United States
In Colonial America, starting in the 16th century, land grants were given for the purpose of establishing settlements, missions, and farms. Countries granting land included Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Britain.
Under colonial law, a patentee had to improve the land. Under this doctrine of planting and seeding, the patentee was required to cultivate 1-acre (4,000 m2) of land and build a small house on the property, otherwise the patent would revert to the government.
Starting with the American Revolutionary War, United States veterans often received land grants in lieu of other remuneration.
Between 1783 and 1821, Spain offered land grants to anyone who settled in their colony of Florida. When that colony was transferred to the United States, the resulting treaty agreed to honor all valid land grants. As a result, years of litigation ensued over the validity of many of the Spanish Land Grants.
During the Mexican period of California (and other portions of Mexican territories inherited from New Spain), hundreds of ranchos and large tracts of land were granted to individuals by the Mexican government. The ranchos established land-use patterns that are recognizable in the California of today.
Controversy over community land grant claims in New Mexico persist to this day.
During the 19th century, extensive land grants were made to railroads, since their development was seen as a new form of transportation internal improvements. The Land Grant Act of 1850 provided for 3.75 million acres of land to the states to support railroad projects; by 1857 21 million acres of public lands were used for railroads in the Mississippi River valley, and the stage was set for more substantial Congressional subsidies to future railroads. Four out of the five transcontinental railroads in the United States were built using land grant incentives.
The Morrill Land-Grant Acts of 1862 and 1890 provided for the establishment of land-grant colleges.
Since the conclusion of the Spanish-American war, there has not been a legitimate use of Land Grants.
Read more about this topic: Land Grant
Famous quotes related to united states:
“Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody’s image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)
“The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name.... We must be impartial in thought as well as in action ... a nation that neither sits in judgment upon others nor is disturbed in her own counsels and which keeps herself fit and free to do what is honest and disinterested and truly serviceable for the peace of the world.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“The United States is not a nation to which peace is a necessity.”
—Grover Cleveland (1837–1908)
“... the yearly expenses of the existing religious system ... exceed in these United States twenty millions of dollars. Twenty millions! For teaching what? Things unseen and causes unknown!... Twenty millions would more than suffice to make us wise; and alas! do they not more than suffice to make us foolish?”
—Frances Wright (1795–1852)
“The parallel between antifeminism and race prejudice is striking. The same underlying motives appear to be at work, namely fear, jealousy, feelings of insecurity, fear of economic competition, guilt feelings, and the like. Many of the leaders of the feminist movement in the nineteenth-century United States clearly understood the similarity of the motives at work in antifeminism and race discrimination and associated themselves with the anti slavery movement.”
—Ashley Montagu (b. 1905)