Unsettled Land Research Articles

LEGAL RECORDS OF REAL ESTATE IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA - PERSPECTIVES AND NEW TENDENCIES

The problem of the unsettled land registry state of real estate generated the appearance of new problems, as such but also of some other nature, whereby some of them, and due to the sensitivity of the question, covered by their reach, at the level of the most complex issues in the legal system of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Under the spotlight of such problems, the paper points to possible directions reforms in the field of public real estate records and real estate rights. In order to choose the appropriate recording model, the most significant reform solutions are also presented in the paper, contained in the provisions of the new entity laws on land registers, i.e. of the law on real rights. With the same goal, the paper points out the importance of following rich legal traditions in the matter of establishing rights to real estate. In this respect, special attention is dedicated to the re-updated system of unique real estate records, as a kind of expression of completely different aspirations in this area.

Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, The Struggle for Texas. By Sam W. Haynes

Journal Article Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, The Struggle for Texas. By Sam W. Haynes Get access Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, The Struggle for Texas By Sam W. Haynes(New York: Basic Books, 2022. ix + 446 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $19.99.) Kyle B Carpenter Kyle B Carpenter University of Arkansas Rich Mountain Mena, Arkansas, USA kcarpenter@uarichmountain.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, whad045, https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/whad045 Published: 03 May 2023

Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas by Sam W. Haynes

Reviewed by: Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas by Sam W. Haynes Andrew F. Lang Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas. By Sam W. Haynes. (New York: Basic Books, 2022. Pp. xii, 446. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-5416-4541-7.) Our current cultural moment features a critical reckoning with racial conflict in American history. Intellectuals and pundits alike have challenged triumphalist narratives of national progress with narratives of inexorable, structural oppression. Into this conversation enters Sam W. Haynes’s striking reappraisal of the Texas Revolution. Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas does not recite the tired myths of the Alamo or rehearse a romantic struggle for Anglo freedom against Mexican oppression. Instead, Haynes exposes a vicious, racialized past long obscured by white, chauvinistic fantasy. His valuable contribution reminds us that history cannot be ceded to propagandists who, in the vein of the Confederate Lost Cause, spin fables for impressionable minds. Haynes guides us on a compelling tour of northern Mexico, a dynamic region in which Native peoples, Mexicans, creoles, Anglos, and both enslaved and free people of color all competed for political authority, economic power, and individual autonomy. Non-Anglo actors did not perform on the margins of an otherwise white liberationist drama. Any group at any moment could have emerged as the dominant faction. Haynes resists the temptation, so endemic in some histories, to narrate a tale of preordained Anglo dominance. We instead witness the contingent ways in which some groups forfeited their freedom during an era when events might well have turned out differently. When Texas severed itself from Mexico in 1836, “A multiracial nation had lost control of a vast swath of its territory to a people with a very narrow definition of citizenship and liberty” (p. 211). While Haynes largely evades the siren call of inevitability, a subtle degree of teleology creeps into his account. From the moment that Anglos settled Stephen F. Austin’s colony in 1821 and disrupted Native life, to the viral spread of plantation slavery in defiance of a Mexican decree, to the establishment of a white-dominated Texas Republic in 1836, the story follows a straight-line path with the ending we know top of mind. Readers are left pondering a perhaps unanswerable question: how are outmoded narratives of superficial triumph any different from narratives of blunt tragedy, especially if both approaches fuel the desires of respective presents? Haynes nevertheless paints a vivid portrait of the “Americanization of Texas” (p. 107). He chronicles the gripping story of Mexico’s crisis of sovereignty, an affliction sustained by myriad nineteenth-century republics. Besieged by threats to its territorial integrity and governing legitimacy, Mexico aimed to appease irreconcilable groups. Native peoples sought legal autonomy. Mexican politicos sought but never achieved a consensus to manage the nation’s sprawling colonial holdings. Anglos sought unchecked access [End Page 355] to cheap, abundant land and protections for slave labor. Riddled with political turmoil, the northern Mexican frontier was hardly a static backwater anticipating Anglo organization. The region instead was a “vortex of violent conflict” that could only be settled through the exercise of raw power (p. 211). As Texas started to resemble the expansive cotton lands of the American South, radical secessionists exploited Mexican instability. A swift rebellion yielded an independent Texas, the world’s newest slaveholding nation. Armed with a masterful sense of paradox, Haynes depicts the Republic of Texas as the very kind of weak and unstable nation against which Anglos had rebelled. Texas’s inability to maintain its territorial independence against repeated Mexican incursions “made a mockery of the republic’s pretensions as a new American empire in the West” (p. 328). Though “utterly dysfunctional,” the republic excelled only at the “ethnic cleansing” of Indigenous people (pp. 343, 5). Meanwhile, Anglo elites clambered to append their fledgling nation to the powerful slaveholding American Union. The fleeting years of independence hurled Texas into the waiting arms of the United States, whose voracious powerbrokers tightened their continental grip. Two decades of Anglo settlement had indeed “unsettled” Texas, soaking the region in blood, binding its laborers to the land, and displacing alleged “savages” (p...

Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas by Sam W. Haynes

Reviewed by: Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas by Sam W. Haynes Gregg Cantrell Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas. By Sam W. Haynes. (New York: Basic Books, 2022. Pp. 447. Illustrations, notes, index.) The Texas Revolutionary era is experiencing something of a moment. In the wake of last year's controversial journalistic treatment of the Revolution, Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth (Penguin) by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford, the Texas legislature passed two laws regulating how public educators can discuss the history of racism. At the same time, the lawmakers launched the 1836 Project to promote "patriotic education," the title clearly intended to serve as a counterweight to the New York Times's 1619 Project, which emphasized the centrality of slavery in American history. Sam Haynes's new scholarly treatment of the era, then, comes at a fortuitous time, and it does not fail to deliver on its promise to give us a new, state-of-the-art history of this contentious period. The book's title foreshadows the main theme of this boldly revisionist book. Texas in the early years of the nineteenth century was truly an "unsettled land," not in the sense that it was unpopulated but rather that it was a crazily complex cultural mosaic. Instead of the armed conflict of 1835–36 as the culmination of the Anglo-versus-Mexican political struggle for Texas, Haynes argues that the true Texas "revolution" took place [End Page 269] over a longer period, and it involved much more than simply the secession of Texas from Mexico and the founding of the Lone Star Republic. As the introduction explains, "Anglo Americans were not the only inhabitants of Texas to experience the upheaval of revolution. For a large segment of the population, independence from Mexico meant the loss of freedom, a fact that only became evident in the years that followed, as the Lone Star Republic moved aggressively to expel Indians, marginalize Mexicans, and tighten its grip on the enslaved. Thus the revolution was far from over in 1836. The work of creating a new society, radically different from anything Texas had known under Mexico, had only just begun" (7). Over the ensuing 366 pages, the author makes a compelling case for this thesis. From the start, the book turns the conventions of Texas Revolutionary historiography on their heads. It begins not with Stephen F. Austin and his colony on the lower Brazos and Colorado but rather in East Texas. Figures such as the Cherokee leaders Richard Fields and Chief Bowls play leading roles rather than the bit parts usually assigned to them. Indeed, this is the first general history of the era, truly, to give Indians their due. The book does the same for free Blacks like William Goyens and Tejanos like Vicente Córdova. Without downplaying the importance of Austin, Houston, Crockett, et al., Haynes offers penetrating analysis of other important Anglos, such as Jared Groce and William Wharton. Perhaps the book's greatest strength is its masterful integration of the events in Texas into the flow of Mexican history. Haynes brings the training and insights of an academically trained Mexicanist to his task, and it shows. Particularly revealing are the central roles played by Lorenzo de Zavala and José Antonio Mexía, two Mexican federalists whose views and interests in Texas clashed with those of Antonio López de Santa Anna. Haynes also vividly portrays the plight of those most caught in the crossfire of the conflict, the Tejanos, revealing the wrenching decisions that men like Juan Seguín and José Antonio Navarro made, or had forced upon them. Likewise, Haynes explains how the memory of the American Revolution led the actions of the Anglo revolutionaries "to take on a weirdly performative character," making the Texan soldiers "for all intents and purposes, historical re-enactors in a struggle against tyranny and military despotism" (144). By extending the story of Texas (and Mexico) up through the Republic years, Haynes does much to historicize and contextualize the events of 1836. The story he tells is a devastating one if considered from the perspective...

