Van Atta 'Secures' Scholarly Recognition
Longtime ’Wick history teacher John Van Atta enjoys the hunt for new material and the thrill of arriving at fresh insight.
Securing the West: Politics, Public Lands, and the Fate of the Old Republic, 1785–1850, a book exploring westward settlement and the federal government’s role in that expansion, is a product of Van Atta’s passionate search for historical knowledge.
“I like the feeling that I am leaving the present day and journeying far back into a world that is different and sometimes quite mysterious,” Van Atta said.
Securing the West, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, found favorable review in the American Historical Review, June 2015.
“This is a book about land,” the Review states. “John R. Van Atta sets out to recover how newly independent Americans conceived and organized access to the new, ‘vacant’ lands they obtained in the Treaty of Paris, and then in the successive conquests of the continent.”
“Van Atta tells this story by focusing on political discourse, offering in-depth analysis of the thoughts of a few key political figures: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Albert Gallatin, Jeremiah Morrow, Thomas Hart Benton, Daniel Webster, Lyman Beecher, and especially Henry Clay.”
“Van Atta’s book provides a compelling account of how this issue went to the heart of the competing, shifting visions Americans had of their new country and its future.”
The Oaklawn Chair in American History recently published another book, entitled Wolf by the Ears: The Missouri Crisis, 1819-1821, and he’s working on a project involving Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the Spanish-American War, tentatively entitled The Ride to San Juan Hill: Theodore Roosevelt and the Vision of Empire, 1897–1901.
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