Tack & Ink

Leah Sottile, host of the fantastic Bundyville podcast and contributor to High Country News, writes on the continuing legacy of the Bundyville stand-off.

When the Bundys declared victory, it was hailed as a win for their vision of the American West. It was a victory for the entire far-right antigovernment militia movement and paved the way for ultra-conservative ideas to dominate the Republican Party’s agenda.

She includes some citations to recent important work by Benjamin Park, Sam Jackson, and Jessica Pishko.

One of the things I'm tracking in my new research on the Sagebrush Rebellion is how the rebellion played out in the northern Plains and Canadian prairies. There is, undoubtedly, a continuing legacy of far-right, anti-government ideology underlying its legacy.

But, at least so far in my work, I don't see this same ideology expressed so forcefully on the plains and prairies. Yet, I still see the importance of ideology, or perhaps identity, in the plains version of the movement. After all, the movement on the plains dealt with considerably less actual public lands—you can combine the entirety of federal lands across the Great Plains and come nowhere close to the percentage of land the federal government manages in Nevada alone—yet the movement still finds purchase. The thread I'm currently following: how much does the ideology and identity of the rebellion define how it acts on the plains? If the plains-style movement is less concerned about federal land, then it must be concerned with something else.

For reasons not entirely sorted in my own mind, I've decided to start a new writing space on the web. I have my long-standing blog at my website that I've mostly used for digital history writing, which I feel is rather pigeonholed into those topics. But I wanted a writing space that feels more freeform and, frankly, frictionless. Since my site runs on Hugo, there's a kind of friction that exists in writing and deploying -- one I could certainly resolve pretty easily, but I just haven't.

Instead of starting up a new Hugo site or rethinking how I design and write posts on my main site, I've decided to start this new venture fully on micro.blog.

So, what is Tack & Ink? I think of this post as defining some contours for the blog. The idea here is I want to write about a variety of topics. There will be less digital history and more about my historical research and, relatedly, as you'll see dear reader, our acreage in the tall grass prairies of central Nebraska. The goal here is a combination of things: curation about things I read, with commentary, that I think others will like; improve my skill as an essayist; sharing of historical sources I find interesting; thinking out loud and in public on the open web.