Assessment of Local Knowledge About Land Use Relevant to Landscape Planning in a Case Study Area in Lowland Slovakia

Abstract Public perception and knowledge of land use changes, and preferences for future landscape development, can contribute to planning processes at different levels from the local to the national. Participatory processes and use of local knowledge are necessary for precise planning purposes and management of public affairs. This paper analyses the results of sociological research with regard to landscape development in Nová Vieska village in the Podunajská nížina lowland in Slovakia. The survey aimed to analyse the answers of local inhabitants and key stakeholders in the field of perception of land-use changes and their causes and biodiversity changes since 1990, as well as expectations of future land use and the driving forces of rural development. Local inhabitants were more likely to perceive changes in the productive parts of the study area (the decline of orchards and gardens, overgrowth of meadows and pastures, etc.), while key stakeholders perceived a broader range of changes in land use. According to the local inhabitants, the disintegration of cooperative farms was the main cause of the land use changes, and unsettled land ownership is the biggest obstacle to development of agricultural production. Key stakeholders cited economic, environmental (climate change) and social causes (ageing of population, change of life style, etc.) as the most important factors in land use change and they also perceived them as the most important obstacles for agricultural development. Local inhabitants (as well as key stakeholders) wished for an increase of the proportion of managed meadows and pastures, gardens, orchards, wetlands and non-forest vegetation, but they expect the opposite trend. The results confirmed that public knowledge of landscape development could provide substantial useful information for future development planning.

Territorial disputes in the North Caucasus as a source of regional instability

Introduction. The article is devoted to territorial interethnic disputes in the North Caucasus of the Russian Federation, both “frozen” and ongoing, and their impact on regional political processes.Materials and methods. The theoretical and methodological foundations of the study are the concept of ethnic boundaries and social distance by F. Barth, the works on ethnopolitical conflicts by D. Horowitz, M. Toft, as well as the research of Russian scientists, such as A.V. Avksentiev, D.A. Dmitriev and others. For the North Caucasus, the issue of land ownership, the historical territory of the people has always been painful, it has been the main reason for and factor of interethnic distancing. This research is based on: 1) analysis of official documents of federal and regional authorities; 2) studying declarations of ethic movements and interviews of politicians; 3) media monitoring; 4) classification and situational analysis.Results. The considered territorial disputes in the North Caucasus can be classified in terms of the factors underlying the conflicts: territorial disputes as consequences of deportation (North Ossetia and Ingushetia, Dagestan); the problem of divided peoples (Lezgins); disputes over unsettled land ownership (Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia and Dagestan); disputes over administrative boundaries (Chechnya and Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan).Discussion and conclusion. Taking into account the fact of significance of the “historical territory” for the North Caucasian peoples, the resolution of territorial disputes should be carried out with respect for historical memory, with the involvement of conciliation procedures that have strong traditional foundations in North Caucasian societies. Territorial conflicts and grievances lead to mobilization of the people, the growth of protest moods and regional political instability, therefore land issues should be resolved with the involvement of the public opinion. This will help to avoid clashes on an ethno-territorial basis and increase the trust in the authorities.

Responsibilities of Land Deed Making Officials (PPAT) for Preparing Unsettled Land Deeds of Sale and Purchase

