The US Civil War ended in 1865 without the distribution of land or compensation to those formerly enslaved--a decision often seen as a cornerstone of racial inequality. We build a dataset to observe Black households' landholdings in 1880, a key component of their wealth, alongside a sample of...

Outside of Indigenous studies, sociologists tend to treat land in the United States as governed exclusively by an entrenched private-property regime: Land is a commodity and an object for individual control. This review presents land in the United States as more complicated and contingent.State...