Homesteading the Plains

Homesteading the Plains PDF Author: Richard Edwards
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496202295
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Get Book

Book Description
"Homesteading the Plains offers a bold new look at the history of homesteading, overturning what for decades has been the orthodox scholarly view. The authors begin by noting the striking disparity between the public's perception of homesteading as a cherished part of our national narrative and most scholars' harshly negative and dismissive treatment. Homesteading the Plains reexamines old data and draws from newly available digitized records to reassess the current interpretation's four principal tenets: homesteading was a minor factor in farm formation, with most Western farmers purchasing their land; most homesteaders failed to prove up their claims; the homesteading process was rife with corruption and fraud; and homesteading caused Indian land dispossession. Using data instead of anecdotes and focusing mainly on the nineteenth century, Homesteading the Plainsdemonstrates that the first three tenets are wrong and the fourth only partially true. In short, the public's perception of homesteading is perhaps more accurate than the one scholars have constructed. Homesteading the Plainsprovides the basis for an understanding of homesteading that is startlingly different from current scholarly orthodoxy. "--

Homesteading the Plains

Homesteading the Plains PDF Author: Richard Edwards
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496202295
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Get Book

Book Description
"Homesteading the Plains offers a bold new look at the history of homesteading, overturning what for decades has been the orthodox scholarly view. The authors begin by noting the striking disparity between the public's perception of homesteading as a cherished part of our national narrative and most scholars' harshly negative and dismissive treatment. Homesteading the Plains reexamines old data and draws from newly available digitized records to reassess the current interpretation's four principal tenets: homesteading was a minor factor in farm formation, with most Western farmers purchasing their land; most homesteaders failed to prove up their claims; the homesteading process was rife with corruption and fraud; and homesteading caused Indian land dispossession. Using data instead of anecdotes and focusing mainly on the nineteenth century, Homesteading the Plainsdemonstrates that the first three tenets are wrong and the fourth only partially true. In short, the public's perception of homesteading is perhaps more accurate than the one scholars have constructed. Homesteading the Plainsprovides the basis for an understanding of homesteading that is startlingly different from current scholarly orthodoxy. "--

Plains of the Past

Plains of the Past PDF Author: Ian Clark
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1469726432
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book

Book Description
The exciting conclusion to the Elder Earth Saga that began in Prophecy of Shadows! The outcast warrior known as K'het tracks the immortal necromancer responsible for the murder of his mother and best friend. The old wizard has journeyed to the Plains of the Past, seeking to put an end to all living things on Elder Earth itself by reuniting the Geminus, one being of pure light, the other of pure shadow. The union of these exiled creatures will cause a cataclysm that would scorch the very heavens and leave all of Elder Earth a barren wasteland. K'het's path will take him through tests of the mind and body in a land where magical energies are still at play and legendary beasts still roam. K'het seeks the aid of allies in the elf kingdom of Tanglewood Forest. He will need their wisdom to catch the necromancer in time and face his destiny.

Prairie Fire

Prairie Fire PDF Author: Julie Courtwright
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700635130
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book

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.

The Greater Plains

The Greater Plains PDF Author: Brian Frehner
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496227077
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426

Get Book

Book Description
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.

To the Last Smoke

To the Last Smoke PDF Author: Stephen J. Pyne
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816540128
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Get Book

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.”

Great Plains

Great Plains PDF Author: Ian Frazier
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466828889
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book

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.

The Great Plains

The Great Plains PDF Author: Walter Prescott Webb
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803297029
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 544

Get Book

Book Description
A study of the changes initiated into the systems and culture of the plain dwellers

Dust Bowl

Dust Bowl PDF Author: Donald Worster
Publisher: New York : Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780195032123
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Get Book

Book Description
In the mid 1930s, North America's Great Plains faced one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in world history. Donald Worster's classic chronicle of the devastating years between 1929 and 1939 tells the story of the Dust Bowl in ecological as well as human terms.Now, twenty-five years after his book helped to define the new field of environmental history, Worster shares his more recent thoughts on the subject of the land and how humans interact with it. In a new afterword, he links the Dust Bowl to current political, economic and ecological issues--including the American livestock industry's exploitation of the Great Plains, and the on-going problem of desertification, which has now become a global phenomenon. He reflects on the state of the plains today and the threat of a new dustbowl. He outlines some solutions that have been proposed, such as "the Buffalo Commons," where deer, antelope, bison and elk would once more roam freely, and suggests that we may yet witness a Great Plains where native flora and fauna flourish while applied ecologists show farmers how to raise food on land modeled after the natural prairies that once existed.

Culinary History of the Gangetic Plains

Culinary History of the Gangetic Plains PDF Author: Dr Anshumali Pandey
Publisher: Notion Press
ISBN:
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 195

Get Book

Book Description
The world population has grown by about five billion since the beginning of the Green Revolution and many believe that, without the Revolution, there would have been greater famine and malnutrition. Population movements increase urban populations and reduce rural populations. This reduces labor productivity in agricultural areas and causes these areas to remain inactive and increases the pressure of urban development on these areas. Keeping above in view the I present this book “Culinary History of the Gangetic Plains” has been attempted. Agriculture is extremely important as it not only provides food and a sense of livelihood to many people in India, but also is a source of employment for many. Being a relatively poorer in certain parts of India, the jobs created as a result of agriculture contribute majorly to people’s incomes and livelihoods. As a result, agricultural industries greatly add to the Gross Domestic Product of India and consequently lead to benefits to the economy such as an increased multiplier effect. Historically, the civilizations established on fertile lands with assure supply of water for livelihood as well as for crops and animals. In India too Indo Gangetic plains bestowed with fertile land as well as adequate supply and availability of water for humans and animals; and irrigation purposes. Therefore, as expected in past history the population density increased more in the Indo Gangetic Plains due to favorable soils and water availability.

Rising from the Plains

Rising from the Plains PDF Author: John McPhee
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374708509
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book

Book Description
Pulitzer Prize-winning author John McPhee continues his Annals of the Former World series about the geology of North America along the fortieth parallel with Rising from the Plains. This third volume presents another exciting geological excursion with an engaging account of life—past and present—in the high plains of Wyoming. Sometimes it is said of geologists that they reflect in their professional styles the sort of country in which they grew up. Nowhere could that be more true than in the life of a geologist born in the center of Wyoming and raised on an isolated ranch. This is the story of that ranch, soon after the turn of the twentieth century, and of David Love, the geologist who grew up there, at home with the composition of the high country in the way that someone growing up in a coastal harbor would be at home with the vagaries of the sea.