Author: Walter Prescott WebbPublisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803297029
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 544
Book Description
A study of the changes initiated into the systems and culture of the plain dwellers
The Great Plains
Author: Walter Prescott WebbPublisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803297029
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 544
Book Description
A study of the changes initiated into the systems and culture of the plain dwellers
Great Plains
Author: Ian FrazierPublisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466828889
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Book Description
National Bestseller Most travelers only fly over the Great Plains--but Ian Frazier, ever the intrepid and wide-eyed wanderer, is not your average traveler. A hilarious and fascinating look at the great middle of our nation. With his unique blend of intrepidity, tongue-in-cheek humor, and wide-eyed wonder, Ian Frazier takes us on a journey of more than 25,000 miles up and down and across the vast and myth-inspiring Great Plains. A travelogue, a work of scholarship, and a western adventure, Great Plains takes us from the site of Sitting Bull's cabin, to an abandoned house once terrorized by Bonnie and Clyde, to the scene of the murders chronicled in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. It is an expedition that reveals the heart of the American West.
Encyclopedia of the Great Plains
Author: David J. WishartPublisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803247871
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 962
Book Description
"Wishart and the staff of the Center for Great Plains Studies have compiled a wide-ranging (pun intended) encyclopedia of this important region. Their objective was to 'give definition to a region that has traditionally been poorly defined,' and they have
Prairie Fire
Author: Julie CourtwrightPublisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700635130
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Book Description
Prairie fires have always been a spectacular and dangerous part of the Great Plains. Nineteenth-century settlers sometimes lost their lives to uncontrolled blazes, and today ranchers such as those in the Flint Hills of Kansas manage the grasslands through controlled burning. Even small fires, overlooked by history, changed lives-destroyed someone's property, threatened someone's safety, or simply made someone's breath catch because of their astounding beauty. Julie Courtwright, who was born and raised in the tallgrass prairie of Butler County, Kansas, knows prairie fires well. In this first comprehensive environmental history of her subject, Courtwright vividly recounts how fire-setting it, fighting it, watching it, fearing it-has bound Plains people to each other and to the prairies themselves for centuries. She traces the history of both natural and intentional fires from Native American practices to the current use of controlled burns as an effective land management tool, along the way sharing the personal accounts of people whose lives have been touched by fire. The book ranges from Texas to the Dakotas and from the 1500s to modern times. It tells how Native Americans learned how to replicate the effects of natural lightning fires, thus maintaining the prairie ecosystem. Native peoples fired the prairie to aid in the hunt, and also as a weapon in war. White settlers learned from them that burns renewed the grasslands for grazing; but as more towns developed, settlers began to suppress fires-now viewed as a threat to their property and safety. Fire suppression had as dramatic an environmental impact as fire application. Suppression allowed the growth of water-wasting trees and caused a thick growth of old grass to build up over time, creating a dangerous environment for accidental fires. Courtwright calls on a wide range of sources: diary entries and oral histories from survivors, colorful newspaper accounts, military weather records, and artifacts of popular culture from Gene Autry stories to country song lyrics to Little House on the Prairie. Through this multiplicity of voices, she shows us how prairie fires have always been a significant part of the Great Plains experience-and how each fire that burned across the prairies over hundreds of years is part of someone's life story. By unfolding these personal narratives while looking at the bigger environmental picture, Courtwright blends poetic prose with careful scholarship to fashion a thoughtful paean to prairie fire. It will enlighten environmental and Western historians and renew a sense of wonder in the people of the Plains.
Great Plains
Author: Michael ForsbergPublisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022668167X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
The Great Plains were once among the greatest grasslands on the planet. But as the United States and Canada grew westward, the Plains were plowed up, fenced in, overgrazed, and otherwise degraded. Today, this fragmented landscape is the most endangered and least protected ecosystem in North America. But all is not lost on the prairie. Through lyrical photographs, essays, historical images, and maps, this beautifully illustrated book gets beneath the surface of the Plains, revealing the lingering wild that still survives and whose diverse natural communities, native creatures, migratory traditions, and natural systems together create one vast and extraordinary whole. Three broad geographic regions in Great Plains are covered in detail, evoked in the unforgettable and often haunting images taken by Michael Forsberg. Between the fall of 2005 and the winter of 2008, Forsberg traveled roughly 100,000 miles across 12 states and three provinces, from southern Canada to northern Mexico, to complete the photographic fieldwork for this project, underwritten by The Nature Conservancy. Complementing Forsberg’s images and firsthand accounts are essays by Great Plains scholar David Wishart and acclaimed writer Dan O’Brien. Each section of the book begins with a thorough overview by Wishart, while O’Brien—a wildlife biologist and rancher as well as a writer—uses his powerful literary voice to put the Great Plains into a human context, connecting their natural history with man’s uses and abuses. The Great Plains are a dynamic but often forgotten landscape—overlooked, undervalued, misunderstood, and in desperate need of conservation. This book helps lead the way forward, informing and inspiring readers to recognize the wild spirit and splendor of this irreplaceable part of the planet.
