The Greater Plains: Rethinking a Region's Environmental Histories

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.

 

Brian Frehner is an associate professor of history at University of Missouri–Kansas City. He is the author of Finding Oil: The Nature of Petroleum Geology, 1859–1920 (Nebraska, 2011), winner of the Hal K. Rothman Prize, and coeditor of Indians and Energy: Exploitation and Opportunity in the American Southwest. Kathleen A. Brosnan is Paul and Doris Easton Travis Chair of History at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author or coeditor of a number of books, including City of Lake and Prairie: Chicago’s Environmental History and Mapping Nature across the Americas.