The purpose of this study is to identify and analyze: 1). Arrangements for the transfer of land rights in the Sale-Purchase Deed made before the PPAT. 2). Position of the Deed of Sale and Purchase, which payment has not been fully paid. 3). PPAT responsibility for the preparation of the Sale and Purchase Deed, the payment of which has not been fully paid. The approach method in this research is juridical normative, namely research that emphasizes the science of law and tries to examine the rules of law that apply to the subject matter. The data used are primary and secondary data obtained through interviews and literature studies, while the data analysis method is carried out by qualitative descriptive analysis. The results of the research resulted in the following conclusions: 1) The PPAT of the Official for Making Land Deeds is appointed by the government, in this case the National Land Agency with certain duties and authorities in the transfer of land rights, deeds of assignment of land rights, and deeds of granting power to impose mortgage rights as regulated in the prevailing laws and regulations. PPAT has responsibility for the deed it makes, namely administrative responsibility, civil responsibility and criminal responsibility. 2). Whereas if the PPAT has been negligent either intentionally or unintentionally made a Sale and Purchase Deed even though the land payment has not been paid off so that it is detrimental to the PPAT client, then the PPAT will be liable administratively and can also be sued to be accountable for its negligence in civil terms. 3). Efforts made by the Official for Making Land Deeds (PPAT) if the payment for the sale and purchase of land has not been paid off is by making a Sale and Purchase Agreement (PPJB). The land sale and purchase agreement was made because one of the conditions for the implementation of the Land Sale and Purchase Deed had not been fulfilled, namely the payment of land which had to be paid in full according to the agreed price. After paying off the remaining payment, then a Sale and Purchase Deed can be made.

City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present

City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present

Mountain regions in the legal space of Russia

The allocation of the mountainous regions of Russia as a subject of legal regulation is a relatively new trend in Russian lawmaking, which began in the 1990s. The initiation of the process of developing mountain laws was influenced by the international experience of European countries that have mountain areas in their composition. An important event at the end of 2020 is the adoption by the CIS Interparliamentary Assembly of the Model Law “On the Protection and Development of Mountain Areas”. The purpose of the article is to analyze modern initiatives in the field of legal support for the sustainable development of the mountain regions of Russia. The results are based on an analysis of documents adopted in the field of mountain legislation, as well as on interviews with experts and expeditionary work. The program for the development of the mountainous territories of Dagestan, initiated on the basis of the implementation of the regional law on mountainous territories, became a certain “litmus” test that revealed the problems of modernization and ensuring sustainable development in the mountains. These include, first of all, distrust of the government’s initiatives, unsettled land relations, fear of getting into credit dependence, the complexity of bureaucratic procedures, etc.

Rediscovering the Maine Woods: Thoreau's Legacy in an Unsettled Land. Edited by John J. Kucich. (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. Pp. 248. $27.95 paper.)

<i>Rediscovering the Maine Woods: Thoreau's Legacy in an Unsettled Land</i>. Edited by John J. Kucich. (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. Pp. 248. $27.95 paper.)

Rediscovering the Maine Woods: Thoreau’s Legacy in an Unsettled Land . Edited by John J. Kucich. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. ix + 227 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. Cloth $90.00, paper $27.95.

Rediscovering the Maine Woods: Thoreau’s Legacy in an Unsettled Land . Edited by John J. Kucich. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. ix + 227 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. Cloth $90.00, paper $27.95.

The Armstrong Ranch: Establishing and Preserving a Legacy

The Armstrong Ranch: Establishing and Preserving a Legacy Sarita A. Hixon (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution The Armstrong family, circa 2003. Courtesy of Sarita A. Hixon. [End Page 140] I had the good fortune to be raised on the Armstrong Ranch, which my family has owned for more than one hundred and sixty years. Located about eighty miles south of Corpus Christi, the ranch is an oasis in the heart of the Wild Horse Desert. We are in the seventh generation of family ownership, and I am thankful for the vision, labor, tenacity, and sacrifice of those who established and preserved this family ranch. I am proud to share the story of my family’s legacy. The story of the Armstrong Ranch began on a spring day in May 1852 when my great-great grandfather, James H. Durst, rode through the Wild Horse Desert from the Rio Grande Valley to Corpus Christi, Texas, for a state fair. At the time, the Wild Horse Desert was raw, unsettled land. The arid, sandy soil and scarcity of water made it unsuitable for farming. Yet the presence of great numbers of healthy wild horses, cattle, and deer clearly proved the land could be grazed. James Durst had recently moved from Nacogdoches to the Rio Grande Valley following the U.S.–Mexico War. He had established a successful mercantile operation and had money to invest.1 He saw potential for large scale cattle ranching in this land, so in December 1852, he bought 21 leagues, more than 92,000 acres, of the La Barreta land grant from descendants of the original grantee, José Francisco Ballí.2 His friends Captain Richard King and Captain Mifflin Kenedy followed suit the next year and purchased lands in the Wild [End Page 141] Horse Desert.3 With these purchases, Durst, King, and Kenedy became the founding fathers of the Armstrong, King, and Kenedy Ranches, respectively. Sadly, Durst never realized his vision for his raw rangeland. He died on April 24, 1858, and left a twenty-four-year-old widow, Mary Josephine Durst (my great-great grandmother), and two young children, Mollie and Jim Durst. Unable to support her children alone in South Texas, Josephine Durst moved to Austin to be near her family. According to James H. Durst’s will, the properties were to be left equally to his widow and children.4 The family retained the Nueces County law firm of Lovinskiold and McCampbell to settle the estate.5 Suspiciously, a few years later, title to the extensive La Baretta property ended up in the hands of the attorneys, and the widow and children never received a dime for the sale of the estate properties.6 The story of the Armstrong Ranch would have ended with this fraud had not my great grandfather, John Barkley Armstrong, gone to Texas (later sources list his middle name as “Barclay”). John B. Armstrong came from a long line of prominent physicians in Tennessee. He left for Texas in 1868 at the age of eighteen.7 We do not know why he left his family in Tennessee.8 By January 1873, however, he was in Austin, where he joined the Travis Rifles, and in 1875 signed on to serve in Captain Leander McNelly’s company of Texas Rangers.9 He rose quickly through the ranks and acquired the nickname “McNelly’s Bulldog.”10 The highlight of my great grandfather’s Texas Ranger career was his arrest of the notorious outlaw John Wesley Hardin in 1877.11 Family lore has it that once Armstrong returned Hardin to Texas for trial and collected his share of the $4,000 reward, he finally believed he was worthy of marrying the young lady in Austin he had admired for several years, Mollie Durst, James Durst’s daughter and heir.12 Mollie and John B. Armstrong were married in Austin in 1878 and their mutual friend, Robert J. Kleberg, served as Armstrong’s best man.13 [End Page 142] It is not clear when Armstrong learned of the Durst properties lost to unscrupulous lawyers. Once aware of the fraud, John B. Armstrong resolved to regain title to those lost lands for...

A Nation of Settlers: The Early American Republic and the Colonization of the Northwest Territory

A Nation of Settlers:The Early American Republic and the Colonization of the Northwest Territory Michael Witgen (bio) The Jefferson-Hartley map, drawn to reflect the Land Ordinance of 1784, represented the settler colonial aspirations of the United States (Figure I). The map was produced by Thomas Jefferson as part of his work on a series of congressional committees tasked with creating a system of government for lands from the Appalachian Mountains west to the Mississippi River valley. The ordinance of 1784 was revised into the Northwest Ordinance, the legal mechanism designed by the federal government to transform Native homelands in the newly organized Northwest Territory into the public domain of the United States.1 The map, in effect, performs the ideological work imagined by the ordinances. It erases the presence of Native peoples and inscribes indigenous land with new meaning, as nascent states poised to enter the union on an equal footing with the original thirteen. This vision for the western expansion of the United States hinged on a political imaginary that understood North America as "the New World." This was the New World envisioned by John Locke, who wrote in his Second Treatise of Government that "in the beginning all the World was America."2 Locke, like many of his contemporaries, understood Native peoples in North America to be living in a "state of nature," which he described as a universal commons without any organized system of governance. "Labour, [End Page 391] in the Beginning," he wrote, "gave a Right of Property."3 Native peoples, he imagined, had failed to exercise this right. They were stuck as if at the beginning of time, living as a primitive version of humanity. From this perspective Native peoples had not cultivated the land because indigenous territories in North America were not organized around any private property regime discernable to the peoples of European empire.4 Accordingly, Locke asserted that Native peoples had not established "dominion" or possession over their homelands and therefore had not entered into a social compact establishing a legitimate government and civil society. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure I. Jefferson-Hartley map, 1784. Courtesy, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Conceptualizing North America as the New World, European empires regarded the continent as unsettled land, which allowed them to claim these lands by right of discovery. The Treaty of Paris ending the American Revolution granted the Northwest Territory to the United States. Imagining this space not as Native North America but rather as an unsettled [End Page 392] wilderness, the United States set out to transform Native homelands into American homesteads. Under the terms of the Northwest Ordinance, with the immigration of five thousand free white men, a settlement could be organized as a federal territory, with an appointed governor and judiciary and an elected legislative council. With sixty thousand white inhabitants, a territory could draft a state constitution and petition the republic for admission to the union. The explicit goal of the Northwest Ordinance was to establish the civil society of the American Republic in the region.5 The land law represented a social contract between the federal government and white settlers willing to move west to claim what was assumed to be wilderness for the republic. They would not be colonial subjects; rather, they would be citizens of the United States. Jefferson's map reflected this ideology and its assumption that North America and the Northwest Territory existed in a "state of nature."6 In colonial regimes an exogenous power establishes its authority over a subordinated population to extract wealth and resources from the colonized territory. Accordingly, colonialism requires an ongoing political relationship rooted in the structural inequality between the colonizer and the colonized. Settler colonialism, in contrast, seeks an end or completion of the colonial project via the elimination of the indigenous population and its replacement by a settler population. This was the outcome projected by the Jefferson-Hartley map. The colonial project of the United States in North America, conceptualized as an experiment in self-government, would come to an end with the elimination of the uncivilized Indigenous population and the successful creation of the settler state...

