Ballard Campbell edits The Gilded Age And Progressive Era, examining public figures at the turn of the 20th century. Biography blends with historical review and analysis in this important coverage.

This fine book of black and white photography and accompanying text portrays a period of Western development that flourished in the early 20th century and then died with the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s. The author, an archaeologist by profession, has taken his camera to the states in the western Great Plains and the Great Basin of the Northwest and photographed the remains of homesteads that were once part of a thriving dry-land farming economy. There are photographs of abandoned farm houses, barns, schools, post offices, hotels, cemeteries, farm machinery and vehicles, and he has written a lengthy account of the period, based on research and personal interviews with descendants of homesteaders.

Today, where once stood prosperous farming communities joined by a network of roads and railways and served by a scattering of rural towns, fulfilling Thomas Jefferson's dream of a nation of small farmers, there is thinly populated ranchland, large hay fields, and expansive wheat growing operations. After decades of unusually high rainfall, these regions have returned to their normal arid conditions, which are unsuitable for dry-land farming. In some places, the prairie grass has reclaimed the land, obliterating evidence that the earth here was ever tilled. Only a few abandoned structures remain.

Campbell's photographs are fascinating and haunting. In many of them the vast sky looms overhead. Often in the distance there is a range of mountains, sometimes snow covered. The sunlight is bright and the shadows deep; the only signs of life are the grass and occasional trees. In all of them, the details are crisply focused, and where the landscape is flat and open, everything is sharply clear right to the horizon. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the West, images of the plains, and the history of homesteading.