Montana

Latitude: 
47.00
Longitude: 
-109.75
GeoNames ID: 
5 667 009

Introduction: The Promise of Free Land

Introduction: The Promise of Free Land

Introduction to American Land Rush, a virtual exhibition by Sara Gregg.

American Land Rush:
“A Lonely Homesteader” Searches for Security in the Montana Homestead Boom

Swept up in the optimism of the 1910s, Lily Stearns settled with her four children on a promising homestead in northeastern Montana, where she found her fate conscribed by extreme weather and the limits of her endurance. This richly illustrated virtual exhibition tells the story of one participant in the largest homestead boom in US history, revealing the erratic fortunes of farm life reflected in the abundant economic, political, and personal uncertainties of the era.

Sara M. Gregg

About the author

Gregg, Sara M.
Gregg, Sara M.

University of Kansas, USA

Show more
Sara M. Gregg (PhD, Columbia University) is an associate professor of history and environmental studies at the University of Kansas. Her current project, Little Piece of Earth: The Hidden History of the Homestead Era, examines the process of state formation from Native dispossession through the several U.S. Homestead Acts using historical GIS and grassland microhistories of the homestead booms in Kansas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, and Montana. She is the author of Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, the New Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia (Yale, 2010) and co-editor of the anthology American Georgics: Writings on Farming, Culture, and the Land (Yale, 2011).

orcid.org/0000-0001-9680-9856

Browse the exhibition

Exhibition Overview
Introduction
Locating
Building
Fighting
Moving On
Lily’s Letters
Further Reading

Locating

Locating

Chapter 1 of American Land Rush, a virtual exhibition by Sara Gregg.

American Land Rush:
“A Lonely Homesteader” Searches for Security in the Montana Homestead Boom

Swept up in the optimism of the 1910s, Lily Stearns settled with her four children on a promising homestead in northeastern Montana, where she found her fate conscribed by extreme weather and the limits of her endurance. This richly illustrated virtual exhibition tells the story of one participant in the largest homestead boom in US history, revealing the erratic fortunes of farm life reflected in the abundant economic, political, and personal uncertainties of the era.

Sara M. Gregg

About the author

Gregg, Sara M.
Gregg, Sara M.

University of Kansas, USA

Show more
Sara M. Gregg (PhD, Columbia University) is an associate professor of history and environmental studies at the University of Kansas. Her current project, Little Piece of Earth: The Hidden History of the Homestead Era, examines the process of state formation from Native dispossession through the several U.S. Homestead Acts using historical GIS and grassland microhistories of the homestead booms in Kansas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, and Montana. She is the author of Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, the New Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia (Yale, 2010) and co-editor of the anthology American Georgics: Writings on Farming, Culture, and the Land (Yale, 2011).

orcid.org/0000-0001-9680-9856

Browse the exhibition

Exhibition Overview
Introduction
Locating
Building
Fighting
Moving On
Lily’s Letters
Further Reading

Building

Building

Chapter 2 of American Land Rush, a virtual exhibition by Sara Gregg.

American Land Rush:
“A Lonely Homesteader” Searches for Security in the Montana Homestead Boom

Swept up in the optimism of the 1910s, Lily Stearns settled with her four children on a promising homestead in northeastern Montana, where she found her fate conscribed by extreme weather and the limits of her endurance. This richly illustrated virtual exhibition tells the story of one participant in the largest homestead boom in US history, revealing the erratic fortunes of farm life reflected in the abundant economic, political, and personal uncertainties of the era.

Sara M. Gregg

About the author

Gregg, Sara M.
Gregg, Sara M.

University of Kansas, USA

Show more
Sara M. Gregg (PhD, Columbia University) is an associate professor of history and environmental studies at the University of Kansas. Her current project, Little Piece of Earth: The Hidden History of the Homestead Era, examines the process of state formation from Native dispossession through the several U.S. Homestead Acts using historical GIS and grassland microhistories of the homestead booms in Kansas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, and Montana. She is the author of Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, the New Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia (Yale, 2010) and co-editor of the anthology American Georgics: Writings on Farming, Culture, and the Land (Yale, 2011).

orcid.org/0000-0001-9680-9856

Browse the exhibition

Exhibition Overview
Introduction
Locating
Building
Fighting
Moving On
Lily’s Letters
Further Reading

Fighting for the Farm

Fighting for the Farm

Chapter 3 of American Land Rush, a virtual exhibition by Sara Gregg.

American Land Rush:
“A Lonely Homesteader” Searches for Security in the Montana Homestead Boom

Swept up in the optimism of the 1910s, Lily Stearns settled with her four children on a promising homestead in northeastern Montana, where she found her fate conscribed by extreme weather and the limits of her endurance. This richly illustrated virtual exhibition tells the story of one participant in the largest homestead boom in US history, revealing the erratic fortunes of farm life reflected in the abundant economic, political, and personal uncertainties of the era.

Sara M. Gregg

About the author

Gregg, Sara M.
Gregg, Sara M.

