$69.49
Author: Ablavsky Gregory
Brand: Oxford University Press
Edition: 1
Number Of Pages: 362
Details: Product Description
Federal Ground depicts the haphazard and unplanned growth of federal authority in the Northwest and Southwest Territories, the first U.S. territories established under the new territorial system. The nation’s foundational documents, particularly the Constitution and the Northwest Ordinance, placed these territories under sole federal jurisdiction and established federal officials to govern them. But, for all their paper authority, these officials rarely controlled events or dictated outcomes. In practice, power in these contested borderlands rested with the regions’ pre-existing inhabitants-diverse Native peoples, French villagers, and Anglo-American settlers. These residents nonetheless turned to the new federal government to claim ownership, jurisdiction, protection, and federal money, seeking to obtain rights under federal law.
Two areas of governance proved particularly central: contests over property, where plural sources of title created conflicting land claims, and struggles over the right to use violence, in which customary borderlands practice intersected with the federal government’s effort to establish a monopoly on force. Over time, as federal officials improvised ad hoc, largely extrajudicial methods to arbitrate residents’ claims, they slowly insinuated federal authority deeper into territorial life. This authority survived even after the former territories became Tennessee and Ohio: although these new states spoke a language of equal footing and autonomy, statehood actually offered former territorial citizens the most effective way yet to make claims on the federal government. The federal government, in short, still could not always prescribe the result in the territories, but it set the terms and language of debate-authority that became the foundation for later, more familiar and bureaucratic
incarnations of federal power.
Review
“…there is no denying this is a major contribution deserving a wide academic readership.” — Nicolas R Parrillo, Yale Law School, American Journal of Legal History
“With uncommon clarity and breadth, Federal Ground reconsiders essential questions of American statehood, federalism, and politics. Revisiting the origins of U.S. territorial practices of property, Native American policies, and ‘conditional admissions’ for statehood, Greg Ablavsky exposes the centrality of interior lands to the U.S. constitution’s implementation. The results are a major addition to the growing historiography on the Northwest Ordinance and a new, revelatory analysis of the Southwest Territory’s equally important place in U.S. history.” — Ned Blackhawk , (Western Shoshone), Professor of History and American Studies, Yale University
“No trifling sideshow in American political development, the federal government’s shaping of the Northwest and Southwest Territories fashioned the template of America and its state for a century to come. In a masterwork of political and legal history, Greg Ablavsky forces us to rethink the meaning of space, empire, Native dispossession and the very nature of American government.” — Daniel Carpenter, Allie S. Freed Professor of Government, Harvard University
“Federal Ground is a stunning debut by a gifted historian. Greg Ablavsky’s path-breaking study will transform the way we understand the emergence of an expansive American empire in the new nation’s western borderlands. Lavishing its largesse on the perpetrators as well as the victims of frontier violence, this new American empire and its adjudicatory regime unleashed the creative and destructive energy of market society on a continental scale.” — Peter Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia
“With meticulous research, Greg Ablavsky shows how a complex tapestry of competing land claims led to both nation-building and violence on the frontiers of the American early republic. Written by one of the nation’s leading legal historians of property and Native
Release Date: 08-01-2021
Package Dimensions: 28x241x640