„Dla powszechnego rozwoju, podniesienia i poprawy naszego księstwa”. Lokacje miast mazurskich w Prusach Książęcych (1525-1701)

The article presents the process of creation of new towns in the Duchy of Prussia (1525-1701), which later became Masuria. More specifically, the paper describes how a hamlet received a location privilege. The establishment of towns described here (Olecko, Gołdap, Węgorzewo, Giżycko,Pisz and Ełk) was initiated by Albert, the Duke of Prussia (1525-1568). He was motivated by the idea partially formulated in the location privilege: “For the general growth, elevation and betterment of our duchy”. The duke personally granted the location privilege only to Olecko, which was the sole town established on previously unsettled land. In the remaining cases, he only gave a verbal promise. This did not guarantee a rapid grant of thelocation privilege as the promise was fulfilled by the duke’s successors in the remaining cases. It happened first in case of Gołdap and Węgorzewo, just several years after the promise had been made. It took a little longer in case of Giżycko (after several decades), while Pisz and Ełk had to wait the longest (almost or more than 100 years). Each town had its own different origins. Gołdap was created quickly (1565-1570) on an area which used to be a duke’s grange. Węgorzewo, Giżycko, Pisz and Ełk waited for several hundred years for a legally binding location privilege. It is important to note that each of the aforementioned towns was established near a former castle of the Teutonic Order. Moreover, the hamlets which developed near the former castles had a different status but they all performed a market or craft function. With time, this function served as a basis for applying for the town privilege. The market function was originally carried out by the peasant hamlets in Węgrorzewo and Giżycko, even though the towns were createdon the tenant farmer villages. Furthermore, the old peasant hamlets still functioned but as the contemporary out-of-town jurydykas (German Schloβfreiheit). Pisz was established on the basis of an old peasant hamlet and it never was a tenant farmer village. In case of Ełk it was the exact opposite, there never was a separate peasant hamlet. The tenant farmervillage located there evolved into a town. Only two towns were founded due to the inhabitants’ initiative, namely Olecko and Gołdap. The remaining ones were established collectively by the whole community. Most frequently, it took place with the participation of the inhabitants of the former hamlets (Giżycko, Pisz, and Ełk). The former inhabitants did not participate in the process of town building only in the case of Węgorzewo and Gołdap.Generally speaking, each location privilege described here gave the towns the so-called town privilege (German Stadtrecht). It described in detail the area of land and the type of the town privilege which was granted (Culm law in each case). Moreover, it allowed the creation of town authorities (mayor, council and bench) and granted them the option to issue documents and statutes (German Willkür) as well as allowed them to possess a seal. Furthermore, it allowed the towns to organize markets and fairs on certainfixed dates as well as regulated the rights and obligations of the townsmen. Even though the location privilege formally meant the end of the town creation process as far the law was concerned, it did not mean that it was the end of its formation. Further steps had to be made to constitute the authorities and the bench, to write statutes (German Willkür), guild regulations, etc.