University of Kansas, USA

Show more
Sara M. Gregg (PhD, Columbia University) is an associate professor of history and environmental studies at the University of Kansas. Her current project, Little Piece of Earth: The Hidden History of the Homestead Era, examines the process of state formation from Native dispossession through the several U.S. Homestead Acts using historical GIS and grassland microhistories of the homestead booms in Kansas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, and Montana. She is the author of Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, the New Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia (Yale, 2010) and co-editor of the anthology American Georgics: Writings on Farming, Culture, and the Land (Yale, 2011).

orcid.org/0000-0001-9680-9856

Browse the exhibition

Exhibition Overview
Introduction
Locating
Building
Fighting
Moving On
Lily’s Letters
Further Reading

Moving On

Moving On

Chapter 4 of American Land Rush, a virtual exhibition by Sara Gregg.

American Land Rush:
“A Lonely Homesteader” Searches for Security in the Montana Homestead Boom

Swept up in the optimism of the 1910s, Lily Stearns settled with her four children on a promising homestead in northeastern Montana, where she found her fate conscribed by extreme weather and the limits of her endurance. This richly illustrated virtual exhibition tells the story of one participant in the largest homestead boom in US history, revealing the erratic fortunes of farm life reflected in the abundant economic, political, and personal uncertainties of the era.

Sara M. Gregg

About the author

Gregg, Sara M.
Gregg, Sara M.

University of Kansas, USA

Show more
Sara M. Gregg (PhD, Columbia University) is an associate professor of history and environmental studies at the University of Kansas. Her current project, Little Piece of Earth: The Hidden History of the Homestead Era, examines the process of state formation from Native dispossession through the several U.S. Homestead Acts using historical GIS and grassland microhistories of the homestead booms in Kansas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, and Montana. She is the author of Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, the New Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia (Yale, 2010) and co-editor of the anthology American Georgics: Writings on Farming, Culture, and the Land (Yale, 2011).

orcid.org/0000-0001-9680-9856

Browse the exhibition

Exhibition Overview
Introduction
Locating
Building
Fighting
Moving On
Lily’s Letters
Further Reading

Lily’s Letters

Lily’s Letters

A selection of letters by Lily B. Stearns. This is a chapter of the virtual exhibition American Land Rush by Sara Gregg.

American Land Rush:
“A Lonely Homesteader” Searches for Security in the Montana Homestead Boom

Swept up in the optimism of the 1910s, Lily Stearns settled with her four children on a promising homestead in northeastern Montana, where she found her fate conscribed by extreme weather and the limits of her endurance. This richly illustrated virtual exhibition tells the story of one participant in the largest homestead boom in US history, revealing the erratic fortunes of farm life reflected in the abundant economic, political, and personal uncertainties of the era.

Sara M. Gregg

About the author

Gregg, Sara M.
Gregg, Sara M.

University of Kansas, USA

Show more
Sara M. Gregg (PhD, Columbia University) is an associate professor of history and environmental studies at the University of Kansas. Her current project, Little Piece of Earth: The Hidden History of the Homestead Era, examines the process of state formation from Native dispossession through the several U.S. Homestead Acts using historical GIS and grassland microhistories of the homestead booms in Kansas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, and Montana. She is the author of Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, the New Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia (Yale, 2010) and co-editor of the anthology American Georgics: Writings on Farming, Culture, and the Land (Yale, 2011).

orcid.org/0000-0001-9680-9856

Browse the exhibition

Exhibition Overview
Introduction
Locating
Building
Fighting
Moving On
Lily’s Letters
Further Reading

"Restoration and the Affective Ecologies of Healing: Buffalo and the Fort Peck Tribes"

In this special section on affective ecologies, Julia Hobson Haggerty, Elizabeth Lynne Rink, Robert McAnally, and Elizabeth Bird study the restoration of bison/buffalo by the Sioux and Assiniboine tribes to their reservation in Montana in the United States. They argue that ecological restoration can promote and facilitate emergent and dynamic processes of reconnection at the scale of individuals, across species and within communities.

Molding the Planet: Human Niche Construction at Work

About this issue

This volume explores some of the diverse niches created by humans in different times and places. The essays span the globe, from Texas to China, from Scandinavia to Papua New Guinea, exploring agricultural spaces and indoor biomes, human aesthetics, and Anthropocentric perspectives.

Content

"An Impure Nature: Memory and the Neo-Materialist Flip at America’s Biggest Toxic Superfund Site"

This essay reflects on an incident in 1995, when 300 snow geese died in the flooded Berkeley Pit, a toxic open pit copper mine in the northwestern United States. In his analysis the author draws on new materialist theoretical approaches that reject anthropocentric thinking and instead emphasize the powerful materiality of cultural phenomena.

The Environment & Society Portal is a project of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, a joint initiative of LMU Munich and the Deutsches Museum. The center is supported by a grant from the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research. Read more about the Portal in English and in German.