The Greater Plains : rethinking a region's environmental histories / edited by Brian Frehner and Kathleen A. Brosnan.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Brosnan, Kathleen A., 1960- editor.

Frehner, Brian, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Human ecology--Great Plains.

Human ecology.

Great Plains--History.

Great Plains.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, [2021]

Summary:

"The Greater Plains tells a new story of a region, stretching from the state of Texas to the province of Alberta, where the environments are as varied as the myriad ways people have inhabited them. These innovative essays document a complicated history of human interactions with a sometimes plentiful and sometimes foreboding landscape, from the Native Americans who first shaped the prairies with fire to twentieth-century oil regimes whose pipelines linked the region to the world.The Greater Plains moves beyond the narrative of ecological desperation that too often defines the region in scholarly works and in popular imagination. Using the lenses of grasses, animals, water, and energy, the contributors reveal tales of human adaptation through technologies ranging from the travois to bookkeeping systems and hybrid wheat. Transnational in its focus and interdisciplinary in its scholarship, The Greater Plains brings together leading historians, geographers, anthropologists, and archaeologists to chronicle a past rich with paradoxical successes and failures, conflicts and cooperation, but also continual adaptation to the challenging and ever-shifting environmental conditions of the North American heartland. "-- Provided by publisher.

"This collection of essays represents an attempt to move beyond degradation and exploitation as the defining ecological narratives of the Great Plains by examining the region through the interrelated themes of water, grasses, animals, and energy"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: List of Illustrations

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Brian Frehner and Kathleen A. Brosnan

Part 1. Indigenous Grassland Adaptations over the Longue Duree

1. Before the Horse: Indigenous Food Systems on the Plains, 1300-1680

Natale Zappia

2. Travois Trails: Mobile Lifeways of Nineteenth-Century Plains Indian Women

Leila Monaghan

3. Bison Hunters and Prairie Fires: A View from the Northwestern Plains

María Nieves Zedeño, Christopher Roos, Kacy Hollenback, and Mary Hagen Erlick

4. To Know the Story behind It: Aboriginal Heritage and Buffalo Hunting on the Northern Plains

Genevieve Susemihl

Part 2. Animals on the Great Plains

5. Kinscapes and the Buffalo Chase: The Genesis of Nineteenth-Century Plains Metis Hunting Brigades

Nicole St-Onge and Brenda Macdougall

6. Fauna and Flux on the Plains' Edge: Animal Kinship, Place Making, and Cherokee Relational Continuity

Clint Carroll

7. Bison and Bookkeeping: Accounting for an Environmental Imagination in Great Plains Trading Posts

George Colpitts

8. An Uncommon Nuisance: Cattle Feeding, Nuisance Complaints, and Legal Remedies on the Southern Plains

Jacob A. Blackwell

Part 3. Modern Agriculture and the Transformation of the Plains

9. Measuring Expertise: Ralph Parshall and Watershed Management, 1920-1940

Michael Weeks

10. A "Plow to Save the Plains": Conservation Tillage on the North American Grasslands, 1938-1973

Joshua Nygren

11. From Wheat to Wheaties: Minneapolis, the Great Plains, and the Transformation of American Food

Michael J. Lansing

12. "Nature Rarely Establishes Sharp Boundaries": Settler Society Agricultural Adaptation in the Great Plains Northwest

Molly P. Rozum

Part 4. Energy Landscapes

13. Energy Heartland: How the Midcontinent Pipeline System Fueled and Fouled the Great Plains

Philip A. Wight

14. Places of Overburden: Strip Mining and Reclamation on the Northern Great Plains

Ryan Driskell Tate

15. Encountering Oil Cultures in a Prairie Town

Jonathan Peyton and Matthew Dyce

16. Blows Like Hell: The Windy Plains of the West

Julie Courtwright

Contributors

Index.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781496227058

1496227050

9781496227072

1496227077

OCLC:

1250630307