During the first quarter-century after its founding, the United States was swept by a wave of land speculation so unprecedented in intensity and scale that contemporaries and historians alike have dubbed it a “mania.”
In Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) Michael A. Blaakman uncovers the revolutionary origins of this real-estate bonanza ― a story of ambition, corruption, capitalism, and statecraft that stretched across millions of acres from Maine to the Mississippi and Georgia to the Great Lakes. [Read more…] about Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic