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Abstract This introduction to a special issue offers a broad outline of habeas corpus historiography and explains the historical significance of that legal mechanism for people throughout the American West. It also explains the links between the special issue’s three articles—by Katrina Jagodinsky, Matthew Villeneuve, and Cory James Young—about women’s resistance to gendered violence, Indigenous families challenging federal Indian boarding school confinement, and Black minors’ ongoing vulnerability to coercive labor in the late nineteenth century.
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Late Homesteading: Native Land Dispossession through Strategic Occupation
U.S. homesteading has been linked to establishing federal sovereignty over western lands threatened by the Confederacy, foreign powers, and the Indian Wars in the last half of the nineteenth century. However, the bulk of homesteading actually took place in the early twentieth century, long after these threats to federal ownership ceased. We argue that this “late homesteading” was also an effort to enforce federal rights, but in response to a different threat—a legal one. Questionable federal land policies in the late nineteenth century dispossessed massive amounts of Indigenous lands, and exposed the federal government to legal, rather than violent, conflict. Late homesteading was used to make the dispossession permanent, even in cases where a legal defeat eventually occurred. Examining the qualitative evidence, and using data on the universe of individual homesteads and federal land cessions across the 16 western states, we find evidence consistent with this hypothesis.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2117660
- PAR ID:
- 10539946
- Publisher / Repository:
- Cambridge University Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Political Science Review
- ISSN:
- 0003-0554
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 15
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055423001466