To the Last Smoke
Author: Stephen J. PynePublisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816540128
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 449
Book Description
From boreal Alaska to subtropical Florida, from the chaparral of California to the pitch pine of New Jersey, America boasts nearly a billion burnable acres. In nine previous volumes, Stephen J. Pyne has explored the fascinating variety of flame region by region. In To the Last Smoke: An Anthology, he selects a sampling of the best from each. To the Last Smoke offers a unique and sweeping view of the nation’s fire scene by distilling observations on Florida, California, the Northern Rockies, the Great Plains, the Southwest, the Interior West, the Northeast, Alaska, the oak woodlands, and the Pacific Northwest into a single, readable volume. The anthology functions as a color-commentary companion to the play-by-play narrative offered in Pyne’s Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America. The series is Pyne’s way of “keeping with it to the end,” encompassing the directive from his rookie season to stay with every fire “to the last smoke.”
The Great Plains, Second Edition
Author: Walter Prescott WebbPublisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496231333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 628
Book Description
Walter Prescott Webb identifies the revolver, barbed wire, and the windmill as technological adaptations that facilitated Anglo conquest of the arid, treeless region of the Great Plains.
Great Plains Indians
Author: David J. WishartPublisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803290934
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 162
Book Description
David J. Wishart's Great Plains Indians covers thirteen thousand years of fascinating, dynamic, and often tragic history. From a hunting and gathering lifestyle to first contact with Europeans to land dispossession to claims cases, and much more, Wishart takes a wide-angle look at one of the most significant groups of people in the country. Myriad internal and external forces have profoundly shaped Indian lives on the Great Plains. Those forces--the environment, religion, tradition, guns, disease, government policy--have written their way into this history. Wishart spans the vastness of Indian time on the Great Plains, bringing the reader up to date on reservation conditions and rebounding populations in a sea of rural population decline. Great Plains Indians is a compelling introduction to Indian life on the Great Plains from thirteen thousand years ago to the present.
American Serengeti
Author: Dan FloresPublisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 070062466X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Book Description
America's Great Plains once possessed one of the grandest wildlife spectacles of the world, equaled only by such places as the Serengeti, the Masai Mara, or the veld of South Africa. Pronghorn antelope, gray wolves, bison, coyotes, wild horses, and grizzly bears: less than two hundred years ago these creatures existed in such abundance that John James Audubon was moved to write, "it is impossible to describe or even conceive the vast multitudes of these animals." In a work that is at once a lyrical evocation of that lost splendor and a detailed natural history of these charismatic species of the historic Great Plains, veteran naturalist and outdoorsman Dan Flores draws a vivid portrait of each of these animals in their glory—and tells the harrowing story of what happened to them at the hands of market hunters and ranchers and ultimately a federal killing program in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Great Plains with its wildlife intact dazzled Americans and Europeans alike, prompting numerous literary tributes. American Serengeti takes its place alongside these celebratory works, showing us the grazers and predators of the plains against the vast opalescent distances, the blue mountains shimmering on the horizon, the great rippling tracts of yellowed grasslands. Far from the empty "flyover country" of recent times, this landscape is alive with a complex ecology at least 20,000 years old—a continental patrimony whose wonders may not be entirely lost, as recent efforts hold out hope of partial restoration of these historic species. Written by an author who has done breakthrough work on the histories of several of these animals—including bison, wild horses, and coyotes—American Serengeti is as rigorous in its research as it is intimate in its sense of wonder—the most deeply informed, closely observed view we have of the Great Plains' wild heritage.
On The Great Plains
Author: Geoff CunferPublisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781585444014
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Book Description
"To support his theory, Cunfer looks at the entire Great Plains (450 counties in ten states), tapping historical agricultural census data paired with GIS mapping to illuminate land use on the Great Plains over 130 years. Coupled with several community and family case studies, this database allows Cunfer to reassess the interaction between farmers and nature in the Great Plains agricultural landscape."--BOOK JACKET.