Manifest Destiny wasn’t just a theme or a movement sweeping the country. It wasn't the Hot New Thing of the 1860s, like extra-wide hoop skirts, waltzing, or bloody civil war.It was why the dang H...

Narrative flourish #1 in the Homestead Act is most definitely repetition. And narrative flourish #2 is…um…Actually, repetition pretty much the only one. We're talking about a legal document her...

The Homestead Act, like any good governmental decree, covered its bases. Nothing was set in stone, so the whole document is a series of if-then statements. (If we were writing the Homestead Act, we...