provide a partial treatment of imagined social and national identities in this borderlands region. It also serves as a good starting point for further inquiry. Michelle Rhodes-University College of the Fraser Valley Mark A. Lause, Young America: Land, Labour, and the Republican Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005). Mark A. Lause, an Associate Professor of history at the University of Cincinnati, has distinguished himself as a keen analyst of the insurgencies that influenced mainstream politics throughout the nineteenth century. He continues this scholarship with his fine study of the National Reform Association (NRA). This organization carried to the fore the concerns working class Americans had for land reform. Lause argues effectively that the "NRA's agrarianism formed a persistent and underlying theme for the later working-class movement" (129). Lause demonstrates how the agrarian movement of the antebellum period succeeded in securing the "Republican" Homestead Act of 1862, and also laid the ideological groundwork for the rise of fraternal organizations of the postbellum period. With this work, Lause demonstrates the intellectual connection between agitation that 'peaked' in the years 1850-52, with the later movements known as Greenbackism, the Single Tax proposal of Henry George, and other "non-electoral communitarian, socialist musings" that gripped national politics in the late-nineteenth century. But the organization's influence also helped to "mobilize public opinion strong enough to topple the slaveholders' party from office" (133). Thus we find in Lause's work a critical link between antebellum political agitation and the social radicalism of the late-nineteenth century. The leaders of the National Reform Association understood initially that "theirs was but a partial white, urban, Anglo-American perspective on the working-class experience" (2). Yet, their message, according to Lause, appealed to a broader segment of the working class then the anti-monopoly rhetoric of the Locofocos. National Reformers advocated three principal and interrelated measures. First, they pushed at the state level for debt reform and the end of property seizures. Second, homestead legislation that would "permit the free settlement of the landless on the public domain." Third, reformers wanted to eliminate speculation by limiting the amount of land any one individual could own (3). As the NRA spread from an eastern, urban, working-class movement into the Midwest and West, they embraced another set of "secondary" or "auxiliary" movements, including the ten-hour workday, direct election of government officers, and "abolition of practices ranging from the Electoral College to slavery." According to Lause, National Reformers also consistently defended newcomers to the country, urged peace, and fostered international associations" (3). While most scholars focus on the impact these undercurrents had on the Democratic Party, Lause contends that it was the Republican Party that benefited most (but ultimately learned
