Entanglements in legal history: conceptual approaches

Everywhere the Anglo-Americans settle, the lands become productive and progress is rapid….They build their own cabins, cut down and burn trees, kill the savages or are killed by them, and disappear from the land either by dying or by giving it up. When a score of new colonists have, in that way, gathered in a place, a couple of printer appear, one federalist, the other anti-federalist, then doctors, then lawyers, then adventurers; they drink toasts, they choose a speaker; they constitute themselves a city; they vie with each other in the procreation of children. They vainly advertise vast territories for sale; they attract and cheat as many buyers as possible. They paint inflated pictures as to the size of the population, so as to arrive quickly at a figure of sixty thousand souls, … and there is then one more star affixed to the pavilion of the United States!