Land Hunger

Mansel G. Blackford is a professor emeritus of history at the Ohio State University, where he worked in the fields of business history and frontier history for forty years. He is the author or coauthor of a dozen books, several of which deal specifically with Ohio and midwestern history—most recently Columbus, Ohio: Two Centuries of Business and Environmental Change.

Land Hunger provides a sweeping overview of settlement in Ohio, Oregon, and the Great Plains. It is an incisive study of the interactions between White settlers, Native Americans, and African Americans and the environment. Blackford tells an important story of adaptation, failure, and success in the westward movement.(R. Douglas Hurt, author of Agriculture in the Midwest, 1815–1900) A seasoned and talented historian tells here the story of how a “lust for land” shaped white settlement in both Ohio in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and in the Far West and the Great Plains later in the twentieth century. Mansel Blackford blends together intimate details from diaries and rich historical resources to help us better understand the clash between Indigenous traditions of communal land management and the visions of white settlers who saw the natural environmental as a commodity to be transformed into material wealth. This is a wonderful book that connects histories of the Pacific Northwest and the Great Plains to stories of land conquest and commodification further east. It’s also a story that helps those of us who live in these places better understand how we got here.(Bart Elmore, author of Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Remade Our Economy and the Planet) Mansel G. Blackford is among the nation’s leading business, environmental, and political historians. In this beautifully written book, Blackford explains the ways in which nineteenth century Euro Americans, persuaded of their inherent rights, took Native American lands starting in Ohio, across the plains, and then all the way to Oregon and Washington. Real estate speculation, Blackford determines, was baked into that westward movement. . . . Blackford’s books, moreover, are always readable, powerful, deeply researched, and assignable. (Mark H. Rose, author of Market Rules: Bankers, Presidents, and the Origins of the Great Recession)