues to animate it even today.

Traditional interpretations of the American West have concentrated on the importance of its aridity to the region's cultural evolution and development. But the West is marked by a second fact of physical geography that distinguished it (from the experiences of settlers) from the east. As pioneers struggled with the climate west of the hundredth meridian, they were also confronted by mountains strewn across the region and offering their own set of limitations and opportunities. This volume focuses on these green islands of the Mountainous West that have witnessed patterns of settlement and development distinct from their lowland neighbors. In thirteen essays, the contributors address the mountains by means of five themes: the mountains as barriers to movement, islands of moisture, a zone of concentrated resources, an area of government control, and a restorative sanctuary. The focus ranges from California's Sierra Nevada to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, Utah, and Montana. William K. Wyckoff is an associate professor, Department of Earth Sciences, Montana State University. He is the author of The Developer's Frontier: The Making of the Western New York Landscape and of articles in many journals, including The California Geographer, Social Science Journal, Geographical Review, and Journal of Historical Geography. Lary M. Dilsaver is a professor in the Department of Geology and Geography, University of South Alabama. The author, with William Tweed, of Challenge of the Big Trees: A Resource History of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, he has also written articles in journals such as Geographical Review, Annals of Tourism Research, and Yearbook of the Association of Pacific CoastGeographers.

First published in 2000. More than any other occupation, the long history of mining raises issues of class and dependency, of men, women, and children bound to permanent wage work or forced labor underground with small hope of securing an independent living. Like all popular images, perceptions of workers reveal as much about the nature of the dominant culture as about the complex experiences of workers themselves. The main purpose of this study is to document and analyze the development of working-class culture in the mining camps of the American West.

Excerpt from The Public Lands: Studies in the History of the Public Domain The vast and intricate story of the creation and expansion of the public domain, the administration, distribution, and management of federal lands, runs from 1776 to the present. But the ideas and values that controlled these matters lay partly in the American colonial past, partly in legal and other institutions imported from England and the Continent. Colonial experience and needs had by the time of the Revolution created different systems for obtaining legal posses sion of land, and for describing and recording titles in the separate colonies, but in one important respect the differences between the Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts systems, for example, were superficial. Men wanted and Obtained individual ownership of land, and although they may never have heard of Blackstone, what they did illustrates his declaration that There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, to the total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe. It was understood and accepted that a set of words upon parchment served to convey dominion on land, or at least that it should. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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