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Bad Land: An American Romance
Paperback
Series: Vintage Departures
19th Century United States HistoryRegional: MidwestUnited States Politics
Publisher Price: $18.00
ISBN13: 9780679759065
Publisher: Vintage
Published: Oct 7 1997
Pages: 364
Weight: 0.69
Height: 0.98 Width: 5.26 Depth: 7.94
Language: English
Awards: National Book Critics Circle Award, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award
In 1909 maps still identified eastern Montana as the Great American Desert. But in that year Congress, lobbied heavily by railroad companies, offered 320-acre tracts of land to anyone bold or foolish enough to stake a claim to them. Drawn by shamelessly inventive brochures, countless homesteaders--many of them immigrants--went west to make their fortunes. Most failed. In Bad Land, Jonathan Raban travels through the unforgiving country that was the scene of their dreams and undoing, and makes their story come miraculously alive. In towns named Terry, Calypso, and Ismay (which changed its name to Joe, Montana, in an effort to attract football fans), and in the landscape in between, Raban unearths a vanished episode of American history, with its own ruins, its own heroes and heroines, its own hopeful myths and bitter memories.
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