Традиционное землепользование кочевников Монголии и поземельные конфликты

The article traces the main causes of land conflicts arising among modern nomads of Mongolia. The author connects the conflicts with the unsettled land legal relations, as well as with socio-economic reasons. Traditional land use faces competition from mining companies, tourist companies, and farmers engaged in crop production. In addition, there is internal competition among nomads for the use of pastures, associated with active migration processes.

“The Surest Support of Their Enormous and Iniquitous Claims”: Legal Expertise and Land Acquisition in Late Colonial New York

ABSTRACT While the close ties between colonial New York's lawyers and great proprietors has been oft-noted, how exactly provincial lawyers supported monopolistic land acquisition has yet to be fully examined. New York's abundance of unsettled land, combined with economic and demographic growth in the eighteenth century, created vast opportunities for speculative ventures. Legal expertise was crucial in making each step of such ventures work. New York lawyers were proficient in using land documents, surveys, and formal court procedures to their clients' advantage. Further, by evaluating and enhancing the value and security of property, facilitating the profitable selling and leasing of land, and suppressing challenges from rebellious tenants and squatters, lawyers allowed speculators to take controlled risks while maximizing profit. By helping wealthy land grabbers gain competitive advantage over rival claimants and settlers both in and out of courts, lawyers greatly contributed to the continued concentration of land-based wealth in New York.

Methodology for Calculating the Potential Maritime Wind Park Area by Taking into Account the Needs of Shipping Sector

Renewable energy sources (wind energy, solar energy, hydroelectricity, ocean energy, geothermal energy, biomass and biofuels) are alternatives to fossil fuel that help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, diversify energy supplies and reduce dependency on markets of unsustainable and volatile fossil fuels, particularly oil and gas. Wind energy is one of the renewable energy sources and is considered to be self-renewable as it is the result of the Sun’s activity. Using wind energy is a rapidly developing industry today, and more and more wind turbines are installed worldwide every year, land-based wind turbines being more widespread than offshore ones. In Latvia, spread of land-based wind parks is hampered by unsettled land ownership rights, while the deployment of wind parks in the sea is a new field for all Baltic States. The neighbouring countries Estonia and Lithuania have developed their own projects for offshore wind parks, therefore the topicality of the development of wind farms in the territorial waters of Latvia has also increased. Experts have proposed best options and their locations. When assessing possibilities for development of wind parks and their capacity, the following economic factors were evaluated: construction and connection costs, potential operational costs and energy prices. The aim of this study is to develop the methodology for calculating the area of a potential wind park by considering the safety distance to shipping routes and height of the wind turbines, as well as for calculating the potential capacity of a wind park.

The Fiction of Tim Winton: Relational Ecology in an Unsettled Land

A complicare il processo di appartenenza degli australiani non indigeni, c’e la consapevolezza di vivere in una terra sconfinata e composita, un posto di cui non sono nativi. La narrativa del celebre romanziere anglo-australiano Tim Winton riecheggia il pensiero della poetessa Judith Wright, per la quale “Due sentimenti sono diventati parte di me – l’amore per la terra che abbiamo invaso e il senso di colpa per averla invasa. E un luogo stregato” (Wright 1991: 30). Il presente saggio esplora i romanzi di Winton nei quali si avverte un intenso senso di malessere e perdita, in relazione ai luoghi e alla terra, da parte dei personaggi principali. I personaggi di Winton - Wueenie Cookson che testimonia dolorosamente alla cattura barbarica e alla mattanza delle balene; Fish Lamb quasi annegato in mare; Lu Fox alla ricerca di un rifugio nella natura selvaggia, da profeta, dopo la tragedia della morte della sua famiglia – sono tutti accompagnati da un senso spettrale di insediamento fallito ed esilio, in cui le forze naturali – il mare e le sue creature, le distanze e i rischi del posto – si contrappongono e fanno ravvedere gli aspiranti dominatori. DOI : 10.17456/SIMPLE-56 Bibliografia Burke, Edmund. 1958 [1756]. On the Sublime . J. T. Bolton ed. London: Routledge & Kegan. Grogan, Bridget. 2014. The Cycle of Love and Loss: Melancholic Masculinity in The Turning. Lyn McCredden & Nathanael O ’ Reilly eds. Tim Winton: Critical Essays . Perth: UWAP, 199-220. Hitt, Christopher. 1999. Toward an Ecological Sublime. New Literary History, 30, 3: 603-623. Plumwood, Val. 2009. Nature in the Active Voice. Australian Humanities Review , Ecological Humanities, 46, http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-May-2009/ plumwood.html (consulted on10/07/17). Porter, Peter. 2002. Rednecks of the Outback. Review of Dirt Music by Tim Winton. The Guardian , June 8, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/jun/08/ featuresreviews. guardianreview27 (consulted on 10/07/17). Winton, Tim. 1984. Shallows . Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Winton, Tim. 2001. Dirt Music . Sydney: Picador. Winton, Tim. 2004. The Turning . Sydney: Picador. Winton, Tim. 2015. Island Home: A Landscape Memoir . Melbourne: Penguin. Wright, Judith. 1991. Born of the Conquerors . Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.

