Anne Mackin

Books

Anne Mackin

Americans and Their
Land: The House Built
on Abundance

"Malthus knew. Lord
MacCaulay knew. Albert
Gallatin knew. America
and its people would
change as a growing
population whittled
away the supply of
land.

Nothing has shaped
the American character
like the abundance of
land that met the
colonist, the pioneer,
and the early
suburbanite. With
today’s political and
economic institutions
shaped by the largesse
of yesteryear, how will
Americans fare in the
new landscape of water
wars, expensive
housing, rising fuel
prices, environmental
and property rights
battles, and powerful
industrial lobbies?

Why is land the key to
American democracy?
How can we protect our
democracy as more
people and industries
compete more
intensively for our
remaining resources?
Americans and Their
Land begins an
important, overdue
discussion of these
questions. Anne
Mackin takes the
reader story by story
from frontier history to
the present and shows
how land shaped the
American political
landscape. She shows
how our evolving
traditions of
apportioning resources
have allowed
diminished supplies to
create our present,
increasingly unequal
society, and she asks
how 300 million
Americans living in the
new American
landscape of growing
competition can better
share those resources.