When
Come join us on various Wednesdays this Spring semester for the History Lunch Lecture Symposium. We will gather in Chávez 406a to learn more about our colleagues' scholarship. Additional details will be posted here a week before the event.
Open to the University community!
For those of you who are unable to attend in person, please use the following Zoom link: https://arizona.zoom.us/j/82733203379
James Paules, PhD. Candidate
Troubling Topographies: Transportation, Land Law, and Montane Industry in the Southwest, 1878-189
Abstract
In the decades following the Civil War, the transcontinental railroad system served as the major vector of westward expansion and settlement as thousands rushed towards imagined opportunities west of the hundredth meridian. At the same time, the railroads acted as galvanizers of extractive industry in the regions they penetrated. In the Southwest, grazing, mining, and lumbering all experienced rapid expansion and intensification. This growth precipitated sweeping changes in the forested uplands, but was itself shaped and limited by a variety of forces. Throughout the 1880s, interconnected physiographical, legislative, and economic topographies combined to generate complex patterns of exploitation and a heterogeneous transformation of the upland environment.