The Greater Plains explores the history of human interactions with the region, from Native Americans to oil regimes, through innovative essays that highlight human adaptation and the challenges of the North American heartland's environmental conditions.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 406 pages
Publication date: 01 July 2021
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

The Greater Plains: A New Story of a Region

The Greater Plains is a region that stretches from the state of Texas to the province of Alberta, encompassing a diverse range of environments. These innovative essays document a complicated history of human interactions with this 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.

Weight: 610g
Dimension: 151 x 228 x 26 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781496226471