A surprising, and as yet not fully explained, phenomenon took place about 1840, just as the era of the Mountain Men was coming to an end. Even though there was abundant cheap land available throughout the prairies and plains of latter-day Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and more, thousands of Easterners took a sudden passion to carve [...]
The Day of the Cattleman
by Ernest Staples Osgood,
University of Chicago Press, 1957
In the year 1874, patents for barbed wire and for a machine for making it were taken out by J.F. Glidden of De Kalb, Illinois. By 1880 barbed-wire factories in the United States were turning out forty thousand tons of the cheap fencing; by [...]
The Southwest in American Literature and Art: The Rise of a Desert Aesthetic by David W Teague
John C. Fremont, exploring the region in 1843-44, found the Great Basin Desert to be of “dreary and savage character” and, in reporting its inward-draining rivers, expressed doubt about its future productivity. The idea of the desert as irrigated [...]
Today’s financial crisis echoes a similar scandal in the 1980s - the Savings and Loan Crisis — which resulted in the failure of 747 savings and loan associations in the U.S. and ultimately cost taxpayers some $160 billion in taxes or charges on their accounts. The crisis contributed to substantial budget deficits in the early [...]
