The Great Plains

Author : Ian Frazier
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 1466828889
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Great Plains written by Ian Frazier and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2001-05-04 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Walter Prescott Webb
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 9780803297029
Total Pages : 544 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Great Plains written by Walter Prescott Webb and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1959-01-01 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the changes initiated into the systems and culture of the plain dwellers

Author : Julie Courtwright
Publisher : University Press of Kansas
ISBN 13 : 0700635130
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Prairie Fire written by Julie Courtwright and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2023-01-13 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Stephen J. Pyne
Publisher : University of Arizona Press
ISBN 13 : 0816540128
Total Pages : 449 pages
Book Rating : 4.29/5 ( download)

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Download or read book To the Last Smoke written by Stephen J. Pyne and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.”

Author : David J. Wishart
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 9780803247871
Total Pages : 962 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Encyclopedia of the Great Plains written by David J. Wishart and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 962 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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

Author : Walter Prescott Webb
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 1496231333
Total Pages : 628 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Great Plains, Second Edition written by Walter Prescott Webb and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2022-08 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : W. Raymond Wood
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 536 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Archaeology on the Great Plains written by W. Raymond Wood and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This synthesis of Great Plains archaeology brings together what is currently known about the inhabitants of the ancient Plains. The essays review the Paleo-Indian, Archaic, Woodland, and Plains Village peoples, providing information on technology, diet, settlement and adaptive patterns.

Author : David J. Wishart
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 0803290934
Total Pages : 162 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Great Plains Indians written by David J. Wishart and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Michael Forsberg
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022668167X
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Great Plains written by Michael Forsberg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-03-22 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Dan Flores
Publisher : University Press of Kansas
ISBN 13 : 070062466X
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Serengeti written by Dan Flores and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2017-01-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.