A Pattern-Based Definition of Urban Context Using Remote Sensing and GIS.

In Sub-Saharan Africa rapid urban growth combined with rising poverty is creating diverse urban environments, the nature of which are not adequately captured by a simple urban-rural dichotomy. This paper proposes an alternative classification scheme for urban mapping based on a gradient approach for the southern portion of the West African country of Ghana. Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) and European Remote Sensing Satellite-2 (ERS-2) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery are used to generate a pattern based definition of the urban context. Spectral mixture analysis (SMA) is used to classify a Landsat scene into Built, Vegetation and Other land covers. Landscape metrics are estimated for Built and Vegetation land covers for a 450 meter uniform grid covering the study area. A measure of texture is extracted from the SAR imagery and classified as Built/Non-built. SMA based measures of Built and Vegetation fragmentation are combined with SAR texture based Built/Non-built maps through a decision tree classifier to generate a nine class urban context map capturing the transition from unsettled land at one end of the gradient to the compact urban core at the other end. Training and testing of the decision tree classifier was done using very high spatial resolution reference imagery from Google Earth. An overall classification agreement of 77% was determined for the nine-class urban context map, with user's accuracy (commission errors) being lower than producer's accuracy (omission errors). Nine urban contexts were classified and then compared with data from the 2000 Census of Ghana. Results suggest that the urban classes appropriately differentiate areas along the urban gradient.

Simultaneity- across- Borders: Richard Henry Dana Jr., Alexander von Humboldt, Edgar Allan Poe

The nineteenth century saw significant shifts in the cognitive life of Americans. As transnational critics have suggested, the energies of imperialism and the contemporaneity of different claims on unsettled land engendered a radically unsettled perception of space, one that permeated into the fabric of day-to-day life. Meanwhile, the co-presence of different orders of time, as Lloyd Pratt and Dana Luciano have argued, undercut their attempts to articulate supralocal categories of affiliation, whether nation, race, or gender. Both national time and transnational space were, then, in a state of contestation, tending towards heterogeneity. As yet critics have not thought about whether the dynamics of transnationalism might permeate into formulations of time; conversely, little analysis has been given to the role of time in transnational discourse. This article aims to begin to fill this lacuna through an extensive reading of antebellum invocations of "simultaneity-across-time." Through rejecting the national framework that supported Benedict Anderson's use of this term, I demonstrate that antebellum Americans understood simultaneity in explicitly transnational terms. The first section argues that as globalization wrought significant changes in the composition of the globe, connecting US citizens, like Richard Henry Dana Jr., and European scientists, like Alexander von Humboldt, to others far distant, conceptions of simultaneity became equally extended, stretching out across oceans. But, as my second section, focused on Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka, suggests, rather than tending to a world in which a single co-extensive time was shared by all, this process tended toward heterogeneity, with spots of temporal locality warping the linear passing of the antebellum clock. There was, then, no absolute sense of a shared, planetary time, instead a deeply-felt terror at a sudden interconnectedness of the planet.