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  • Federal Ground: Governing Property and Violence in the First U.S. Territories

    Federal Ground by Ablavsky, Gregory;

    Governing Property and Violence in the First U.S. Territories

    Series: Oxford Legal History;

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      • Publisher's listprice GBP 37.99
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        18 149 Ft (17 285 Ft + 5% VAT)
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    18 149 Ft

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    Estimated delivery time: Expected time of arrival: end of January 2026.
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    Product details:

    • Publisher OUP USA
    • Date of Publication 30 July 2021

    • ISBN 9780190905699
    • Binding Hardback
    • No. of pages362 pages
    • Size 165x236x33 mm
    • Weight 612 g
    • Language English
    • 183

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    Short description:

    Federal Ground shows how the federal government gained authority in a borderland that many groups made their own claims to control. Although on paper the federal government enjoyed almost exclusive control over the territories, it actually gained authority because territorial residents wanted things from this new federal government - confirmation of rights to land, to jurisdiction, to money. Often, those residents - Native peoples, Anglo-American settlers, French villagers - were able to successfully exploit the federal government. But they became increasingly reliant on that government in the process, couching their claims in the language of federal law and turning to federal officials to claim rights.

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    Long description:

    Federal Ground depicts the haphazard and unplanned growth of federal authority in the Northwest and Southwest Territories, the first U.S. territories established under the new territorial system. The nation's foundational documents, particularly the Constitution and the Northwest Ordinance, placed these territories under sole federal jurisdiction and established federal officials to govern them. But, for all their paper authority, these officials rarely controlled events or dictated outcomes. In practice, power in these contested borderlands rested with the regions' pre-existing inhabitants-diverse Native peoples, French villagers, and Anglo-American settlers. These residents nonetheless turned to the new federal government to claim ownership, jurisdiction, protection, and federal money, seeking to obtain rights under federal law.

    Two areas of governance proved particularly central: contests over property, where plural sources of title created conflicting land claims, and struggles over the right to use violence, in which customary borderlands practice intersected with the federal government's effort to establish a monopoly on force. Over time, as federal officials improvised ad hoc, largely extrajudicial methods to arbitrate residents' claims, they slowly insinuated federal authority deeper into territorial life. This authority survived even after the former territories became Tennessee and Ohio: although these new states spoke a language of equal footing and autonomy, statehood actually offered former territorial citizens the most effective way yet to make claims on the federal government. The federal government, in short, still could not always prescribe the result in the territories, but it set the terms and language of debate-authority that became the foundation for later, more familiar and bureaucratic incarnations of federal power.

    ...there is no denying this is a major contribution deserving a wide academic readership.

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    Table of Contents:

    Introduction
    Part I: Property
    Chapter 1: Sources of Title in the Territories
    Chapter 2: The Land Company Experiment
    Chapter 3: The Rise of Federal Title
    Part II: Violence
    Chapter 4: Federal Sovereignty
    Chapter 5: Laws of War and Peace
    Chapter 6: Expenses of Sovereignty
    Part III: Statehood
    Chapter 7: Equal Footing
    Epilogue: Three Systems
    Acknowledgments
    Abbreviations

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