Friday, June 29, 2007
Acquisition and Development
When I was a kid, my big adventure was riding the Empire Builder, the Great Northern Railway's passenger train that ran from Seattle to Chicago. My paternal grandfather worked on this railroad, and by my reckoning, his grandfather would have witnessed the conquering of the continent for which the route was named.
As empires go, America can hardly rival the vast terrain of Tsarist Russia or the cultural diversity of Imperial Britain, but it is nonetheless a spectacular landscape of cultural and geographic wonder.
A couple of years ago, during the bicentennial of the Voyage of Discovery -- Lewis and Clark's contribution to the building of the American Empire -- a Shawnee professor at Lewis and Clark Law School wrote about the mission of the expedition sent forth by President Jefferson, and helped shed light on the mindset of America at the time, as well as the worldview of our empire that was about to quadruple in size.
In the article Lewis and Clark, "Discovery" and the Indian Nations, Professor Robert J. Miller describes in detail the intriguing process by which the American Empire acquired some of the rights to this vast landscape from the discovered peoples who inhabited it. He also has an article on how the treaties governing these contracts were made and interpreted over time, but we'll save that for another post.
As empires go, America can hardly rival the vast terrain of Tsarist Russia or the cultural diversity of Imperial Britain, but it is nonetheless a spectacular landscape of cultural and geographic wonder.
A couple of years ago, during the bicentennial of the Voyage of Discovery -- Lewis and Clark's contribution to the building of the American Empire -- a Shawnee professor at Lewis and Clark Law School wrote about the mission of the expedition sent forth by President Jefferson, and helped shed light on the mindset of America at the time, as well as the worldview of our empire that was about to quadruple in size.
In the article Lewis and Clark, "Discovery" and the Indian Nations, Professor Robert J. Miller describes in detail the intriguing process by which the American Empire acquired some of the rights to this vast landscape from the discovered peoples who inhabited it. He also has an article on how the treaties governing these contracts were made and interpreted over time, but we'll save that for another post.
