In 1862, Congress passed four landmark pieces of legislation: the Homestead Act, the Morrill Act, the Pacific Railroad Act, and the act to establish the U.S. Department of Agriculture; it was also the year of the fateful Dakota Conflict. These acts and events funda-mentally shaped the Great Plains as well as the nation.
Videos of our featured speaker's presentations are below.
An Unquenchable Thirst:
How the Great Plains Created a Water Abundance and then Lost It
Donald Worster
University of Kansas
Co-sponsored by the E.N. Thompson Forum on World Issues
The Morrill Land Grant Act:
Investing in America's Future
Martin Jischke
Purdue University
Too Early? Too Many? Too Bad?: Railroads and American Settlement on the Great Plains
Richard White
Stanford University
So Many Important Questions: The 37th Congress and the New America
David Von Drehle
Time Magazine
Railroads, Art, and the Making of Modern America
William Thomas, III
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Do People Matter? Population, Farming, and Environmental Change in the Settlement of the Plains
Myron Gutmann
University of Michigan
Erasing and Replacing: Prairie First Nations and the Homestead Order
Sarah Carter
University of Alberta
The Coming Tribal Reclamation of the Great Plains
Daniel Wildcat
Haskell Indian Nations University
The Dispossession of the Eastern Nebraska Indians, Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Cultural Genocide
David Wishart
University of Nebraska-Lincoln